In the run-up to a Goldman Sachs-brokered IPO sometime next year privately-held financial software house Lawson Software wants to get on everyone’s radar. But it credits much of its success to creeping under the radar of the big ERP vendors – SAP, Oracle, Baan, PeopleSoft – and at the same time wants to keep its homely feel. There’s unlikely to be any sweeping changes or sudden outbreaks of suit-wearing among the Minneapolis, Minnesota-based company’s executives; indeed getting them on the road to present a public face in lieu of the IPO route should be challenging enough for its newish communications team. OK, so we’re not supposed to call Lawson the AS/400 financial software company given it does 80% or more of its $200m revenue on Unix and has siphoned the AS/400 business off into a separate group – so why get in our faces with new AS/400 performance benchmarks rather than all of the claimed firsts like Y2K, Euro currency, OLAP with pre-built rules, web-enablement and Java, guys? We’re supposed to think of Lawson as much more than financial software too: human resources, supply chain, procurement and so on, but it doesn’t do manufacturing software. We’re back office, it says. Although it doesn’t want to go head to head with the ERP folk it counts PeopleSoft, not JD Edwards as its closest competition, however. It’s got a packaged solution for the channel, worth some 15% of its business. It’s doing the vertical industry application thing with healthcare and retail under its belt and insurance, professional services and public/government and industrial distribution packages due later this month. Despite other vendors’ claims it says it has met only Ernst & Young in the healthcare sector with a similar product. Also due is a new desktop application designer suite enabling customers to create their own forms and reporting mechanisms. Lawson’s also a Windows NT house of six months now; we’ll call its strategy ‘nascent,’ for now.
