Lawson makes services orientated architecture a reality for manufacturers
1 min read
Lawson Software has reconfigured its former Intentia M3 extended ERP system to enable manufacturing users to evolve and get the benefits and cost savings of a services orientated architecture (SOA).
The company has released M3 System Foundation 7.1 and Business Process Management 7.1, which it says will “significantly simplify lifecycle management activities and provide Lawson customers with a solid business process and SOA-based foundation.”
By decoupling its underlying technology from the M3 applications, Lawson reckons users will be able to reduce the cost and time of upgrades and get “a sensible method for staying current with their supporting technologies – all with minimal disruption to business processes.”
Martin Hill, vice president of marketing for EMEA, says it’s the practical face of SOA for manufacturers. “It makes connecting applications much easier. For example, users could implement a subset of their ERP suite on a small hand held, with a common interface using the ERP backbone as a bunch of services.”
He sees it as providing manufacturers with an open platform ERP foundation and, from that, the ability to change, add and serve functionality as the need arises throughout the lifecycle of the original ERP investment – without having to replace everything else at the same time.
As a result, customers can upgrade their enterprise applications and technology incrementally and separately, on their own timelines and at much lower costs, without disrupting their business operations, he says.
From a systems point of view, there are updated technology stacks that now combine web services and document archiving with IBM WebSphere Application Server ND v6.1 and IBM DB2 Content Manager technology.
Hill says that means high-performance, standards-based technology and a solid path to SOA. He also makes the point that the new version of Lawson Web Services Designer is now 100% Eclipse-based and contains better support for industry standards and security functions like WS-I Basic Profile compliance and a security layer provided by WS-Security.
Incidentally, also introduced with this release is the Lawson M3 Document Archive Foundation, a complementary application to M3 System Foundation that harnesses content management solutions from IBM for improved archiving, auditing and compliance processes.
