Business & Money Trail:

BAAN ROLLS OUT CRM STRATEGY, LATE

Baan delivered the plans for its assault on the CRM market last week at a conference in Arizona. The plan seemed to reinforce the fact that Baan had come to this market rather late in the game, but it may have a trick or two up its sleeve to help it smooth its passage.

The strategy is nothing revolutionary of course as CRM is CRM whoever does it. Therefore the usual array of services, touch point management and analytics can be expected as part of the bundle. Perhaps one thing that will make Baan stand out from some of the crowd is the fact that Baan does ERP, giving its iBaan for CRM solution a natural home in the brand scheme of things.

This however will only differentiate Baan from the leader, Siebel. It will do little to make it stand apart from the likes of Oracle, SAP and PeopleSoft who are undoubtedly further down the CRM road than Baan. But Baan thinks it may have another benefit over its competitors -- it's going vertical, big time.

The plan is for Baan to target its traditionally strong areas like electronics, defence and aerospace, with suites of products that will enable them to work more smoothly. And it's come out with a new tool to help it smooth the way -- the I-Baan E-Configuration Enterprise Solution. This provides users with a real-time configuration model.

Configuration models aren't necessarily the most exciting things in the world. It's essentially a modeling engine, tailored for specific verticals that should enable organizations to access multiple back-end systems and draw from them a whole host of information -- glueing them into something resembling a deliverable.

This approach should mean that Baan's potential customers have an easy ride when it comes to implementation and going live. But that's not the sum of Baan's challenges. Looking at the market as a whole it seems safe to say that Baan's target customers have already got CRM software. This means that Baan has to convince them that it's systems will be better and that it has some serious functionality in these areas. And that's before we even get to cost savings.

However, Baan has already notched up some success. It claims to have more than 500 CRM customers already on the go and this week it added a few more to the pile. On the same day it revealed its new strategy it also revealed a new customer -- step forward HDS, with plans to upgrade its current systems to a 900 seat implementation of Baan's iBaan SalesPlus 4.2 solution.

The message was further reinforced when it revealed another new customer -- Flowserve -- all of which helped strengthen the message that Baan is taking things pretty seriously this time.