Jeff Raikes, Microsoft Corp’s group vice president of sales and support, was at BaanEurope to talk up Baan Co NV and Redmond’s licensing deal, but also to expand on the theme that Microsoft has been pushing at conferences across the world all this year: the ‘Digital Nervous System’. Raikes described the idea behind the system as using the opportunity of information technology to get the right information to the right people at the right time. Behind the hype, the system offers two opportunities for Redmond, a new way to dress up knowledge management; and the opportunity to push NT and platform software such as SQL Server and Site Server. In particular, Microsoft seems to be attaching a lot of value to SQL Server 7, which is now slated to be released in the next six weeks. Yan Baan, the company founder, talking at the conference, declared that ERP is dead. He said that what will take its place is distributed systems, datawarehousing, XML language technology and the ‘data browser.’ Baan is gambling on MS infrastructure software leveraging an awful lot of market share on Unix and other proprietary systems.
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