Lawson Software Inc. recently became the latest vendor of ERP applications to jump into the cloud computing fray, rolling out versions of its M3, S3, and talent management applications running in Amazon.com’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) environment as well as an option for customers to run bundled versions of some of its applications on their internal cloud platforms.
But don’t expect Lawson to turn itself overnight into a Salesforce.com or NetSuite. For one thing, Lawson’s architectural approach to cloud computing is markedly different from those of such software-as-a-service-only (SaaS) vendors. And, for another, Lawson foresees its customers embracing its cloud-based applications only gradually. Officials said Lawson expects only 5% of its revenue to come from cloud-based services in the first year, growing to 15% over the next few years.
“I’m not so sure that, in the short term, demand [for cloud-based applications] will be dramatic,” said CEO Harry Debes, in an interview with Managing Automation at Lawson’s recent annual CUE customer conference in San Antonio. “Over the next three to five years, it has a chance to be big. But it will take a while for our customers to understand it.”
Lawson’s approach to the cloud differs in several ways from that of pure-play SaaS providers and its more traditional competitors. Unlike vendors such as SAP and Epicor, for example, Lawson has elected not to rewrite its applications to run as multi-tenant SaaS services with all customers sharing a common code base and database. Instead, customers of Lawson’s external cloud services will each run its own copy of the Lawson applications.