| Abstract: | At annual users' conference, the ERP company reveals an expanded partnership with IBM that will bring SaaS capabilities to Lawson's products; announces a new release of its ERP suite. |
| Keywords: | Lawson, IBM, SaaS, software as a service, ERP, user conference, enterprise resource planning, WebSphere, Enterprise Service Bus, M3, Total Care Platinum, environmental compliance |
Before an audience of 4,500 users and partners at its annual CUE customer conference, Lawson Software today announced an expanded relationship with IBM, a new release of its M3 ERP platform for manufacturers, and a plan to support customers' initiatives to track and minimize their impact on the environment.
Lawson said it will rely on IBM to host an on-demand version of its ERP offerings. The company also said it has extended its technology partnership with IBM, incorporating IBM's WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) platform into the System Foundation platform on which Lawson's S3 ERP system runs.
The new hosted offering — called Lawson Total Care Platinum — represents a first step by Lawson toward what the company hopes will be a full software-as-a-service offering, according to Terry Plath, Lawson's global director for business development. The initial offering will include hosted versions of both Lawson's M3 applications for manufacturers and its S3 applications for service companies. Under the new offering, customers would be required to license the Lawson applications and purchase maintenance contracts as they do currently. On top of that, customers would purchase, on a fixed, per-month basis, hosting and application management services. For a company with 200 named users, Plath said, the hosting and application management services would run about $15,000 per month.
IBM will host Lawson's applications in an application service provider fashion, meaning that each customer will be served from its own dedicated server and its own implementation of the software. Lawson chose to start with the ASP-styled on-demand offering, said Plath, because it offers security and data privacy advantages over the multi-tenant type of on-demand offering in which multiple customers share a server.
Lawson does, however, also plan a multi-tenant on demand version of its applications, said Plath. Customers would have the option of paying for that offering on a subscription basis. Plath declined to say when a multi-tenant offering might become available.
Total Care Platinum is available today, although to date Lawson has no customers in production using the product.
Meanwhile, Lawson also unveiled a new release of its M3 ERP product, version 7.1, which includes a redesigned user interface, new order management capabilities, as well as industry-specific product planning, demand planning, and sales and marketing functionality.
In order to take advantage of the new features of M3 version 7.1, customers will need to upgrade to the latest release of the product's technology infrastructure, which is written in Java and makes use of IBM's WebSphere Application Server. Lawson, however, said it will continue to support the older RPG version of M3.
Once customers have upgraded to the Java version of the M3 technology, they will be able to take advantage of application enhancements without undergoing major technology infrastructure upgrades, Lawson officials said.
The new release of M3 — the ERP platform which Lawson acquired along with Intentia Inc. in mid 2005 — includes what the company calls Smart Client, a new user interface that Lawson called more intuitive and easier to customize to fit individual users' needs. Based on Microsoft core technologies such as Windows Presentation Framework, Smart Client will make it easier for customers to tailor interfaces so that they present only the most pertinent information to individual users, hiding information they may not need to see. The new UI can also incorporate features such as documents, two- and three-dimensional graphics, and video.
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