Baan Defectors – Is This Only Tip of an Iceberg?

Market Impact

Baan's protracted financial saga, negative publicity, personnel departures and channel shakeout, as well as the uncertain direction of acquired company, have begun to take its toll on customers' loyalty and patience. There has long been an open season on disconcerted customers of beleaguered ERP vendors like Baan and SSA. SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft, J.D. Edwards, Symix, MAPICS, QAD, as well as ROI Systems in this specific example, are only a few of the vendors, which have, with different level of candidness, developed strategies of preying on dissatisfied and apprehensive organizations where those doomed systems have been implemented.

Invensys should, without any delay, address customers' concerns by unequivocally stating its more detailed product strategy and the timeframe for its delivery. Also, it is very important that the company explain why it believes impending restructuring will not jeopardize future product development and/or service & support. The fact remains that Baan still has a competitive product line. The irony of life is that its core product has never been more mature and stable. However, product functionality and technology are only a small part of the selection process, with ever diminishing significance. Invensys may allay some of the viability questions, however, Baan's channels, both direct and indirect, to buy and sell its products were all but decimated during the last two years. Failure to rebuild these channels will have far-reaching consequences.

User Recommendations

While we cannot advise Baan's customers to remain cool, calm and collected, we do not recommend jumping ship in a knee-jerk reaction. Due diligence and development of case scenarios for either a system change or remaining with the status quo states goes without saying. An unsuccessfully implemented system and unhappy and/or demoralized users would be one of the additional crucial arguments for the case of switching to another system. On the other hand, in the case of a successful implementation, smooth business processes flow and users being fond of a system, one would have to reckon with the tremendous issues of managing change and user resistance.

Unless there is a crying need for and apparent, preferably quantifiable benefits from abandoning the Baan product currently in use, you may be better off by hanging on for awhile. Nevertheless, be on high alert and develop medium- to long-term alternative plans for moving to a new technology. Ensure that you have the prerogative to change the source code and a team of skilled resources available. 'Self-sufficiency' should be the name of the game. Approaching Invensys and asking for assurances and firm commitment to future service & support goes without saying. Until the acquisition is consummated and a new product strategy becomes clear, we do not advise potential users to evaluate this product. We suggest evaluating the features, price, and corporate viability of other vendors instead, before making a selection.

Conducting polymers

The linear-backbone "polymer blacks" (polyacetylene, polypyrrole, and polyaniline) and their copolymers are the main class of conductive polymers. Historically, these are known as Melanins. In 1963 Australians DE Weiss and coworkers reported iodine-doped oxidized polypyrrole blacks with resistivities as low as 1 ohm/cm. Subsequent papers reported resistances as low as 0.03 Ohm/cm. With the notable exception of Charge transfer complexes (some of which are even superconductors), organic molecules had previously been considered insulators or at best weakly conducting semiconductors.
Over a decade later in 1977, Shirakawa, Heeger, and MacDiarmid reported equivalent high conductivity in rather similarly oxidized and iodine-doped polyacetylene. They later received the 2000 Nobel prize in chemistry for " The discovery and development of conductive polymers ".