Baan’s battles not over yet

1999-06-07

Baan hasn’t made a profit for a while but battles on, determined to be one of next year’s success stories (it seems to have written off this year) with a new approach and new product lines. Baan is keen to shed the image of being an ERP company and is moving into e-commerce, focusing on the business to business sector. In our opinion this is a wise move - ERP as a market-leading technology is dead, becoming just one of many applications which need to be linked and co-ordinated via the web to optimise and automate business relationships and transactions. The only mistake seems to be that Baan still believe in lock-in. “The majority [of organisations] … preferred to buy all its products from a single vendor,” claimed Baan. This said, the “majority” have no choice but to run a variety of products from different vendors. It is likely that companies which promote integration and interoperability, such as Concur, will steal a march on single-solution vendors. Baan better watch its flanks.

(First published 7 June 1999)