Baan World 98: Baan Goes Mainstream (Part 1)
By Russ Finney
May 19, 1998
I recently attended the Baan World 98 conference April 21-24 in Denver, Colorado. Baan is an ERP software vendor which competes directly with vendors such as SAP, Peoplesoft, and Oracle Financials. This year's conference had over four thousand people in attendance. The keynote speaker was Bill Gates.
Baan's growth and success has now raised its software to the status of a mainstream ERP product. The following two part feature series is my report from this conference.
Microsoft's Bill Gates shares Microsoft's strategy for enterprise wide computing.
Bill Gates was the keynote speaker at Baan World 98 in Denver, Colorado. He talked quite a bit about Microsoft's strategy for enterprise computing. He also answered tough questions from the audience. But more on that later.
First, let me share a few observations as a member of the audience. I have seen Bill Gates speak live on many occasions - but this time it was different. I attribute this two significant developments. Bill Gates is now worth fifty billion dollars, and his company is engaged in an escalating legal battle with the US government. His "wonder kid" image no longer existed with this audience.
Many IT folks I spoke with at the conference now seem to view Gates with almost an air of both awe and suspicion. His image is now one of "world celebrity" and "world's richest person". But because of this, I believe that everything Microsoft and Gates does from this point forward will be analyzed by many against their personal tolerance of greed, as well as their perception of his quest for monopoly. The richer Gates gets, the louder the pro and anti Microsoft debate will become. What do you think? Go to the Bulletin Board.
The best question asked from the audience was "now that you have achieved your financial goals, why do you keep working so hard?". I'll tell you his answer later.
One last thing, I was amazed at how many people brought cameras to the session to take their own photo of Gates during his presentation. Gates was continuously flashed during his entire one and a half hour speech (several times by me).
The "Digital Nervous System"
Microsoft's Bill Gates shares Microsoft's strategy for enterprise wide computing.
If you haven't heard Microsoft's latest marketing phrase you will very soon. Most of the Microsoft executives are now out giving this presentation as often as possible.
Gates explained it this way: "The idea is that a company's nervous system is the whole way it coordinates its activities, the way information moves, including meetings, memos, phone calls, and now a substantial part of that is moving into digital form".
He further explained "that this involves tracking basic operations, organizing planned events, retrieving knowledge from previous work that was done, making sure you know everything that's going on with a customer, reacting to the unplanned events that are taking place in today's economy, and gaining competitive advantage. All of that requires companies to step back and think about their total information flow."
Gates went on to say that "now, we will revolutionize those products, bringing in things like speech recognition, visual recognition, a rich understanding of the user model, but having those as high-volume standards will be our primary contribution".
Enterprise Clustering and COM
Gates also covered the new enterprise products the Microsoft is currently rolling out. He explained that "clustering is the last big thing that comes from the mainframe world that architecturally has not been available in the PC-Windows environment. Clustering first came out with NT, late last year, and now we'll be moving that up to larger clusters, up from the two-nodes that we supported initially".
Gates continued by explaining that in the future "applications, no matter where the code is running, whether it's coming down to the PC or running on the server, to the user it's got to be single click deployment. You get a mail message telling you about an application, if you want that application, you click, it comes down onto your machine. That's the only way we can get the management that we want out of these things. And we have to make the transition to this by using the interoperability capabilities that are built in".
He remarked that "the platform we're building for this is the Windows DNA platform. COM, our Component Object Model, is very much at the center of this. And COM is a centerpiece technology for the work that BAAN and Microsoft are doing together. It allows you to partition applications, both logically and physically. And it lets you take advantage of the richer services that we are building down into the platform".
The Component Object Model
Gates went into more detail about COM - the component object model. He said that "COM, although it's native to Windows, it's got to be available on all the enterprise systems. We have COM up and running on UNIX and MDS. We're working hard on the AS400 version. That's one of the requirements that BAAN had for us, and that we're hard at work putting together".
He continued by saying "we've got a lot of partners, who are very involved with learning about COM and using it themselves, and the work they're doing. And we're making sure that the other object standard that's out there, CORBA, that we have excellent interoperability. In fact, IONA, who has been a leader in CORBA-based systems, is now building COM into all the products they ship. And that gives you transparent interoperability between the different systems. And so this will become a very key standard in the enterprise environment. COM becomes the connector, connecting BAAN ERP on different platforms, connecting to the ARM system, the CODA system, and to third-party applications".
Gates Next Target: Enterprise Computing
After Gates finished covering Microsoft's component object model, he expanded on their new approaches for enterprise computing. This strategy is directed at replacing today's current UNIX mid-range computing. Microsoft's new server operating system known as NT enterprise edition now supports clustering for both scalability and fault tolerance.
Even after the presentation I am personally still not convinced. I am not ready to shift our company's mission critical computing to this platform quite yet. One thing that I am convinced of is that Microsoft is pouring the money and resources into the enterprise market space. Once perfected, their offering will probably be a significant competitor to UNIX. Most hardware makers at this conference seem to now be covering their bets both ways.
Read Baan World 98: Baan Goes Mainstream (Part 2)The fun stuff - Gates answers questions, PrimeSource Technologies, and the Doobie Brothers.
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Copyright © 1999, Russ Finney, All Rights Reserved. Originally written for The Mining Company.
