It also announced availability of integrated solutions suite for B2B e-commerce. It ties together business processes across multiple functional domains, enabling e-Fulfillment within extended enterprise communities.

OpenWorld is particularly meant to help manufacturing companies collaborate over the Net to deliver higher value and profitability and can be of great value to such organisations who spend more than 35 per cent of their IT budgets integrating disparate applications, tying together customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning and supply chain applications.

However, the company is expected to be working on a similar internet portalinitiative as SAP. When asked, Baan vice-president (strategic marketing) Rohit Agarwal said: "It is true that we have nothing like mySap.com yet, but stay tuned. A lot of developments will unfold within the next few months."

Taking a dig at rival companies in the ERP arena, he said all of them were engaged in similar integration exercises to bring back-end and front-end applications together, but Baan had done so two years ago.

"Baan has already been in the position to provide integration of the entire business processes, from sourcing to CRM to SCM and the rest as we acquired or developed all other applications that we did not have to broadbase our offerings. We also had an early start with the componentisation of our products which is why we are in a position to offer them to services companies as well,'' pointed out Agarwal.

Outlining the agenda of the company, he said Baan aimed to be first or second player in ERP for the manufacturing sector, mid-market enterprise applications, European and Asia-Pacific enterprise applications, global CRM market and global supply chain solutions.

Quoting the Forrester Research data, Agarwal pointed out that the B2B e-commerce market would grow to over $1.3 trillion by 2003. More than 65 per cent of this opportunity will be availed by the manufacturing companies, he added.