Is Infor the right mother for Baan? What is your idea?

Infor has killed Baan.

Infor's total lack of a sales and marketing strategy coupled with their inability to follow through with any product strategy has resulted in Infor LN being the lowest ranked ERP in the magic quadrant. The necessary rsources to advance the product are no longer at Infor. Most have moved on to other ERPs. Infor's inabilty to reach new customers with LN has resulted in a continually reduced sales focus. Infor values LN only for the maintenance revenue and without investing in LN, this revenue stream will dry up soon.

Consulting resources are limited. Sales doesn't focus on the product. They never learned how to compete with SAP, Oracle, Dynamics AX or any of the smaller ERPs that should have never been a threat. Why any CIO would risk his career selecting LN is a mystery? Just look a their current implementation debacles.

The venture capitalist financing Infor must be pissed if they aren't too stupid to be.

Baan - 1996 to Infor - 2009 I've been gone for a year and couldn't be happier.

I don't know if we can blame Infor for baan's lack of marketability.
Nobody has figured out a way to sell a non Oracle/SAP ERP since 2000.

Invensys, SSA, and now Infor have never been able to overcome the Baan fallout that took them off the map.

Now, in my opinion, the market is going away from ERPs. If you ever look at a typical customer use of Baan they're using maybe 10% of the system. Why fork over all that money, infrastructure, consultants, customizations, updates, etc for a system when you just need something to run MRP for you?

So it's a tough market, but in that market I've seen infor provide good R&D dollars to baan, Webtop is a top-notch product. They've had 2 major support site upgrades with a significantly improved knowledge base.

What'd I'd like to see if a re-investment into OpenSource to reduce the TCO. that might make them a little more appealing and open up new markets.
I know they've tried MySQL and PostgreSQL but were unable to get good performance, however both of those RDBMs have very quick release cycles and have come a long way since they've been given up on.

Dave

Some good points Dave. We use bolt ons for time, quality and soon purchasing. We use these same products no matter the erp system on the backend. And Baan is much cheaper than Oracle (our other ERP system). Not sure of the costs of some of the smaller erp systems.

New customers are few. Yes, that's true.
But I think Infor is doing their best to keep the Baan product line. You can see they release a new FP each year. That's good.

Infor isn't placing enough emphasis on the current 4c4 installations. Too many companies are moving from Baan to something else without putting Infor on their short list. In many cases, the fastest and most cost effective path to a new system is from Baan 4c4 to LN, but Infor's percieved lack of interest keeps them out of the selection process.

I had more Baan consulting work than I could handle until for the last 15 years, until this year. Now, it is extremely slow - without work for the first time. I understand that the overall economy is slow, but customers moving from Baan to other packages are tightening the Baan market.

Most folks who I have talked to about potential consulting opportunities that are moving to another package said that Infor didn't give them a "deal they couldn't refuse" for the upgrade to LN. Seems like it would be easier for them to keep/upgrade current customers than looking for new ones.

Infor launch many feature patch...from FP1 to FP6...and now they will launch again FP7...why lauch so many feature pack just for small amount of change in functionality...focus more on totality of combine feature then split it to so many FP...confuse customer...what is the strategy...ask customer to upgrade??

Infor got so many softwares...and this own software compete with each others...this will make customer confuse...own people kill own people...

Infor lack of markerting and product focus like oracle & SAP, they maintain so many softwares on hand...i wonder how they support with it


Just share my experience

Today, Baan is difficult to compete with ERP from SAP, Oracle and Microsoft because there is no marketing on this product at all. People purchase products because of the brand. If a product has good functions but nobody hear about its name, people will not buy it.