My Journey with a Visionary

“Guys ! Mr. Baan is coming to India in two weeks.” 

Once the announcement is made everyone knows what to do next. 
The teams become busy finishing and polishing the new features they are building; the product managers are preparing a demo script; the meeting room is booked for the Thursday and a full day demo session is planned for Mr. Jan Baan. Preparations are intense within the teams to articulate and position the work they have been doing in the best possible way. And the excitement is on ! We have been doing this for years and every engineer in the R&D centers both in India and The Netherlands will know what this means. 

I started one of the most stimulating and purposeful journeys of my life when I joined Baan in 1995 as a young engineer. After training for a whole 6 months in ERP concepts and Baan IV functionality, my batch mates and I got ready to develop the next version of Baan ERP. We started Baan V with a lot of excitement because the new release had a huge technology leap along with many advanced ERP solutions. The new tools version had innovative user interface capabilities and object oriented concepts introduced via a new data access layer (DAL). Baan Service modules were supposed to adapt the new tools capabilities first and I had the chance to be an early user of this great technology.

From the Hyderabad development center we were involved in developing many new modules of ERP with the guidance from the senior colleagues from The Netherlands. Learning was huge and being the first set of people who joined Hyderabad center we had to take a lot of ownership in understanding the concepts and delivering the ERP modules with quality. I was given the architect role and became responsible for all modules of Baan Service. We followed the then popular Baan Development Methodology which evolved internally with lot of best practices and standards. Team in India took the ownership of some of the ERP packages completely and it demonstrated the trust shown by the Baan management towards India. I had the opportunity to work in various capacities - as an engineer, an architect and also later as a Business Development Manager interacting with various sales units and customers in rolling out the Baan product world-wide. 

Two things that impressed me the most about Baan is the product vision and the work culture. On the product delivery side we were busy translating the vision into attractive solutions. Easy to implement and easy to use were the two key factors which drove Baan sales which in turn was the goal for the development teams. On the work culture front, Ramam practiced 'leadership with love' and Mr. Ramanathan was behind all the employee friendly policies. The Indian management paid special attention to create a trustful and friendly environment which was driven by some key principles of the CEO and  founder Mr. Jan Baan. The most profound ones, as I remember are:

• Ask for forgiveness instead of permission
• Focus on resolving the issue rather than finding out who did it
• Honesty and Integrity - the best policy

In every employee address he reinforces these key principles.

After working for 9+ years at Baan I had the opportunity to work more closely with Mr.Jan Baan on his next entrepreneurial journey, Cordys. That’s when I came to know first hand of his visionary ideas and saw the fire in him for creating new products and solutions . The first assignment he gave to me was to develop a solution based on the utility computing principles. Now it is popularly known as cloud computing with many variations and classifications like SaaS, PaaS, APaas, IaaS etc. We started with a very small team and the goal of the team was to create an attractive solution which can be consumed via the internet in a subscription model. We first attempted an application for approval and soon realised that we had to develop a framework which will have the ability to model an approval application. We had many demonstrations to Mr.Baan during his India visits. As a team we always put our goal to make the next big jump in our solution before his next visit. Within a year and with a small team we created an App Modeler which had the possibility to create simple workflow applications in the cloud.

The motivation and support that we received from Mr. Jan Baan was tremendous. Every meeting with him paved way for bringing new elements into our solution. He constantly challenged us with his views and ideas which resulted in growing the solution into a very attractive one. I had found it hard many times to comprehend his thoughts and translate them as features in the product. He was always many steps ahead. He was continuously showcasing the solution to several new audiences and bringing in new ideas and opportunities.

We demonstrated to many prospects & partners including the likes of Webex, British Telecom, KPN etc and the discussions were rewarding and motivating. Finally this utility computing initiative became the platform as a service (PaaS) solution of Cordys which was named Cordys Process Factory - a simple web based solution to model your workflow applications. It came with inbuilt multi-tenancy and a multi-tenant data store.

Mr. Baan took it to Forrester and they ranked the product next to force.com. We won a major deal at Valeo for this solution. More than 1000 workflow applications went live on this platform and they did an enterprise wide implementation with 30000 user on this platform. It was a story how Mr. Baan nurtured a team with a lot of support, encouragement and direction to create something special. I think It was not new for him as he had done it already many times. But for me it was a first and was most gratifying.

All nice stories don’t have a happy ending. Mr. Jan Baan had to stop this initiative despite the big customer win and analyst rankings as the Cordys Board decided to consolidate and focus on its core offering in tough market conditions..

A true entrepreneur never stops trying. I am fortunate to continue with him in his next endeavour Vanenburg Software where we continue to build innovative solutions. Mr. Baan has gone a step ahead in his interest to build products, by offering Innovation as a service. Many startup initiatives from the Netherlands are using the team in Vanenburg Software to build new innovative solutions in the area of Cloud Computing, Mobile Applications, Internet of Things, Data as a Service, Machine to Machine communication, Electronic Invoicing etc.  His passion to build products and solutions has not stopped and he continues to search for ideas and solutions which will benefit enterprises for the next 10 -15 years.

One of the initiatives within Vanenburg Software which Mr.Baan is passionate about is Collabrr. The idea here is to offer a document based collaboration for enterprises where users can capture information as structured documents based on templates. Social collaborative features around this document provides new way of information sharing within and across the supply chain. Developing it as a cloud based solution with mobile access makes the offering accessible from anywhere. Adding a workflow component to this solution provides process automation on the documents. We started this initiative some years ago with a young team and for me history repeats to see how Mr. Baan creates another interesting solution with constant encouragement and guidance. Mr.Baan believes that the enterprise solutions for the future need to be focused on improving productivity and should be simple and easy to use and that we need to kill the complexity. A slogan he often repeats!

I consider myself lucky to work closely with him and to have all those meetings and interactions with him on his numerous India trips. His passion is contagious and it energizes us to make happen his vision and ideas. He ignites my thoughts and my learning has never stopped. In my career of 20 years I have only worked with Baan companies. I have not seen the outside world. But Baan World itself is quite big which can offer learnings for a lifetime. I will always cherish the companionship of the brilliant colleagues that I have met here and worked with. All these learnings and experiences have made me a better person and the journey enjoyable.