A new post on my blog. http://ziaps.blogspot.com.
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Today a consultant said many large customers of Baan ERP are switching to SAP. I think that is true for many years as SAP has a more complete solution and the ecosystem built up around SAP is much much better than Baan ERP. For a good ecosystem, customers will be served better and the satisfaction with the system will be high. A bad ecosystem around Baan ERP means customers cannot be served well.

I have asked some customers why do they switch. Their common answer is, "The support is bad. Product is good. Future is unknown."

Another problem that pushes customer away is because customer has no choice to decide wehther to pay the annual support fee or not. Many customers pay the support fee only because they are afraid once the Baan system is down, Infor will not provide the licence key to them. Licence key is a big problem because the licence key ties to hardware server. Once the hardware server crashed and you need to switch to another server, you have to request Infor to send you another licence key. But if you are not on support, Infor cannot guarantee they will provide another key. Therefore even the support service is very bad, customer has no choice but to keep paying the annual support fee. If only support is bad, customer can just choose not to pay the support fee, but keep using the software. But if support is bad, and still need to pay the support fee, the accumulated dissatisfaction will finally make the customer choose to switch to another vendor.

I am not sure whether other vendors work in the same way. But some ex-Baan resellers said this was the major problem from preventing them to recommend Baan software to potential prospects. Customers are generally afraid to be locked by a vendor.

If talking purely on product, Baan ERP is a good product, especially the technical architecture and the ease of customization and development. Many programmers who have tried Baan tools love this tool. But it is difficult to deny that the Baan customer base is shrinking.
Because of the shrinking, Infor will gradually reduce the R&D cost putting on the Baan product line.

I will suggest Infor to change the way Infor control the licence key. Infor should guarantee the licence key can be provided to the customer no matter whether they are on support.

You are absolutely right. Infor needs to Open up and come out of that closed shell that they build around themselves. They need to develop a healthy echo system of developers, partners and consultants externally that can support the product. It is a common practice for product development companies to target consulting revenues but there needs to be a healthy balance to foster long term growth and encourage people to work on their products.

Can you believe how easy it is to get trained or download/obtain a demo version of Oracle or SAP. There are volumes of publicly available product guides, help etc on these Apps. It is hard to get any documentation or the product road map for any Infor's produts.

I checked with Infor about an year back on any publicly available training courses and the answer was that they only provide training for corporates any more.

Thanks
Chakri
www.solec.net

Did you compare the SAP cost VS. Baan cost? Just wondering...

Everything has its price tolerences.

Basically the product does the same thing. I know of SAP consultants that complain about the number of sessions and the number of parameters that need to be set up as well.

Price is a major factor in purchasing any product. For many smaller companies, SAP is just not affordable.