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Ex-Baan chief takes San Francisco post

Mary Coleman will serve as managing director of operations of the Internet Capital Group, a holding company with a network of business-to-business e-commerce companies as partners.

Kim Girard
Kim Girard has written about business and technology for more than a decade, as an editor at CNET News.com, senior writer at Business 2.0 magazine and online writer at Red Herring. As a freelancer, she's written for publications including Fast Company, CIO and Berkeley's Haas School of Business. She also assisted Business Week's Peter Burrows with his 2003 book Backfire, which covered the travails of controversial Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina. An avid cook, she's blogged about the joy of cheap wine and thinks about food most days in ways some find obsessive.
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Kim Girard
Just days after leaving her job as head of struggling enterprise software maker Baan, Mary Coleman has accepted an executive post with the Internet Capital Group, the company said today.

Coleman will serve as managing director of operations at the company's San Francisco office. Internet Capital Group is a holding company that invests in online firms focusing on so-called business-to-business e-commerce.

In the new post, Coleman will be charged with helping the chief executives of ICG's partner companies refine business strategies, recruiting senior managers, forging partnerships and shepherding them through hoped-for initial public offerings.

Coleman, who left Baan after just seven months at the helm, was formerly head of Aurum Software, a customer relationship management (CRM) software company Baan acquired in 1997. In interviews last week, Baan executives said Coleman was leaving the company, which has suffered a financial dive in recent quarters as sales declined, to consider other job offers and would likely accept a position closer to her Silicon Valley home.

As head of Baan, Coleman spent much of her time shuttling between the company's main headquarters in the Netherlands and its U.S. headquarters in Virginia. In her new post, she will focus on building Silicon Valley and other West coast-based partner companies, the company said.

Internet Capital Group has investments in such firms as the Web community site Deja.com, services company Breakaway Solutions, e-commerce software maker ClearCommerce and trading community builder VerticalNet.