Jan Baan

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 joined him in the management of the company. Under Jan's stewardship, the company made good market in the field of Enterprise Resource Planning (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 SAP and PeopleSoft 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.

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 Enterprise Resource Planning 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 for 33M USD.

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.