Lawson Software (Nasdaq:LWSN) further strengthened its commitment to the IBM® System i community worldwide by releasing Lawson 9 on the IBM System i platform, including Lawson 9 upgrade programs and services for existing System i Lawson customers in services industries. Since the late 1970s, Lawson has been building and optimizing applications to run on IBM’s “all-in-one†business computing system and its predecessors. Today’s announcement demonstrates that continued commitment.
“Thousands of Lawson customers and prospects depend on System i to run their businesses reliably and cost-effectively,†said Guenther Tolkmit, senior vice president of product development, Lawson. “That is why it is important to give them access to the same Lawson 9 benefits as our other customers, including industry-standard technology that is leading toward a service-oriented architecture (SOA) and new application enhancements tailored for industry-specific needs.â€
Designed in response to customer and marketplace demands for less complexity, Lawson 9 lays the foundation for moving to SOA and establishes a planned path for customers to purchase future Lawson Landmark-based applications. It includes the new Lawson technology layer, enhanced business applications, strengthened business intelligence capabilities and enhanced business process management tools.
Lawson 9 supports i5/OS Version 5 Release 3 (V5R3) and i5/OS Version 5 Release 4 (V5R4) – the newest version of the IBM integrated operating system – and is optimized for IBM middleware including WebSphere Application Server ND. Furthermore, it simplifies the total ownership experience with simplified purchase pricing, versioning, packaging, maintenance contracts and support for customers.
Great Plains Coca-Cola has already been using Lawson 9 on System i successfully. “Lawson and IBM continue to partner with Great Plains Coca-Cola to extend our System i investments, keep our systems current and help us derive greater value from our technology investments,†said Clayton Sliger, chief financial officer, Great Plains Coca-Cola.
New Technology Layer
To present high-performance, standards-based technology to Lawson customers, Lawson System Foundation 9.0 combines the company’s best technology with IBM’s marketplace-leading WebSphere Application Server ND middleware.
The new technology layer features improved user interfaces that apply user-centered design principles based on customer suggestions and feedback. It delivers solid security, scalability, performance and usability.
Since its initial release in November 2005 for IBM AIX, Windows, HP PA-RISC and Sun Solaris, Lawson System Foundation 9.0 has been adopted faster than any previous technology release from Lawson.
Enhanced Core Applications
The release of Lawson 9 business management solutions includes enhancements to core ERP applications, including:
- Lawson Business Intelligence – This application allows improved access to information for discovering trends, finding problems and analyzing the drivers of business performance. The report “bursting†capability helps organizations create rich, highly formatted reports based on enterprise-wide data, and then create rules for “view-time security†so authorized portions of the report are automatically distributed to appropriate staff.
- Lawson Human Capital Management – Lawson Employee & Manager Self-Service has been enhanced to offer more information to employees and managers, driving faster user adoption of self-service functionality and reducing administrative costs. Lawson Absence Management helps streamline and automate labor-intensive tasks while enhanced Lawson Position Management capabilities help make it easier to manage a more fluid, flexible workforce.
- Lawson Supply Chain Management – Lawson Procurement Cards functionality enables companies to streamline purchasing processes by empowering authorized employees to use credit cards for purchasing, rather than formal requisition and purchase order processes. This can help maximize rebates and reduce transaction costs, acquisition lag times for purchases and invoicing, and receiving and reconciliation overhead.
- Lawson Enterprise Financial Management – Enhancements to the Lawson Budgeting & Planning application make collaborative, auditable budgeting practices core to the strategic planning and analysis process. Features within Lawson Grant Management enable the optimization of grant-based revenues for research or other grants and ease the compliance process. Lawson Deductions Management provides key new financial management and reporting capability. An improved Lawson Cash Management application offers opportunities for greater capital productivity, efficiency and fraud prevention while assisting with local legislation compliance. New allocation features allow the Lawson Strategic Ledger module to capture the financial consequences of customer interactions in a variety of ways for multi-dimensional analysis, accountability and statutory reporting. Created primarily for financial services industries, these capabilities will enable new operational efficiency and insight opportunities for all Lawson customers.
Enhanced Tools
Lawson Business Process Management provides the tools necessary to manage world-class, end-to-end business processes, including underlying application design and configuration, business process design and execution, business process security, and enterprise business process integration with internal and external interaction points. Lawson Business Process Management helps customers streamline, integrate and secure their business processes.
A Simple Path to SOA
Lawson 9 enables customers to incorporate Lawson Landmark-based applications designed to deploy in an SOA. Landmark-based applications will help customers receive industry-specific or functional-specific applications without the usual lengthy product development cycles. Lawson customers will be able to enjoy the benefits of the Landmark-based applications without having to migrate all of their applications at one time. Landmark-based applications and Web Services will be rolled out gradually and will be purchased separately. Information relating to separate pricing for Landmark-based applications will be provided when Landmark-based applications are made available.
“Lawson’s continued support of the System i platform is outstanding news for our customers,†said Mark Shearer, general manager, IBM System i. “We work very closely with the Lawson team to make sure their applications run better on System i than any other platform. By supporting the new i5/OS V5R4 features, Lawson applications can provide our customers with a reliable and cost-effective solution, particularly for getting started with SOA.â€