SSA ERP ln will never die on its own unless its host company, SSA Global
themselves do something to kill it !!.......

They may succeed to kill it perhaps by doing nothing in the marketing front
where very aggressive marketing strategies are required coupled with free,
easy and flexible distribution of the basic installation modules and abundent
technical knowledge material, especially new material in the open market for
all Baan users, old and budding Baan developers and enterprising technical
entrepreneurs.! (Remember Microsoft strategies on the O/s market.. same
reasons why you, me and the world is banking on Microsoft O/s today!!)

Given a decent margin of opportunity in the ERP business world, there is an
apparant lack of popularity of Baan from the career perspective in the open
market, especially with the newer learning generation is due to the lack of
awareness about Baan and the pityful difficulties people face to acquire this
knowledge base in bringing about this very awareness.

Check out the attachments for product evaluation results for yourself and
understand the position of Baan in the ERP world.

The evaluation was prepared by a German Ulm-based company GPS
(Gesellschaft zur Prüfung von Software - Society for Software Testing) and
published by Computerwoche, 17 March 2006.

Business, and its product(s), survives when they make money. Baan's ERP products are good, very good. But the fact is that it's priced and designed for rather large institutions which by now mostly have installed some sort of ERP, and won't be needing to replace it for next 20 years or so. So, for Baan's (high-end) ERP product to survive, the best option is to maintain customers (don't let any one go away) and perform incremental improvements.

That's about the product. How about the company that sells Baan's ERP products? The best is to stop focusing on high-end ERP products and start focusing on other fields where money can be made. An example strategy is focusing heavily on lower-end ERP and be good at it and be the leader in the field (have a look at the latest Gartner Magic Quadrant for mid-market ERP and you'll be surprised who now leads it)

Rgds,
Paul

totally agree, one other thing that the company can do is diversify their portfolo into the products that ARE selling such as CRM products and middleware. Hence SSA Epiphinay and SSA OpenArchitecture. Both are very strong and competitive products that SSA can sell to existing customers and new customers alike.

Dave

To get deeper into the SME business, implementation times and implementation costs must come down. However, even if you have small budgets, you still have the need for customization and development, even more than in large enterprises, because you will have to streamline processes. I bet, that there is not a single Baan/SSA/Infor installation without some development being needed during the implementation. I have never understood why the development modules have to be licensed seperately for quite an amount. Speaking of LN, you even need the sources for doing customizing(!), because a lot of session-names are hard coded (copying sessions to give them a new form doesn't work any more) so you will have to pay for them too. Since most SME customers do not want to spend that money, customizing and development for them is done by their system integrators on the system integrators system. This however is far more expensive and error-prone (since you have to try but still can't keep that in sync with the solutions on the customers system) than doing it on the customers system directly.

So, having development and sources at all customers sites as part of the standard installation without any extra costs (as far as I know, SAP is doing it that way), would really help in doinger faster projects, easier maintainance, lower costs and better customer satisfaction. I really think in the long term that would pay off by being able to sell more licenses (the SME market always was and is still huge), even if the few extra bucks earned by the development package now don't come in any longer.

Well, implementation times and costs can already come down tremendously and I believe this can be realized without any customizations or development.
Already a product like LN can be utilized in the SME market even though many people think it is too rich in functionality for this type of market.

How can this be done?
By using a template company with a pre-defined set up of the LN environment and you can even do this in such a way that you have a template per line of business.
Also the data migration to such an environment can be highly standardized so there we can save time and money for customers as well.

In the end the SME market will benefit the most with solutions like this and they are not waiting for the "old" approach in the golden years of consultancy.
In fact right now a template LN set up is already available for immediate use and within 3 days companies can run their major processes in LN in the areas of Order Management (sales and purchasing), Warehousing, Enterprise Planning, Manufacturing and Finance once they have extracted the data out of the previous system. This is also true for existing BAAN IV customers. You only have to see it to believe it :).

Baan is a good product. They have to heavely focus on two weak area which are CRM and analytics. Since the product don't cater to these two emerging technolgy.

No one knows about Baan anymore....just sad that zero $$ is spent on marketing..it will die out...