Baan NV said recently it was looking to expand beyond its traditional market of enterprise resource planning (CI No 3,342), and now it has taken an undisclosed minority share in Meta4 SA, the Spanish personnel and payroll management software house based in Madrid. Meta4, a seven year-old company which has over the last few years been looking to expand beyond its home market (CI No 2,966) has 350 customers of its Human Resource Management System software, mostly in Europe and Latin America. It says its software can be used for large organisations with 100,000 employees or over. Baan wants to make the product an integral part of its software fsmaily, the Amsterdam, Netherlands-based company said. Human resource and payroll modules will be integrated onto Baan’s enterprise business management software at the component level, using Baan’s Business Objects Interface, and speeding up its time to market for personnel and payroll systems. Baan will also use the company’s expertise to help it develop people resource planning and human resource warehousing modules. The agreement is non-exclusive, and so Meta4 will continue to sell its own software direct, as well as through Baan channels. The two companies have worked together previously, with the two products already being used together at the Spanish arm of the Swedish-Swiss electrical engineering giant ABB Group. French and US early release products of Meta4’s software are due out in the second quarter of this year, with a German version due by year- end.
