New Baan EMEA President Charts Course >By Simon Hodgson

Computergram International, Sept 21, 1999

After a year of soul-searching, cost-cutting and snide Wall Street scrutiny, Baan Co NV is ready to emerge from its shell, according to Mike Shinya, recently appointed president of Baan's EMEA region. He has promised to realign the Dutch enterprise resource planning vendor, saying that the internal company structure designed to maximize Baan's efficiency, would be replaced by a more sales-driven model.

Shinya wants to move as many of Baan's personnel over to "customer-facing" positions to generate more licenses. But there will be no blood-letting, Shinya told ComputerWire, "I don't think we're in the lay-off mode," he said. This round of restructuring comes less than a year after the purge of 1,200 jobs (CI No 3,528).

Shinya, who was previously director of sales operations at Oracle Corp, is keen to publicize the company's positioning in the business solutions space, rather than pure ERP. The Barneveld-based company has already taken full page advertisements in the Wall Street Journal and will repeat the approach in Europe over the next few weeks.

He pledged that the Dutch firm would focus on building license revenue over the next year. He also promised to concentrate on less initiatives but on putting "more firepower behind them." The sales pipeline, Shinya said, "does not reflect the investment made in the product range." It was unclear which areas would suffer, though Shinya said that a reduction in vertical markets could be one solution.