18 April 2002 Laurens van der Tang, president of manufacturing software vendor Baan, says that parent company Invensys – the struggling engineering group – offers Baan “great opportunities”.
Speaking at Baan’s inForum user conference in Rome, van der Tang conceded that Baan had been forced “to work harder to get visibility” since it was acquired by Invensys in June 2000.
However he added that Baan had also benefited from Invensys’ stewardship: “In times such as these, where we have seen a huge downturn in the software industry, being part of a large, multinational company with $10 billion in revenues is a significant advantage. Customers can see a real future and continuity for Baan, and in turn, we can become a very trusted partner to them.”
Invensys, he added, was rapidly becoming one of Baan’s biggest customers and provided Baan with “a great test bed” for its products. According to Invensys CEO Rick Haythornthwaite, the company was using 126 different discrete enterprise resource planning systems when he was first appointed in October 2001 – a situation Baan is helping to rectify.
Baan’s performance is crucial to Invensys, which recently sharpened its focus on software after announcing plans to sell off a £2.3 billion (€3.77 billion) chunk of its business that dealt with industrial components and systems.
