Lawson Software is pushing into the ERP space by plugging some of the holes it thinks the rest of the market is leaving as it rushes to add new functionality to fulfill every manufacturing requirement. While not a manufacturing software house – its financial and planning suite is back office software – Lawson’s next venture will be building automation into the drive train. Current ERP solutions simply don’t provide real-time feedback, it thinks, and is readying a product codenamed strategic ledger which will provide a dashboard-like console providing real-time information feedback based upon any performance metric a company wishes to calibrate. Using current ERP financial software is like driving a Mercedes but having to stop at every garage to get a report on how far, how fast and how much gas has been used since the last stop, Lawson says. Although Unix is the preferred platform of its middle-market customers Lawson says users are increasingly attracted to the price and ease-of-use promise of Windows NT. However there are often associated hidden costs which mean the total cost of ownership often works out higher than on Unix. It has taken Microsoft longer than it thought to get into the market and the world is going to be very much a mixed environment place, Lawson believes. Lawson, which already offers its entire financial and planning suite on NT says the current SQL Server has some performance constraints compared with Oracle and Informix which it also supports on NT, but as a beta-tester of SQL Server 7 due by year-end reports, the forthcoming release is much improved. Lawson expects NT sales to account for between 40% and 50% of its revenue by the end of its fiscal year 2000 (22 months away) up from a very small percentage now. Also on the product runway is a Web Designer suite Lawson says will make every business object, rule, method and process stored in its repository available for use by Lotus Notes, Java and Visual Basic (ActiveX) developers and alongside components created in each of these environments. Until someone comes up with a standard universal repository for storing web information, this will be the way to go, it says. Developers can also write a front-end to Lawson applications in any of these environments, it says.
