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V. Rishi Kumar

HYDERABAD, May 28

THE restructuring process of the $10 billion Invensys plc, a global leader in production technologies and energy management, currently under way would pave the way for alienation of its wholly-owned subsidiary BaaN— an enterprise resource planning (ERP) major, which the former had acquired about 27 months ago.

``The global operations of BaaN are going through a process of evaluation. On April 15, Invensys had made an announcement about its plans to restructure its operations including that of BaaN. Following this development, BaaN has received about 11-12 bids. However, this has been narrowed down to about three broad areas - - pure financial services companies, software services companies and a hybrid of the two. ``However, one of the important pre-condition to this is that the suitor should not have similar business interests,'' a senior BaaN official told Business Line.

With regard to the India development centre, the BaaN official said ``with a huge footprint, we are certain that there will not be much change in the way the Indian operations are handled''. A decision on this issue is likely to be announced by the month-end coinciding with Invensys results.

This will be a significant development for BaaN, particularly in the backdrop of Invensys announcing plans to invest a few million dollars following a visit by Mr Rick Haythornthwaite, Chief Executive Officer of Invensys, late last year.

BaaN India has about 140 customers in India and over 6,000 globally and has charted out a successful track record in ERP implementations in several verticals and covering process automation and electronics. This IDC is one of the three global support centres, the others being in the US and Holland.

How will this change impact the Indian operations and particularly BaaN IDC, its biggest outside Europe? ``It is premature to comment on the developments. However, let me add that our operations are not likely to be impacted and we are on track working to release our next product by September-October time frame,'' the official said.

In a communiqué to customers, BaaN Info CEO, Mr Gopal K. Madnani, has said ``Invensys would be seeking financial partners or new owners for their holdings in the divisions other than production management, as it would be reducing its operations from two core divisions to one. As part of this development, BaaN, which is part of development division of Invensys, will also be seeking financial partners.''

``For three years, our association with Invensys has been very fruitful. During this tenure, our customer satisfaction scores have improved, we have been able to stabilise our business and also executed on a sensor to boardroom capability. With Invensys, we have also had the opportunity to create new and path breaking technologies and applications and continue to improve products and solutions for our customers.''

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