Baan is fit and well… and staying with Invensys

Enterprise software vendor Baan is to stay under parent Invensys. “Baan is absolutely core for Invensys,” said Baan president Laurens van der Tang at a hastily convened Europe-wide telephone press conference, and he categorically denied rumours of Baan’s imminent sale. Having got that off his chest van der Tang said Baan is thriving. “We’ve been quietly rebuilding the company over the last 18 months [since acquisition] and we’ve made tremendous progress. We’ve signed more than 300 new customers and our customer satisfaction has significantly increased. “License revenues are up 50% in the first nine months of our year against a background of others struggling, and we have had five consecutive profitable quarters.” Indeed, he insisted, “We are still the largest ERP vendor dedicated to our manufacturing markets, and after SAP we have the second largest installed base – more than 6,000 customers world-wide and considerably more sites.” They’re grand claims, particularly given the company’s difficulties two years ago, which saw it heading rapidly towards bankruptcy, and also given the likes of up and coming competitors like Swedish ERP vendor IFS, not to mention rejuvenated SSA GT and big boys Oracle and JD Edwards. But van der Tang makes the point that the firm has been around for a considerable time and had earned an enviable reputation for mid manufacturing market expertise and delivery before its troubles. He also declares that the company kept its R&D going throughout those dark times so that it didn’t lose ground – and that it maintained focus on its customer base, ensuring that its lifeblood was preserved. Since then, that considerable R&D team has, of necessity, been committed to developing its integration infrastructure, now very much proven in the form of Baan OpenWorld. Ironically, van der Tang says, “Increasingly, that’s one of our differentiators,” alluding to the difficulties many manufacturers have in connecting disparate systems, so often the result of mergers and acquisitions and the history of specialist systems. But beyond this, Baan has also been busy building what is now undeniably a well rounded suite that goes well beyond ERP, with CRM (customer relationship management), SCM (supply chain management) and PLM (product lifecycle management) applications – all solid offerings in the mid market context. Baan, he said, is “focused on ‘everything made with Baan’.” And indeed he claims manufacturing customers, both new and existing, are now looking to the company to provide these kinds of ERP extensions. As for the future, van der Tang pledged that “it’s absolutely our ambition to become an ‘admired partner’ for our customers… to help them with radical transformation. We are doing this already with some customers.” Looks like we have a Baan back to strength, and manufacturing industry likely to benefit from it.