Baan Company, the $400 million Netherlands based enterprise resource planning (ERP) software firm, will be using India as a base for developing a large chunk of its next generation ERP software.
This is perhaps the first time that an international software product is being so extensively developed in India. Most software companies like Microsoft, and other ERP majors like SAP of Germany and Oracle or Peoplesoft of the US do most of their development work in their own countries.
The current generation of its software called BAAN IV has been just released in the Indian market.
Also Read
"Almost 50 per cent of the next version of this software (likely to be called BAAN V) will be done at the newly acquired 20 acre complex at Hyderabad," said Deepak Ruchandani, director marketing at Baan Info Systems India Pvt Ltd, the Indian subsidiary of the company. Apart from India, development work for BAAN V is also being carried out in the US, Japan and Europe. BAAN V is likely to be released around mid-1998.
The company will be investing between Rs 60-70 crore over the next few years in building up its development facility in Hyderabad, which will mean installing hundreds of large UNIX-based workstations and recruiting additional trained programmers.
There are some 500 software programmers already working on the BAAN V package. "We will need at least 1200 programmers to work at our Hyderabad facility," Ruchandani added.
ERP softwares are used to run the entire operations of a company from manufacturing and finance to distribution and sales.
BAAN, which is the world's number two ERP software vendor after SAP of Germany, has been doing some development work in India since 1989. But none of it so extensive and never on a new product.
Most of the work so far related to localising its software for the Indian market to take care of issues as sales tax, MODVAT and Octroi. These parameters have to be configured in by local programming.