Among the St. Paul, Minn.-based company's major projects are plans to integrate its existing application sets and continue to roll out its next-generation Web-based Landmark ERP and technology platform. Lawson recently talked about the ERP market, his company's future and the history of business applications. Excerpts from that interview follow:

What are your day-to-day duties now? I'm board co-chairman [along with Romesh Wadhwani] and my daily role is nothing. My unofficial role is to keep my fingers [in the business]. My personal passion is technology and I'm maintaining that and just sort of doing a consulting role. I do give the research-and-development department feedback on what I'm seeing run through it.

How has the merger with Intentia affected Lawson? How has the company changed overall since its founding? We're a whole lot bigger. What we wanted [with Intentia] was a whole new set of software to bring to our table on the manufacturing side for the food and beverage industries, and so forth.

It's [overall] been a huge change for us. We started out in a consulting role. We were sort of contract programmers; We'd get a project and went in and did it. There were small companies that didn't have the staff capability to do what the big companies were doing, but were starting to buy [computers]. I handled the technology and my brother understood the business.

When we started out consulting, it was to large companies. But our passion was mid-size companies. We provided turnkey systems -- they'd buy a mid-size computer, a Burroughs, and later the AS/400 from IBM -- and they needed software. But there was no patented software to speak of. You'd build them systems, the [platform] operational systems, but also their applications systems, the general ledger and accounts payable. We found, good grief, they all wanted general ledger and payroll systems and we caught on to the fact that maybe we could build some standalone applications and sell them and they'd get them cheaper and faster.