Baan Co NV has announced its first dabbling with a front office applications suite and claims it can no longer be described as an Enterprise Resource Planning organization. Instead the Dutch company is referring to itself as an enterprise applications provider. Baan is pleased as punch with its new FrontOffice system, which has been designed to enable organizations to offer a more comprehensive service for their customers. The Baan FrontOffice system has been developed thanks to systems and software that Baan got its hands on when it paid $250m acquiring Aurum Software Corp with the sole intention of launching itself into the customer management space (CI No 3,160). The system is based around Windows so, according to Baan, it will provide users with a familiar interface and will be easy to use. The intention behind the system is to enable all staff within an organization who have to deal with customers, to have access to the same information, and be able to get their hands on it from a single point of entry. The system consists of three main components; BaanSales to deal with management, forecasting, team selling functions; BaanCallCenter to automate inbound and outbound call center operations; and BaanConfiguration which is a sales configuration engine that uses models to assess customer requirements and to produce complete configuration. Gartner estimates the combined sales force automation and interactive sales solutions markets will be worth $2.7bn by 2000. Baan hopes it can grab a large share of this combined space as it emerges as a new market. The systems will be able to handle hundreds of thousands of users, and Baan is therefore targeting markets with large numbers of customers such as telecommunication and retail finance.
