Lawson Intentia deal finally closes: dual convergent systems to follow

Lawson and Intentia, the ERP software developers from the US and Sweden respectively, have closed their merger, and are now operating as one global company under the Lawson banner. Lawson Software claims now to be a candidate for the third largest ERP applications provider slot, after SAP at number one, and Oracle number two. With combined revenues of $750m and around 4,000 customers in 40 countries, it’s comparable with ultra-acquisitive Infor and SSA Global. However, whereas both of the latter focus almost exclusively on manufacturing in the loosely defined mid-market, the new Lawson is split more or less equally between the original company’s services business and Intentia’s manufacturing and supply chain leaning. Former CEO of Intentia Bertrand Sciard becomes COO, while Harry Debes retains his position as president and CEO of Lawson. Initially, there will be two product lines – one dubbed Lawson ‘M3’ (make, move and maintain) born out of Intentia’s newly launched Movex 3 ERP line, and the other Lawson ‘S3’ (staff source and serve) from the Lawson stable. Debes says the two will be enhanced “to radically simplify the process of developing, deploying, maintaining and using ERP applications.” Martin Hill, vice president of marketing says the priority is to, “capitalise on each other’s product lines – so in M3 we can capitalise on Lawson’s human capital management. Eaually they can capitalise on our maintenance.” That shouldn’t present too many problems: both systems share similar IT foundations – open standards, Java and IBM Websphere – and both parties have had plenty of time to sort out and converge their technology roadmaps as this merger has dragged on. Says Hill: “There’s a very bright future for manufacturing users. Movex won’t die: it’s our intention to continue to develop it and to work towards a common technology platform behind the scenes. We want to develop once and deploy twice – once in each product line.” And he adds: “We’re talking about development and a new world of common applications and seamless integration. One of our guiding principles in coming together is to avoid any disruption at the customer touch points.” He sees key ERP issues for mid-market manufacturers as interoperability, industry functionality and the user experience. And while that sounds like nothing new, Hill makes the point that, on interoperability, it’s not just about departmental integration but whole business-to-business interoperability, with a need for flexibility connections as business needs arise. “Tier One companies have done some of this with offshoring, outsourcing and so on. That was inaccessible to the mid market because the cost of integration outweighed the benefits. Integration needs to be accessible and packaged – so we will provide the means for them to enjoy the benefit by providing SOA [service orientated architecture] business applications that can work at a higher level of abstraction. “We will provide an integration platform out of our project ADA (Active Document Adapter) that understands what Movex enterprise applications do so that they appear as a series of service applications: for example a customer order entry system or a supplier invoice matching solution.” And it’s a similar story with industry functionality, with packaged industry-centric requirements, and with user experience – in this case, taking advantage of new technologies being launched by IBM and Microsoft. Says Hill: “We believe we can have a profound effect on our customers’ ability to innovate and sustain advantage in times of enormous change by improving ease of use and appearance but also providing more opportunity for individuals to control and configure what’s currently hidden and often used only in the initial implementation process. We’re exploring all that with our industry experts now.” “The market needs a strong, viable vendor that can offer simplicity over the complexity of the two large ERP vendors,” says Debes. “The market wants choice, and we expect to establish ourselves as the preferred ERP provider for companies that want to streamline business processes and run their operations more effectively. Just as importantly, we intend to be a company that is simple to do business with, and we intend to deliver on our promises.”