By Antony Akilade and Siobhan Kennedy
Baan Co NV took its first tentative steps towards the internet yesterday announcing a web-based e-services initiative designed to enable its consultants, customers, partners and suppliers to collaborate on-line. But unlike rival offerings, from giants Oracle Corp and SAP AG, the service does not include access to Baan’s applications and nor is Baan referring to the offering as a portal. Rather, the web site, called Baan.aagility, is designed to provide everything a company or partner would need to know about the best way to buy, sell, implement, integrate and support any Baan product.
What’s more, the technology behind the site isn’t actually Baan’s own. As ComputerWire reported last week, the company has signed a multi-million dollar deal with silicon valley start-up Portera Inc, whose professional consulting and services application will form the basis of the Baan.aagility offering, with a few Baan homegrown services, such as on-line consulting, thrown in.
Under the agreement, Baan’s services division will implement Portera’s product, ServicePoint, on a worldwide basis and the software will be run and managed from Portera’s Santa Clara-based datacenter. The ServicePoint suite includes applications – project management, collaborative planning and methodology, resource planning, issue tracking, and customer feedback surveys – which Baan will repackage and offer under a series of aagility offerings. At the center of the suite is aagility.serviceport which is the place where customers, Baan consultants, systems integrators, suppliers and third party vendors can get together and work on-line in a collaborative planning environment.
On top of that Baan will offer about 12 other aagility services ranging from such things as providing customers with a real-time link to its consultants (aagility.cyberconsult) to desktop-based classes and training on demand (aagility.virtualcampus). Many of the different modules will be free, but Baan said it was too early to give exact details of the pricing structure. Certainly, the first offering, aagility.method, is a free-of-charge methodology to guide implementation, operation and maintenance of Baan’s enterprise solutions, it said. Next comes an intellectual property database (aagility.knowledge@work) for which pricing has yet to be decided. The database will include best practice case studies, implementation strategies, research reports and troubleshooting advice. Other free-of-charge features include a workspace feature designed to deliver project management tools and other implementation resources over the web and a web-based diagnostic kit used to monitor the performance of Baan applications.
The news comes in contrast to bold announcements made by the company’s CEO, Mary Coleman, yesterday. Opening BaanWorld ’99 in Vienna, Coleman touted her company’s newly-integrated enterprise suite of applications and challenged competitors Oracle and SAP to provide evidence that their ERP, CRM and supply chain applications were as integrated as they claim.
But yesterday the boot seemed to be on the other foot and Baan was shown to be the laggard when it came to providing detailed strategy. Aside from fleshing out details of the e-services push, the company said very little about its plans to develop an enterprise portal. Although it’s now well behind its main rivals, all of which have announced their portal strategies and are in the midst of rolling out products, Baan seems reluctant to make any commitment to offering something similar other than to say that plans were in the pipeline.
Katrina Roche, chief marketing director at Baan said the company is still considering what the best way forward would be. She said there remain a number of key issues to iron out before announcing any strategy. Top of the list is a decision on how to distribute royalties from online trading communities, as well as issues over the management of communities where suppliers are required to register at multiple
sites.
Ironically, given Baan’s big integration push, Roche said there are also issues concerning the technical integration of a service that will involve a large number of small businesses. Industry analysts estimate that the market in this area may be worth around $1.3 trillion but despite that Baan clearly feels it is wise to approach it cautiously. Other vendors, notably SAP and Oracle, are rushing to get an early slice of the action.
In separate news, Baan also said today it was the first enterprise application vendor to have achieved full Windows 2000 compliance and that its ERP suite 5.0c is now directory enabled on the Microsoft Windows 2000 operating system.
