Lawson Software announced a partnership that will make its ERP and other business applications available on Amazon Web Services' cloud-computing service.
Lawson's S3 Enterprise Management System, M3 Enterprise Management System and Talent Management application will be hosted on Amazon's cloud for new Lawson customers.
Lawson is copying SAP business by design idea and offering prospects the option to test drive Lawson ERP software online for two weeks.
Pricing will stay the same the same as their on premise licence costs , Lawson stated that the company does not "intend to use pricing on the cloud as a loss leader or to buy market share."
Lawson's cloud strategy is a sound one for the customers it targets, said Ray Wang, partner with the analyst firm Altimeter Group. "Honestly, these are companies that should focus on their business and let the infrastructure go to the lowest-cost provider," he said. "[Amazon] is one of the places."
It is good to see that more traditional software house such as Lawson is dipping its toes in the cloud computing water. To us at UNIT4 it confirms that we have been on the right track for the past two decades with our SaaS and cloud solutions. Lawson, like many others, is simply providing its existing ERP systems as hosted solutions with a subscription payment option.
UNIT4 has recognized for some time that most clients, especially medium and large organizations, want to take a hybrid approach to cloud computing, with a mix of in house ‘on premises’ software and cloud technology. Virtually none of our clients have 100% of their business systems in the cloud – they usually opt for a mixed environment to give them the flexibility and cost profile that best fits the organization’s specific needs.
It was for for this reason that we launched launched last year a dedicated business division called, ‘UNIT4 Hybrid Computing’.
Posted by: JoAnn Marlow | April 22, 2010 at 01:29 PM