THE HAGUE, October 12, 1998 — At BaanWorld ’98 Europe today, Microsoft and Baan announced the Baan Enterprise Software Agreement, a single license designed to dramatically reduce the complexity of purchasing, implementing and maintaining business software on the Microsoft platform.
The software agreement will reduce the total cost of ownership for customers by combining Baan Company’s business software for Windows NT with three members of Microsoft’s BackOffice family: SQL Server Enterprise Edition; Exchange Server; and Site Server Commerce Edition. Baan Company is the first enterprise application vendor to announce a licensing agreement for all three Microsoft products.
Baan’s Enterprise Software Agreement will deliver all the business software any company needs to manage 90 percent of its business process. An easy-to-manage per-desktop, per-month license for software upgrades, maintenance and support provides enterprise resource planning, supply chain, customer management, accounting and finance software from Baan with Microsoft BackOffice components.
“Microsoft’s vision of a digital nervous system means delivering a seamless flow of information across an extended enterprise, allowing organizations to make better, faster business decisions,” said Jeff Raikes, Microsoft group vice president of sales and support. “Baan Company’s work in creating an integrated solution for the Microsoft platform delivers on that vision with an easy-to-use, manageable set of business software.” Today’s joint announcement marks two years of collaboration between the companies and supports Baan Company’s mission to make buying and deploying business software as easy and flexible as possible.
“Microsoft and Baan Company are redefining the enterprise application space with a complete business software offering that any company can quickly and cost-effectively deploy to optimize customer relationships, operation management and advanced corporate decision applications,” said Tom Tinsley, Baan Company chairman and CEO. “By uniting all the components needed to run the entire IT stack with low fixed costs, we are reaching new categories within the market and making enterprise-level functionality available to the broadest universe of users.”
Early support for the BESA will come from Baan’s global solution providers and resellers, including consulting and channel partners such as Cambridge Technology Partners (Massachusetts) Inc., CSC, Compaq Computer Corp., Ernst & Young and Hewlett-Packard Co., all of which are also Microsoft Certified Solution Providers.
