ORLANDO, FL -- Intentia International AB used its North American user conference this week to assuage anxious mid-market customers that it has overcome software stability and support issues, and to compel them to move forward and embrace its under-achieving enterprise applications suite that is built on a service-oriented architecture (SOA).
For starters, the company disclosed plans to offer pre-configured, vertically oriented applications under the QuickStart moniker to help motivate reluctant customers to migrate from legacy RPG applications to its new Java version, ISA Release 5.2, marketed under the Movex name. Only 13% of Intentia's 5,000 installed base worldwide is running the Java version of its applications suite, the company acknowledged.
Intentia also used the conference here to showcase new and existing consulting tools to help companies visualize the potential business benefits (operational agility and lower costs of ownership) of moving to a more modern applications architecture. Moreover, the company detailed its new QA process to help ensure code quality and stability before software is released, as well as a new patch process that unbundles code fixes from functional upgrades.
Importantly, Intentia also revealed a new tiered support initiative that promises underserved North American customers access to software experts worldwide to help resolve more complex issues.
The conference brought together 80 representatives of 25 North American customer companies interested in how Intentia's products and services would fare in the aftermath of its long-anticipated acquisition by Lawson Software Inc. -- which is expected to close later this month. What they heard from Intentia and Lawson officials, who were also present, is that little will change, initially. The companies' products and services have minimal overlap -- with Intentia's suite pitched at traditional process manufacturing and wholesale/distribution verticals and Lawson's product line primarily targeted to services-oriented businesses in segments such as health care and finance.
The "new" Lawson, however, intends to share technology where it makes sense, with "legacy" Lawson's business intelligence and human capital management filling gaps in Intentia's current U.S. offering. (Intentia has a data warehouse but remarkets Cognos's business intelligence tools, for example.) The sharing should be made a little easier by the fact that both companies have re-engineered their legacy application architectures around Java as well as IBM's WebSphere middleware and DB2 database software. However, fully integrated offerings are likely years away, officials of both companies told Managing Automation.
Intentia, which has struggled to penetrate the North American market, hopes the question of its overall viability will dissipate once it joins forces with a resurgent Lawson. Stockholm-based Intentia, meanwhile, has spent the last year getting its house in order, and is once again profitable. Black ink was achieved through modest license growth and significant cost reductions, company officials said.
Intentia's North American license revenue exceeded the company's goal of $4.5 million by 20% -- with 10 new customers signed during the period, noted David Rode, president of Intentia Americas. That's not a bad performance, considering the company only has six domestic sales representatives, analysts said.
Still, under Lawson, Intentia will need to immediately differentiate its Movex product line within a market where many vendors are sending similar SOA messages. Given Intentia's recent financial and technical issues, the company's challenges are stiffer than those of most of its brethren, noted Nigel Montgomery, an analyst with AMR Research in London.
A good many of Intentia's resource-constrained customers are happy with its legacy architecture and need to be convinced that an SOA's benefits -- lower cost of ownership, software that can more easily be adapted to changing operational requirements -- makes business sense. Among those that have migrated to Movex, many have had issues getting the software to work properly -- and are still waiting for the vendor to address new functionality requests that were slowed by a code freeze late last year that was instituted to help ensure stability.
Add to that the company's immature partner channel and you have a mid-market ERP vendor -- with or without Lawson's backing -- struggling to be heard above the din.
"You can take the name off the words Intentia [is] using and it could easily be someone else," Montgomery said.
Where Intentia has opportunity, Montgomery said, is with its QuickStep initiative, which is now available for food and beverage companies and will be rolled out to fashion, MRO, and wholesale-distribution customers in coming quarters. Intentia officials see QuickStep as a way to accelerate the move and mitigate the risk of upgrading from its RPG-based application architecture to ISA Release 5.2 -- which the company is positioning as a gateway to its next-generation architecture, Movex 3.0 (M3, once the acquisition by Lawson is concluded). Intentia believes that between 70% and 90% of the functional requirements of mid-market manufacturers can be bundled in pre-configured packages, according to Jim Anderson, the company's senior vice president of consulting.
To succeed, Intentia needs to position QuickStep as superior to SAP's All-In-One software -- which offers much of SAP's ERP functionality in a smaller, pre-configured footprint, but has proven to be difficult for some smaller manufacturers to deploy, Montgomery said. "Intentia has a chance to launch this in the right way as a premier solution," he declared, adding that by focusing on key business-critical functions in its key verticals, Intentia can improve its chances of landing on more customer short lists.
Also key to the Movex push is Opportunity Analyzer (OA), a decision-support environment designed to help Intentia customers and prospects see business benefits before they deploy its Java-based software. One recent contract win influenced by OA was a deal signed with Tree Top Inc. (Selah, WA), a $275 million company owned by a cooperative of 1,500 apple growers throughout the Pacific Northwest. The company, which chose Intentia over SAP, JD Edwards (Oracle), and Infor's Agilisys, received 35 OA-enabled best-practice recommendations for making business process improvements across its apple-processing operations, according to Kent Draney, Tree Top's vice president of information services.
"OA kicked [Intentia] up a notch," he said in an interview, noting how Tree Top's use of the tool complemented benchmarking conducted by the company's IT team and input from middle management and business process owners, which revealed the strengths and weaknesses of each competing vendor. "[OA] sucked in all of top management to look at the numbers, defend the numbers, and today we have [project] buy-in at all levels," Draney continued. "In fact, the CEO is the sponsor."
Draney, like other customers at the conference, feels that Intentia has conquered its code stability, delivery, and support issues. While Americas president Rode repeatedly apologized for the company's inability to live up to last year's promise to scale its domestic support group to keep pace with customers' needs, he said the situation should be corrected by the Lawson acquisition, which will add hundreds of Lawson technical specialists to Intentia's team of six.
Meanwhile, Henning Schultze-Lauren, Intentia's new senior vice president of support and delivery, outlined new initiatives to bolster customer confidence. Schultze-Lauren pointed to a new self-service, case-based portal to help customers identify proven fixes to common problems and a new software release process, which he said helped Intentia uncover "300 code defects" before release 5.2 shipped late last year. He also detailed a new tiered support approach that would enable North American customers to escalate support issues beyond regional agents to the company's European team and 90 offshore specialists.
One user who liked what she heard and saw was Peg Nicholson, senior vice president and CIO of Acushnet Co., a Fairhaven, MA manufacturer of golf clubs and related products -- best known for the Titleist brand. Acushnet signed up with Intentia at the end of 2003 and has rolled out the vendor's full suite throughout its international manufacturing and distribution operations spanning from Canada to China. The company still uses Friedman Associates' ERP for its domestic operations combined with Oracle's PeopleSoft back-office applications, but "will likely" move to Intentia in the U.S. so "everyone has the same view" across the globe, Nicholson said.
Nicholson likes the idea of the new tiered support approach -- given her company's 24x7 global requirements. The software's functional breadth, she said, has made it difficult for any one support agent to know it all.
Despite working with a "fairly buggy version" of the software, she says she's happy with where Intentia is going. "The product is solid, the marketing has been weak," she explained, noting that Acushnet's experience has been completely opposite with PeopleSoft.
Nicholson expects the transition of Intentia's ownership to Lawson to be smooth. Ironically, Acushnet moved from Lawson to PeopleSoft in 1998. "It's funny how everything comes full circle in life," she concluded.