The Rappit journey: Our legacy of innovations

This year marks our sweet sixteen. Founded in 2009, Rappit is now officially 16 years in business, although it was formerly branded under the Vanenburg name. Throughout all these years, our company has evolved quite a bit: from offering offshore development and staff augmentation to clients and serving start-up companies during the initial days, to selling a unique application development platform for core systems powered by Google Cloud today.

Yet, our true origin story stretches back over 45 years. That’s when my father, Jan Baan, founded Baan Company, which eventually became the leading ERP player in the ‘90s. After that, a second company was brought to life with Cordys, a BPM and PaaS market leader in the early 2000s. Our third venture, Vanenburg, then took shape, dedicated to crafting innovative business solutions. Just a year ago, we rebranded as Rappit, underscoring our product-centric approach and international growth. Looking at the Rappit team, our products, and our enterprise modernization services today, it’s clear that our current endeavors are built squarely upon the foundations of our past.

Customers often ask what has defined our uniqueness over the years. In this blog, I want to delve into that, reflecting on our legacy of innovation by highlighting our core principles:

1. A mindset of continuous innovation
2. Rapid learning from both successes and failures
3. A mission to democratize IT globally
4. A focus on long-term value, not just fleeting trends
5. Focus on what we’re good at

1: A mindset of continuous innovation

A cornerstone I deeply value is our team’s drive for disruptive innovation. Whether you take a look at the famous ‘customer-order decoupling point’ which was one of the fundamental differentiating factors in the Baan ERP, or if you look to the technology choices we made around open source technologies, or if you dive into the scalable architecture of the Cordys iPaaS: all of these ground-breaking innovations were the result of not accepting the status quo and brilliant minds seeking for alternative solutions which could set them apart from the competition. This mindset is still what we value a lot. It’s not only the technological experience of the team but rather the combined efforts to keep challenging the current limitations.

Today in Rappit, we’re proud to convert this approach into a market-leading platform which offers:

• The speed of low-code;
• The flexibility of high-code, and
• true freedom through no vendor lock-in.

Where the combination of these 3 dimensions was never possible before, we’re proud to have cracked this nut and have overcome the limitations that held us back before.

2: Rapid learning from both successes and failures

Another aspect that has tremendously impacted our 45-year journey is the drive to learn from the past, both from the moments filled with champagne and applause, as well as from the failures and escalations. That in itself might not be unique but our aim is to combine it with the attitude of valuing ‘speed over completion’. Two often heard sayings in our organization are:

Perfect is the enemy of the good

And

Time is the only asset which is not presented on the balance sheet

By failing fast and recovering quickly, we have implemented an approach of fast and continuous improvements. It is even reinforced by a third ‘mantra’ – one which is liked most by my own kids –

It’s better to ask for forgiveness than for permission

By combining speed, courage and learning, we allow everyone to fail fast and become a better version of ourselves, day by day.

3: A mission to democratize IT globally

A third aspect is that our companies were always fueled by the fundamental belief that software would be a main game-changer for everyone who would adopt it, in the right way. This was already the case with ERP, which became a breakthrough in the 90s and was adopted at mass by all enterprise organizations, big and small. Today, it is still one of the most important applications in enterprises, although we know that these rigid, monolithic systems are not the only beacon of hope for companies in the current, volatile, and innovative world. Still, they are serving core operational processes in any organization with 5 or more employees and are crucial as systems of record.

With Rappit, we go a few miles further by extending these generic systems with unique and custom solutions, leveraging the latest cloud-native and artificial intelligence techniques to make our customers really stand out from their peers in their industry. Today, intelligent enterprise applications that empower the unique processes of an organization can really make a difference. This is not left for the ‘biggies’ with ‘deep pockets’, but the business benefits are achievable for any enterprise willing to embrace innovation. Today, our mission is to enable every company, be it big or small, to become a ‘software company’ and reap the benefits of innovative enterprise solutions.

4: A focus on long-term value, not just fleeting trends

At any new emerging innovation in IT, I’ve often heard and seen the statement from many respected ‘experts’ who were shouting that “this innovation is unprecedented and something mankind has never seen before”. As time passed by, the same statements were made to welcome yet another invention. Also, some key industry analysts, who make a business out of inventing new TLAs*, are singing the same song. If you study their business model, it is pretty obvious that they would welcome any new invention in the market so that they can write new reports and advise companies who want to understand what this could mean for their business.

At Rappit, we believe in a more balanced viewpoint. While technology can be a great means and while new technological innovations are great tools for IT nerds such as us, they can never become a goal in themselves. My study in Business Administration has taught me that these means should always lead to a business benefit, either at the top line of the P&L (profit & loss statement) by generating extra revenue, or at the expense side of the equation by reducing cost levels. So while we are happily welcoming all new IT innovations such as cloud, microservices, GenAI and agentic workflows, we rather put these into practice and see how our customers can benefit from them.

It is exactly because of this long-term focus that we offer the capabilities to keep enterprise applications ‘forever young’, irrespective of what language, framework or innovation will be released in the next few years. By decoupling the design (meta data) from the actual logic, we are able to continuously upgrade our application development platform and regenerate the customers’ applications on the latest versions and tooling.

5: A dedication to our core strengths

Last but not least, our activities with Rappit are characterized by the fact that we stick to the things we are good at. That is: building better software faster.
Being in the field of enterprise software for more than 45 years, it is surprising to see that there are so few changes to the way software is being developed. Obviously, the tooling and best practices have changed quite a bit. However, the fundamentals of hardcore software development are still the same in that they start with an idea or an existing application which needs to be modernized and end up with a piece of code which is deployed in production and used by a set of users. The fact that still many software implementations fail or significantly exceed budget, teaches me that there is still room for improvement and we should not be satisfied with the status quo.

Hence, at Rappit, we are optimising this pretty traditional process by removing the gaps between the various stakeholders involved in the process of application development and leveraging the latest AI capabilities to make the entire process more intelligent and effective.

We thereby bridge ‘old’ and ‘new’:

• Old: We know ‘core enterprise systems’ pretty well, because we helped build them (Baan ERP) and integrated with them (Cordys iPaaS). So legacy modernization is part of our DNA.
• New: Having featured in the Forrester Wave report for PaaS 15 years ago (with our previous company Cordys) and leveraging AI for 20 years – when it was called ‘neural networks’ – we are able to master these tech innovations and make them usable for AI-led application generation.

Today, we are applying AI in every step of the development lifecycle (from requirements gathering, design, prototyping and actual development to deployment, monitoring and continuous improvement), to shorten the entire duration and ensure fewer handovers are needed. This allows our users to develop software ‘first time right’ with the business directly involved in all phases. By using smart AI tooling, we can not only reverse engineer existing applications much faster but also provide the right guardrails for greenfield software development which are based on all latest industry best-practices.

In essence, these guiding principles have shaped our diverse journey, the varied customers we’ve served, and the innovative solutions we’ve launched. Today, these principles keep all of us at Rappit laser-focused to speed up legacy modernization and generate better enterprise applications faster. We stay true to our promise of empowering our customers to outperform their competitors.

*  TLA = three-letter acronyms – thanks for checking this out and sticking with me to the end! 😉