New York (June 5, 2003) -- In another shakeup among the original enterprise resource planning software vendors that a few years ago were expected to massively expand into the middle market from their base of large corporate customers, Dutch-based Baan has been sold to an investment group that reportedly plans to merge it into another software company.
The deal was announced just two days after PeopleSoft acquired rival ERP vendor J.D. Edwards. Baan, PeopleSoft and fellow ERP vendors Oracle and SAP AG generated attention in the middle-market business accounting software industry in the late 1990s because of their anticipated marketing expansion to companies of under $500 million in annual revenue; accounting software vendors and analysts at the time began disparagingly referring to them as “the BOPS" for Baan, Oracle, PeopleSoft and SAP.
Baan and PeopleSoft have been the least active among the BOPS in reaching out to smaller customers. Oracle has been making its mark with small and midsized businesses for several years as a major investor in NetLedger, vendor of the Internet-based Oracle Small Business Suite software platform, while SAP has developed an SMB application suite, which it's marketing in the United States in an alliance with accounting firm consolidator American Express Tax & Business Services.
Baan, according to other press reports of the deal, is slated to be merged into SSA Global, a Chicago-based ERP vendor. SSA is owned by General Atlantic Partners, a Greenwich,. Conn.-based investment firm that joined with Cerberus Capital Management, a New York-based private investment firm, to buy Baan.
-- John M. Covaleski
