Hyderabad To Be Baan'S Global Hub

Hyderabad's efforts to turn into the cyber capital of Asia received a further boost yesterday with the Netherland-based Baan Company deciding to make the city the hub of its global operations.

"We believe that Hyderabad will soon be the cyber hub of Asia and that is what prompted us to set up our global facilities here," said Baan vice-president Peter Aired, who was in the city to open the company's global support centre.The new centre is significant as Baan Company is currently scaling down operations and reducing development centres globally from the existing 24 to 18.

In the consequent restructuring, the Baan Global Support Centre here -- the first to operate 24 hours, six days a week -- will provide support for all Baan products worldwide. The company already has a major development centre operating in the city over the past three years which has developed, entirely on its own efforts, a new enterprise resource planning (ERP) product -- with a new architecture -- to be launched worldwide as Baan Series in the year 2000. According to the Hyderabad development centre chief, S Ramanathan, 15 other products are in the pipeline at the centre. With these developments, Baan hopes to come close to the global leader in ERP, SAP of the US, if not surpass it.

 

Robert Coolan, Baan director, marketing and communication said, the centre at Hy-derabad has 55 application specialists and plans to grow to 200 specialists by the year 2000. These specialists will provide product support to Baan customers, partners and distributors and other Baan support centres across the world with web-enabled tracking, telephones, fax and e-mail technical support.

The Baan Company delivers its comprehensive enterprise-wide business management software to companies requiring best-in-class business capabilities. Its current products are fully Year 2000 compliant and based on a flexible, multi-tier client/server architecture which can scale to meet the needs of small, medium and large enterprises. More than 3,000 companies use Baan in 5,000 sites world-wide. Baan's products uniquely support continuous business improvements through its capability for Dynamic Enterprise Modelling. Founded in 1978, Baan has dual headquarters in Barneveld, The Netherlands and Reston, Virginia. The Company's Common Stock is registered on the Nasdaq Stock Market under the symbol BAANF and on the Amsterdam Stock Exchange under the symbol BAAN.