I'm new to Baan, but I have quite a bit of experience with the product "MK Manufacturing". MK Mfg. was sold by CA to SSA with the Interbiz business unit sale. My experience with MK Mfg. was on an Intel platform running over CA's Ingres database, and the company I'm working for now runs Baan IVc3 on an HP-UX platform running over an Oracle database. My question is, since MK Mfg. and Baan were once the same product (so I am told), does anyone currently support both of these products, and if so, how different is the Baan product today from the current MK Mfg. product? Just curious, more than anything else.

Also, does anyone's "crystal ball" provide any insight into what SSA might do with these two products, if they are in fact so closely related? Long term, do you see both of these products surviving? Seems like it would make sense to merge the two products using the best of both products. Or maybe not....

I have not had recent exposure to MK but I am interested because my initial exposure to Baan was with the predesessor of MK - ManMan/x which was Trition 3 marketed by ASK who were taken over by CA in 1994.

My recollection is that there was a legal battle between Baan and CA over thr transfer the product marketing rights that ASK had. I think Baan used the fine print in the legal agreement to invalidate the arrangements and thus open the way for them re-brand Triton to Baan and market the product themselves.

(I think their ultimate downfall can probably be traced back to this (opportunistic) action on the part of Baan.)

As to what SSA will do with the products is hard to predict: we haven't seen any indications that they are doing anything as yet and the clock is ticking away.

If they want to use Baan as the vehicle to again becomming a major force in the ERP market then I would expect that they would also move the MK customers to Baan (perhaps with any nice features that CA may have added to MK and not in Baan)

If on the other hand they intend to merely milk the ongoing licence and support fees until these eventually dry-up, then we can expect that MK may just continue along the way it is.

I think there is a real possibility that the strategy may be to just get a return on investment. The value investment is miniscule in terms of the market value of the major ERP vendors. Peoplesoft is valued at $5or6 billion by both Oracle and JDE. SAP must be worth considerably more than that. The value of Baan was only $150 million.

Terry