Lawson boss backs 'smarter' enterprise software

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Enterprise software specialist Lawson Software has detailed ambitious plans to bolster its place in the global Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and business intelligence markets, amid growing competition from the likes of SAP, Oracle and Microsoft.

The company, which has been through a stark transformation since its 2006 merger with Intentia, is today one of the most successful business intelligence and ERP product and service providers, in vertical sectors such as healthcare IT.

Speaking at the company's Cue 08 user conference in Las Vegas, chief executive Harry Debes detailed a two-pronged product strategy, based around its M3 and S3 product lines, with emphasis on product workflow and smart office tools, but still with the company's emphasis firmly fixed on niche verticals such as manufacturing, health, food and drink, banking and retail.

"Over the last 24 months we have made excellent financial progress as a company. And we've done it organically rather than through acquisition," said Debes. "We've made progress in a lot of areas, but there is a lot left to do in building up this company."

Debes detailed the strategy of developing niche solutions for functions such as personnel management, product lifecycle management and integration with Microsoft's Office suite and enterprise tools.

"We have a solid record of winning against other global ERP providers because we make it easier for customers to deploy and use our applications. We are trying to deliver greater value from a customer's ERP investment by simplifying the way they use business software, boosting productivity and company performance," he said.

The Lawson strategy is based around two platforms. M3 is an enterprise management system with a focus on allowing businesses to make, move, or maintain processes. S3 is tailored for services industries and heavily people-focused businesses. Both sit on core technologies from the likes of IBM and Microsoft.

The company is also moving more into software-as-a-service, working with IBM to offer some niche products via an on-demand service. IBM will provide hosting and application fulfilment.

One example is the company's new personnel recruitment application. Pre-launch customer Commerce Bank has been using the product, on a SaaS model, to help it manage and computerise its staff acquisition processes.

Lawson also announced plans to make a new development environment, called Landmark, available to its customer base. The aim of Landmark is to make it easier to develop integration and customisation of Lawson's applications, while at the same time cutting the amount of written code needed to do it.

"We've been keeping a pretty low profile on this for a while as we have been developing it," said Guenther Tolkmit, senior vice president of product development at Lawson. "Landmark delivers increased programmer productivity by factor of 10, it facilitates innovative Web 2.0 applications, and we used it to build our Strategic Sourcing and Strategic HCM [human capital management - personnel] products."

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