From the Baan homepage today


Los Angeles, CA, USA - October 16, 2002 - Baan, the leading enterprise application provider for industrial enterprises and part of Invensys plc, has selected Frango - a leading supplier of corporate financial management and control software - for a new strategic alliance.


Why? Why are they doing that all the time? If I recall correctly, in the last four years we already had Hyperion, Safari, and Crystal as "strategic" partner products for reporting. Where is the strategy here? The same for databases, Oracle, Informix, you name them. The all have been "strategic" partners once for Baan.

If I was to buy a piece of software like Baan, one of the main issues I will consider is STABILITY. I want to have a solution that I still can update in five years. Ans whats going on right now? The Crystal interface just gets starting to work slowly right now, and now the "strategic" partner changes. Will Baan drop development on the Crystal interface as they did with the Safari and Hyperion interfaces?

Oh you Baan folks, sometimes you make it really hard for us to deliver good consultancy services to our customers...
I think I'll go and buy a crystal ball.

Uli


PS: By the way, does anybody know why two important products that are meant to deliver absolute reliable data are called "Crystal" and "Oracle"?

This news may not be as tragic as you suggest. Crystal is fantastic at providing reporting & information delivery solutions, but be aware they have nothing to offer regarding financial management and consolidation. Customers who demand ready-to-use solutions are not deciding for Crystal.

You still have a point - I'm a product manager for Business Intelligence field and my business largely depends on a stable partnership of Baan & Crystal.

Matic

Question?

Since we never used the Hyperion interfaces (wrote our own), I did not realize that BaaN was supporting the interfaces for Hyperion. I always thought they were exchange schemes, SQL scripts and jobs loaded to BaaN.

Does this mean we can expect no more upgrades from Hyperion?
as well as no support from BaaN?

May never need it, just curious!