Jan Baan
Founder & Chairman
Jan Baan has over 35 years of entrepreneurial and business leadership experience in the software industry. Internationally recognized for his key role in creating the worldwide market for Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software, Jan is a self-made serial entrepreneur and philanthropist.
Jan founded Baan Company in 1978, soon after attending Business College. With the development of his first software package in 1979, Jan started what was to become a pioneering career in the IT industry around Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software. Under Jan’s stewardship, Baan Company grew from a $35 million company in the early 1990s to $680 million in 1998. Baan became the number 2 ERP player in the software industry.
In the late 1990s, Jan became a highly successful venture capitalist by focusing on software innovation. He was an early investor in the on-demand collaborative software company WebEx Communications, later on acquired by Cisco Systems for $3 billion, as well as an early backer of Top Tier, which was subsequently sold to SAP for $400 million.
In 2001, Jan founded Cordys with a mission to solve the IT implementation and change issues faced by today’s extended enterprise by enabling an organization to be more responsive to changing business conditions. Customers leveraging the benefits of their software included the Dutch Ministry of Defence, Siemens, Mercer, Pacific Blue Cross and Tata Steel. In 2013, Cordys was acquired by OpenText, the leader in Enterprise Information Management, and is now the corner-stone for its long-term strategy.
