Baan

Baan was a vendor of enterprise resource planning (ERP) software that is now owned by Infor Global Solutions. Baan or Baan ERP was also the name of the ERP product created by this company.The Baan Corporation was created by Jan Baan in 1978 in Barneveld, Netherlands, to provide financial and administrative consulting services. With the development of his first software package, Jan Baan and his brother Paul Baan entered what was to become the ERP industry. The Baan company focused on the creation of enterprise resource planning (ERP) software.
Baan gained its popularity in the early nineties. Baan software is famous for its technical architecture and its 4GL language, which nowadays is still considered to be one of the most efficient and productive among database application development platforms.

Baan became a real threat to market leader SAP after beating SAP in the Boeing deal. However the fall of the Baan company began when it went public and became listed in the stock market. The management exaggerated company revenue by booking "sales" of software licenses that were actually transferred to a related distributor. The discovery of this "creative" revenue manipulation led to a sharp decline of Baan's stock price at the end of 1998.

In June 2000, facing worsening financial difficulties, law suits and reporting seven consecutive quarterly losses and bleak prospects, Baan was sold at a price of US$700 million to Invensys,[2] a UK automation, controls, and process solutions group to become a unit of its Software and Services Division. Laurens van der Tang was the president of this unit. With the acquisition of Baan, Invensys's CEO Allen Yurko began to offer "Sensor to Boardroom" solutions to customers.

Today Baan ERP software is still used by thousands of mid-range companies in the world, the majority on version BaanIVc4 and most of the rest on Baan5c. Sales of ERP LN have since been slow until a pickup Q4 2008 that has so far continued.