By Antony Akilade in Vienna
At the opening session of BaanWorld Æ99 in Vienna, Austria yesterday, Mary Coleman, CEO of Baan Company NV, took the opportunity to boast of her company’s success in integrating technology from the many acquisitions made over the past three years. Claiming that Baan now has the broadest set of tightly-integrated enterprise applications available, Coleman challenged Oracle and SAP to do likewise. She also took a swipe at JD Edwards’ policy of forging partnerships with Ariba and Siebel to achieve a similar breadth of functionality, telling an audience of potential clients to demand to know how integration between these applications will be achieved. Too many companies were talking the talk but few could really walk the walk, she said.
Coleman’s confidence stems from her being able to demonstrate integration on four key levels and it is these she has challenged competitors to match. The first is on the data side, where information such as parts numbers or customer information is shared or exchanged across applications in real-time. The next is on the application level, involving integration of differing application components, which in Baan’s case meant rewriting code in its core ERP suite to accommodate overlapping areas within the supply chain planning applications. The third area of integration is on the business process level where Baan de-coupled its DEM (Dynamic Enterprise Modeler, or the bit that allows organizations to model business processes and speed-up configuration and customization of Baan applications) from its ERP suite so that it could operate across platforms. The final piece of the puzzle, Coleman says, is integration on the business community level, where differing enterprises are able to link business processes regardless of the systems being operated. Baan has achieved these levels of integration using what it calls its OpenWorld Integration Framework, based on an XML architecture which Coleman claims gives it a two-year lead on its competitors.
Coleman also pointed to a flurry of recent buys by competing ERP vendors – including Oracle’s acquisition of three small CRM vendors; PeopleSoft’s Vantive buy; and JD Edwards’ acquisition of Numetrix – as vindication of Baan’s own acquisition strategy over the past three years. Baan would now take full advantage of its competitors distraction, said Coleman. Some 40% of Baan’s $150m R&D budget had been swallowed up by the task of integrating acquired companies, she said and Baan’s competitors would now face both similar bills and attendant headaches.
Coleman now has her eye on securing the top position in ERP for manufacturing, said to be the single largest segment of a business-to-business e-commerce market expected to be worth over $1.3 trillion by 2003, according to Forrester Research. Coleman also has her sights on the number one spots in the mid-market enterprise applications and European enterprise applications markets. Further, Baan will challenge incumbent leaders Siebel in the global CRM space and i2 in the global supply chain solutions space, she said
