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Baan was a vendor of popular enterprise resource planning (ERP) software that
is now owned by SSA Global Technologies.
The Baan Corporation was created by Jan Baan in 1978 in Barneveld, Netherlands,
to provide financial and administrative consulting services. With the
development of his first software package, Jan Baan entered what was to become
the ERP industry. The development of the company was heavily supported by local
Dutch Reformed christian businesspeople. A few years
later his brother, Paul, joined what was to become the largest software family
firm in Dutch history. The Baan company focused on the creation of enterprise
resource planning (ERP) software.
In 1998 the Baan Corporation was exposed to be manipulating profits
in a prelude to the big accounting scandals that marked the turn of the
century. First Paul Baan left the
company as a result of this, shortly after to be followed by brother Jan. The
loss of confidence in the Baan Corporation was reflected in a rapidly declining
share of the BaaN program in the ERP market.
In June 2000, facing worsening financial difficulties, law suits and
reporting seven consecutive quarterly losses and bleak prospects, Baan was sold
to Invensys,
a UK automation, controls and process solutions group to create its new
Software and Services Division.
In June 2003 poor market performance of BaanERP (Baan V) and delays in
introducing the new Baan version (code named Gemini) led Invensys to sell Baan
to SSA Global Technologies for a cash
consideration of US$ 135 million. The sale of Baan was consistent with
Invensys' stated objectives to divest non-core assets as part of its overall
plan to improve capital strength and increase strategic focus.
Upon acquiring the Baan software SSA Global ceased to
promote the Baan brand, instead referring to it as SSA Baan. In August 2004,
after a delaying the release of Gemini to allow for improvements SSA Global
released SSA ERP LN 6.1.
In September 2004, Jan Baan has launched a new Web services company Cordys. Cordys'
core architecture is a business collaboration platform known as an Enterprise Service Bus - built on XML and
open standards - for creating enterprise-class composite application
frameworks.