Baan Co NV has announced an application which customers can access using a palmtop or internet access device, joining the ranks of ERP firms knocking on the doors of handheld developers. The Dutch enterprise resource planning vendor will release Baan Coda E-Finance in the first quarter.
The Coda E-Finance application, acquired as part of Baan’s purchase of Coda Group Plc in February last year (CI No 3,354), contains core modules for accounts payable, accounts receivable and general ledger. Customers will be able to make account inquiries, check ledgers and balances and post documents.
Baan’s move follows its rivals into mobile and handheld ERP. Oracle linked up with Psion in October to make data available on the EPOC operating system (CI No 3,777). SAP, meanwhile, has been testing links with Palm Computing’s devices and Microsoft’s Windows CE operating system.
Baan is confident that Coda’s background in integration makes its technology more suitable for internet devices than those of its competitors. Coda Finance was designed not to use heavy processing power, so that linking it as a stand-alone system with companies’ other IT would be easy. Baan has extended the module’s traditional adaptor tool Coda-link, using Active Server objects, in Microsoft component object model (COM), which turn the financial data into HTML (hypertext markup language) that can be sent to a handheld device over the internet.
