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.
What are your thoughts on how the Web affected ERP? Some also say the Web has yet really to become part of the core ERP architecture--is that so? It was huge, and we were one of the first to see it. We went to our research-and-development [department] to see what all this [Web] fuss was about. We saw [that] the Web from the technology point of view was going to change things. Today, we have Landmark.... It will take a while for people to move to those [fully Web-based] technologies, but they do exist in Landmark.
You've remained an independent ERP company when lots of others, such as PeopleSoft Inc., have been bought out. Is independence part of the strategy? Yes, we always hope to have independence. In terms of strategy, there are no plans to build ourselves up so someone buys us. We've liked our business, customers and employees. We believe our strategy allows us to be a very strong competitor. It's the same with the technology. A lot of people came in and took a basic approach to be technology oriented with applications that only ran on the AS/400 and not any other platform. We took the approach of supporting multiple platforms. If you look at those [single-platform] people, they had a good life for a while but just couldn't make the technology shift, they couldn't get to the Web. We had built our software using three tiers and that gave us the flexibility to change.
SAP AG was founded at about the same time as Lawson and SAP is now the No. 1 ERP vendor. Why isn't Lawson No. 1 instead? SAP had the ambition to be with the right partner, IBM. We had grown up with Burroughs and didn't want to leave those [Burroughs] customers behind. We never took that approach. And the other thing was SAP's ambition, that's a huge part of it, as opposed to us and who we saw ourselves as. I think SAP having materials resource planning (MRP) applications gave them a global edge. It's easier to sell an MRP system worldwide because the processes are almost always the same, as opposed to trying to sell financial applications, which are so different across the world. We should have jumped into MRP.
What's your opinion on Oracle and its acquisition strategy? How do its many acquisitions affect you? It's a huge opportunity for us. I think lots of people running PeopleSoft and J.D. Edwards software are going to be in the market. They'll be paying for a huge update from Oracle and will be looking at a complete change of software vendor. The [ISVs] left are in a great position to bid for that business. We think our culture and our knowledge of the middle market and our ease of use and cost of ownership are a huge advantage.
What about software as a service? Have you been impressed by Salesforce.com Inc.'s work there? Of course. We use them [internally at Lawson]. But Salesforce.com is still not an ERP system. The big companies like to own their own data and run it their own way. I think what they want is for the software to be more flexible out of the box. What Landmark provides is the ability to easily change the software, configure it as needed and still maintain the quality and integrity.
What do you think is your most important legacy? The most important legacy, that's hard to say. But I like the fact that we're still very customer-oriented and bring to the table the best value for the dollar. We have so many old customers still with us and they haven't changed vendors.