Jan Baan (Born in

Rijssen Rijssen (; Sallands: ) is a city in the Dutch province of Overijssel. It is part of Rijssen-Holten, one of thirteen municipalities in Twente. It has almost 28,000 inhabitants. The economy of Rijssen relies mostly on commerce and construction ...

, 9 March 1946) is a Dutch

entrepreneur Entrepreneurship is the creation or extraction of economic value in ways that generally entail beyond the minimal amount of risk (assumed by a traditional business), and potentially involving values besides simply economic ones. An entreprene ...

and

venture capitalist Venture capital (VC) is a form of private equity financing provided by firms or funds to startup, early-stage, and emerging companies, that have been deemed to have high growth potential or that have demonstrated high growth in terms of number ...

, known as the founder of the Baan Company, a software company providing

Enterprise Resource Planning Enterprise resource planning (ERP) is the integrated management of main business processes, often in real time and mediated by software and technology. ERP is usually referred to as a category of business management software—typically a suit ...

(ERP) software. After selling the company, he founded Cordys, a company to provide web-related ERP products.

Biography

Baan was born and raised in

as eldest son in a family of ten. His father was a

carpenter Carpentry is a skilled trade and a craft in which the primary work performed is the cutting, shaping and installation of building materials during the construction of buildings, ships, timber bridges, concrete formwork, etc. Carpenter ...

, and his grandfather on his mother's side was cofounder of a regional bus company.Henk Post
De snelle groei van de Baan Company: de rol van Jan Baan
in: ''Ondernemen in netwerken.'' Wim Hulsink, Dick Manuel (eds.), 2004. p. 291 At the age of 16, Baan started working at a meatworks, leaving secondary school without a degree. After serving in the military, Baan got a job at an accounting firm. In 1970, he started working for a wholesale firm, where after two years he became head of the accounting department. When the company bought their first computer, Baan got acquainted with automation. Mid 1970s Baan started working as a consultant, and shortly managed the financial department of a large company. In 1978, Jan founded The Baan Company, a software company providing ERP solutions, which became a major player in the ERP software industry. Jan Baan left the Baan Company in 1998. After his efforts with the Baan Company, Baan became a venture capitalist and invested in companies like Top Tier and

WebEx Webex by Cisco, is an American subsidiary of Cisco Systems that develops and sells web conferencing, videoconferencing and contact center as a service applications. It was founded as WebEx Communications, Inc., in 1995 and acquired by Cisco Sy ...

; both were eventually valued above $1billion. Top Tier was later sold to

SAP Sap is a fluid transported in the xylem cells (vessel elements or tracheids) or phloem sieve tube elements of a plant. These cells transport water and nutrients throughout the plant. Sap is distinct from latex, resin, or cell sap; it is a s ...

, while WebEx was sold to

Cisco Cisco Systems, Inc. (using the trademark Cisco) is an American multinational digital communications technology conglomerate corporation headquartered in San Jose, California. Cisco develops, manufactures, and sells networking hardware, s ...

. In an interview, Baan said that "... with

and Top Tier I was an investor. Baan, and Cordys, I do for life. I am not a serial entrepreneur at all." In 2005, Baan wrote a book on his life as an entrepreneur, called The Way to Market Leadership.

Work

Baan Company

The Baan Company was founded in 1978. With the development of his first software package in 1979, he commenced his career in the ERP industry. His brother

Paul Baan Paul Baan (born 1951), together with his older brother Jan Baan, headed the information technology firm Baan Company, which made a name for itself between 1995 and 2000. Baan Company Baan Company was listed at the Amsterdam Stock Exchange in mid ...

joined him in the management of the company. Under Jan's stewardship, the company made good market in the field of

(ERP) software and grew from a $35 million company in the early 1990s, to $680 million in 1998. The Baan Company competed successfully with large companies like

and

PeopleSoft PeopleSoft, Inc. was a company that provided human resource management systems (HRMS), financial management solutions (FMS), supply chain management (SCM), customer relationship management (CRM), and enterprise performance management (EPM) softw ...

and became the number 2 ERP player in the software industry. However, the company's fall started in 1998 as the stocks started to dip and eventually in 2000, it was sold to the British company

Invensys Invensys Limited was a multinational engineering and information technology company headquartered in London, United Kingdom. At its height, the company had offices in more than 50 countries and its products were sold in around 180 countries. I ...

Cordys

In 2001, Baan started a new company, Cordys, along with Theodoor van Donge. The intention was to produce products serving to bridge the traditional

products with the internet, using the internet as the front end. In 2010, Cordys Switzerland AG was founded as an independent legal entity according to Swiss law. The Swiss company was not part of the later M&A deal between Jan Baan and OpenText. In August 2013, Jan Baan sold Cordys to

OpenText OpenText Corporation (styled as opentext) is a global software company that develops and sells information management software. OpenText, headquartered in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, is Canada's fourth-largest software company as of 2022, and r ...

for 33M USD.

Reformed religion

As a Christian and businessman, the entrepreneur from Lunteren handled his principles creatively. He managed to combine the prohibition on labor on Sunday with virtually unimpeded services to customers by working in different time zones. Even when Baan had hundreds of employees in the Netherlands, the reformed character of the company was unmistakable. The downturn of the company in 1999 was a reason for the establishment of the De Keursteen Stichting that fights financial abuses in reformational circuit.

References

External links

Jan Baan at Cordys

CEO Interview: Jan Baan

The Gartner Fellows: Jan Baan's Interview

Cordys Switzerland
{{DEFAULTSORT:Baan, Jan 1946 births Living people People from Rijssen 21st-century Dutch businesspeople