LawsonGuru Blog

Following the acquisition by Infor, Lawson’s annual conference (CUE) has morphed into Inforum, which was held this past week in Denver. I didn’t attend, but I watched the video feeds of keynotes, read the executive/analyst briefings, and of course received my usual eyewitness reports and unsubstantiated rumors. In addition, I’ve included some article links at the bottom. My thoughts:

• Infor projects itself as a “new” enterprise software company, with a startup mentality. It’s all about execution, and the speed of that execution. In fact, they even have an SVP of Speed.
• Infor’s key differentiation is their focus on specific industries, and specifically, “micro verticals” – very specialized industries.  In other words, it’s not just “food & beverage” but rather dairy, meats, bakery, etc.
• Infor acquired Lawson in order to enhance to their product portfolio, specifically HR/Talent Management and Financials. Lawson also offered some additional vertical-focused customer bases, with a strong presence in healthcare and public sector. According to Infor CEO Charles Phillips, this acquisition presented a highly complementary industry / product mix with very little overlap.
• Infor 10
  • A common application infrastructure offering: UI/Workspace, Master Data Management, Localization, Analytics, Reporting, and Mobility
  • ION middleware provides integration based on XML documents
    • Achieving integration using industry standards
    • Integrates at a very high level in a loosely-coupled fashion
  • Localization via “local.ly” (cloud-based) service
  • Business Vault
    • Since Infor 10’s integration occurs at the ION middleware layer, every transaction is captured into a common searchable data warehouse
• Cloverleaf, previously acquired by Lawson, is now part of ION, offering a “clinical bridge”, combining various healthcare data repositories across departments, e.g. patient revenue, Cloverleaf/HL7, EPIC, Cerner, etc.
  • This is an example of Infor’s intention to model and integrate various commonly-utilized business data streams and make them available to all organizations in a given industry. 
• Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) extension for healthcare
  • An interesting integration (again, using ION) across various products across the Infor portfolio to delivery an industry-specific solution: item utilization and replenishment, product recalls, preventive maintenance, energy usage, patient usage/billing, etc.
• Lawson S3 10 demonstrates that Lawson S3 is now clearly an Infor product. I’ll elaborate in a future post.

Some Inforum-related news articles:

http://www.information-management.com/news/Infor-Lawson-ERP-BI-mobile-Oracle-Hamerman-10022370-1.html

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/howlett/infor-next-steps-an-unsurprising-ipo/4072

http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/enterprise_apps/232900910

http://www.cfoworld.com/technology/37380/infor-offers-heavy-discounts-customers-migrating-ion-middleware-platform

http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/applications/3353534/infor-partners-with-amazon-deliver-erp-in-cloud/

http://www.cio.co.uk/news/3353307/infor-in-sources-design-team/