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.
Lawson said Smart Client and other new M3 7.1 features will be phased in globally beginning in May.
Version 7.1 of M3 also will include Supply Chain Orders, a new set of order management workflows that Lawson said will give customers greater visibility of order flows across an enterprise and the ability to react quickly to changes in orders. Supply Chain Orders creates links among the various orders being processed throughout the supply chain, and can, for example, allows customers to automate the process of making adjustments to order events and to check on whether current delivery terms can be met.
Industry-specific enhancements are targeted at users in the fashion, distribution, and beverage manufacturing industries.
A new Fashion Planning Workbench, for example, allows manufacturers to simulate production capacity and one or more sites, allowing them to balance production requirements and meet customer delivery dates.
A new Forecasting and Demand Planner module, designed for distributors and manufacturers, lets customers avoid ending up with depleted and excessive inventory by providing improved statistical forecasting methods and better demand planning functionality.
And a new Sales and Marketing Automation module, designed for distribution and beverage manufacturing companies, adds features like territory management, sales cycle planning and dashboards, and sales and marketing automation. These help customers track marketing activities such as pipelines and qualified leads and allows companies to manage marketing promotions.
Other news released at the CUE conference:
- Lawson said it is launching an initiative aimed at offering manufacturing companies software that will help them manage social and environmental programs such as those intended to reduce energy consumption and polluting emissions such as carbon dioxide. The initiative will deliver software to manage programs that are government-mandated and company-originated. The offerings will include pre-configured applications packaged with Lawson's Business Intelligence suite.
- The company said it has expanded its relationship with IBM still further by agreeing to incorporate IBM's WebSphere Enterprise Services Bus (ESB) into its Lawson System Foundation. The addition of the WebSphere ESB will give customers more simplicity and flexibility when integrating Lawson applications with other systems, the company said. The WebSphere ESB will be available first to customers of Lawson's S3 System Foundation, which is used by services companies. Lawson said it may make the WebSphere ESB available to users of its M3 System Foundation.
- Lawson enhanced its Business Intelligence 9.0 offering with support for French and Swedish languages.