SAP and Baan to go hand in hand on portal development

The deal, due to be announced tomorrow, means that the development work now being carried out by SAP Portals, the company created by SAP when it acquired application interoperability and presentation software firm Top Tier, is to get investment from Baan. At present, there are no details as to the scale or scope of that investment. But whatever they are, on the face of it, it is surprising to see co-operation between two such rivals. However, while it’s being couched in terms of collaboration, openness and moving the iBaan Portal Solution (Baan’s own recently launched web portal offering), onto the new platform, it probably has more to do with common sense and self preservation. Fact is that Top Tier was instrumental in developing Baan’s iBaan Portal Solutions before the take-over by SAP – so this is a good outcome for Baan and for SAP. Baan no doubt owns much of the useful technology, but it will need Top Tier’s (SAP’s) on-going support. As Baan’s UK marketing and strategic alliances director Russell Johns says: “Baan is now investing in the SAP development; we’re on the SAP Advisory Board to ensure the direction isn’t completely obtuse to the way we want to go.” Meanwhile, for SAP too the development can be seen as the firm delivering on its promise of new openness. As Hasso Plattner, SAP’s co-chairman, CEO and co-founder, says: “By forming this agreement with Baan, we are delivering on a vision to introduce open, widely-distributed portal solutions that integrate seamlessly with enterprise applications, empowering customers to collaborate effectively.” And it makes sense for both companies’ users as well. Johns emphasises the importance of arriving at industry-wide standardisation on portals, driven by the might of SAP and Baan together, and the “jump-start for industry” into the new way of interfacing with all the IT it faces when there is only one system to learn. “It’s a better story for the customer,” he says. And Laurens van der Tang, Baan’s president, adds: “We believe that it is in the interest of our customers to deliver a portal solution that has broad acceptance in the market and integrates with many applications – and therefore, we embraced the opportunity to work with SAP in this area.”