A pair of providers of ERP solutions saw their ownership change, with more shifts in the offing, when JD Edwards and Baan got acquired in early June transactions. Baan saw its ERP fortunes purchased by a major investor in MANMAN owner SSA Global Technologies, when General Atlantic Partners and Cerberus Capital Management paid $135 million for the company. That group plans to combine SSA-GT with Baan to create a $600 million ERP provider. One day earlier, PeopleSoft announced it’s buying JD Edwards, whose ERP solutions are running on IBM’s iSeries servers as well as a multitude of Unix offerings. Baan said it’s expecting consolidation among ERP providers, and it believes the combined company will end up being one of the top three ERP vendors in the world.

The backing of the new venture is substantial; General Atlantic and Cerberus represent $14 billion in investment capital. SSA-GT and Baan will continue to operate under their own company names, but a single CEO will manage the combined entity. HP 3000 MANMAN users at the recent CAMUS conference heard from SSA-GT CEO Mike Greenough that “ERP is going the way of stereos in the 1950s. Technology is a commodity — the relationship is not.” Greenough, under whose leadership the company has returned 26 percent on capital, told the users that “you’ll continue to have multiple products, but the extension products will all be the same.”