Although this is not good news, I still want to share with how bad managed acquisitions can push customers away, and push those customers to make a not clever decision.
Since 2000, BaanERP did not add any high profile HT&E customers. Of course, at that moment, On the PPT, we still presented 5 of the top 10 contract manufacturers, so called EMS, were running Baan system, including the top 1 and 2 (F???? and S????).
The SSA acquisition pushed the famous Taiwan contract manufacturer W???? to drop Baan system in 2004, replacing it with SAP. Around the same moment, the no. 2 S???? also dropped Baan system, same, replacing with SAP. (Autaully they have only 1 choice, they even don't want to see the demonstration of Oracle).
The Infor acquisition pushed the even high profile Taiwan PDA/Smartphone OEM H??? to drop Baan system in 2007. Then following the no. 1 contract manufacturer F???? (Since 2006, they are no longer no. 1 ) to drop Baan system.

I here not want to encourage other HT&E customers to follow, and the implementation at S???? also shows that it is easy for CEO/CIO to make decision to replace Baan with SAP. But it is not easy to get SAP up and run, you may need to suffer a lot and still get a system doing the same thing with your previous one. Our advice to HT&E customers, If you feel alone when you are using Baan system in the whole supply chain, you don't need to feel peer group pressure because you are using a different ERP. Buy a third party Rosettanet adapter, like Micosoft Biztalk, to talk with your customers and supply chain. It is much less costly and less painful.

PS: Today, I read the PPT on HT&E from Infor's web site, the PPT is done in Sept, 2006. On the PPT, the author still shows the list of top 10 contract manufacturer and stated 7 of top 10 are using Infor solution. The top 10 list is base on data in 2004, and Hong Hai Precision is still No. 3 on the list. Oh, man, you are still dreaming! Wake up!

I am thiking, that some peoples from Flextronics and Solectron are member of Baanboard community. Very interesting his comments.

The Beginning of The End, perhaps??

sk

It is difficult to imagine how any companies that have public reporting obligations (ie: publicly listed and govt owned etc) can stay with the Baan product in the longer term.

Whilst SSA/Infor say that they will not sunset the Baan products, their installed Baan customer licence seats do not appear to be growing at all. To make matters worse the vast majority of the customers still run BaanIV (or earlier) and not moving to LN very quickly despite the fact that it is now a few years old.

Our situation is that we have been fairly happy with BaanIV which has been running without incident for 9 years (100 user multi-site $billion plus, mfg/distribution) but we are hesitant to move to LN because of the reservations we have as to the future of the software.

Recent dealings with both the sales and support operations have not altered our view of the future for the product. The Sales people have tried to sell additional non-baan products, rather than extra licenses for wider use of additional baan-modules. The Support people have tried to sell Professional Service consulting to address a support issue. The reality is that neither of these tactics will be successful for Infor but they will almost certainly worsen their image with our company.

In the short term an upgrade to LN would be a lower cost option than a move to SAP/Oracle/MfgPro but I am not confident that it would be prudent to upgrade despite our past good experience with BaanIV.

Infor need to demonstrate that their focus is on providing application solutions rather than focus on high-yield investment in support/licence cash-cow.

Terry

Lack of large consulting firms as implementation partners is the major problem for Baan to keep high profile customers.

IBM, HP, Accenture earn more money on SAP than SAP. Yes, Baan may have the lowest TCO, but it is just not the product can bring money for the large consulting firms.

Baan's ecosystem was damaged many years ago, so SSA/Infor always claimed that they themselves do the implementation. The reason is they have to do that on themselves.

Tritonbaan, you are right.... Big consulting firms do not be interested in customer results and TCO, they want to have long process and more money...