Picture the following scene: Bill Gates is on stage, and Shai Agassi, the now-departed heir apparent of SAP, is demonstrating a hot, new product. Sitting in the front row, impatient to head to his next meeting, is Charles Philips, now co-president of Oracle.
This is neither an acid flashback nor a bad dream — just the keynote presentation at the BaanWorld User Conference, April 21, 1998. The meeting that Philips was anxious to attend concerned Baan's most recent quarterly earnings. That earnings report, which included a $65 million shortfall in expected revenue, began the slow, inevitable slide that turned Baan from a major contender into one of dozens of products in the portfolio of ERP roll-up master Infor.
Bill Gates, even then, was Bill Gates. Shai Agassi, then 27 years old, was CEO and CTO of TopTier, inventor of "drag and relate" and the object of an eventual acquisition by SAP, where Agassi's now storied career took shape. And Charles Philips, better known then as Chuck Philips, was financial analyst supreme and owner of toll-free number 1-800-MrChuck.
Also on hand were Jan Baan and Tom Tinsley of Baan, who tried — and failed — to turn Baan into the first ERP roll-up. Lorenzo Martinelli, now of E2Open, who helped jar my memory about this ill-fated conference, was trying to keep it all together in his role as Baan's strategic marketing VP.
This event followed the launch of Windows 98, which had flamed out in a blue screen of death during a Gates demo just a week or so earlier. The reason Gates was on stage was that Baan was entering a strategic alliance with Microsoft to get Baan's ERP software onto an ideal platform for the mid-market — which today is still the promised land for ERP vendors in search of more revenue. (Notably, Jeff Raikes, then Microsoft group VP of sales and support, and now head of Office and the Dynamics ERP product lines, helped to engineer the Baan-Microsoft deal.)
The reason Agassi was on stage was that Baan was a major investor in TopTier. Agassi's drag and relate was part of an effort to impress Gates with how a desktop system running Windows could access back-office ERP data. And Philips was there because it was his job to watch the likes of Baan as the competition intensified among SAP, PeopleSoft, Baan, and Oracle.
So what can we learn about today's market from that day in 1998? The first lesson: Enterprise software is an incestuous industry where yesterday's enemies are today's best friends, and where that nice guy in the first row can become either the scourge or the savior of the industry, depending on your point of view. The second lesson: Microsoft may not always bat last, but, by Gates, it sure loves to try. And the third lesson: The future of enterprise software can be seen in its history — in the primacy of ideas such as attacking the mid-market, aligning with Microsoft, and betting on strategic partnerships and investments — and by following the careers of the talented people in the industry who rarely miss an opportunity to make a difference, wherever they end up.
I can assure you that in 1998, I could never have predicted the events of the ensuing nine years, and perhaps that's the most important lesson of all: In enterprise software, the more things change, the weirder it gets. See you in 2016.