Baan
More info
- Creator
- Jan Baan
- Released
- 1978
- Type
- ERP vendor
Dutch ERP vendor that was SAP's most dangerous European rival — until someone looked closely at the books.
Jan Baan started the company in Barneveld in 1978 as a consultancy for accounting and production planning. In the 1990s its ERP suite spread quickly through manufacturing, where it had a reputation for being more flexible than SAP R/3, and Baan was routinely listed among the big five alongside SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft and JD Edwards.
In 1998 it emerged that some of the sales had been booked to companies connected to the founding family. The share price collapsed, and Baan passed from Invensys (2000) to SSA Global (2003) to Infor (2006). The software survives as Infor LN, running in factories that have no intention whatsoever of going through another ERP migration.