Baan Co NV product marketing vice-president Andries Bottema says the pace at which Microsoft Corp is managing to push development of its high-end products has led the manufacturing software firm to adopt a dual operating system strategy at the high end (CI No 2,961). Its original blueprint for future generation applications supporting thousands of users called only for Unix implementations; now it is targeting Windows NT too. Moreover, Bottema believes Unix is in danger of falling off the map if the industry fails to coalesce around a standard operating system, and it doesn’t appear that Hewlett-Packard Co and Santa Cruz Operation Inc’s pairing meets all of this requirement. However Bottema is impressed at the way Unix vendors such as Sun Microsystems Inc are taking up Redmond’s challenge and keeping a healthy lead at the high end. Meantime, Bottema says Baan is experiencing increased demand for decentralized enterprise resource planning implementations; instead of large-scale multi-firm central servers, downsized sites are asking to run their own enterprise resource planning systems and then replicating and communicating data to other sites. It’s an interesting playground for Microsoft’s BackOffice, he says, since in the downsized Unix-enterprise resource planning firms, the data processing department is sometimes struggling with system administration and maintenance, and on top of that trying to use client-server systems. Microsoft offers a lot here, and reduces costs of operation; this is where enterprise resource planning buyers really have interest.
