Has the agreement to buy Intentia caused any of your customers to have doubts about the future? It's been more of an issue for Intentia customers than Lawson's, in direct correlation to being the acquired company versus the acquirer. We've tried to be consistent and send a message that really hasn't changed over the last 12 months. That is, these products serve different markets, the personnel are different, and we want to keep them both alive and have continuity.
Why were you chosen to lead Lawson at the same time the company agreed to buy Intentia? Think about the Intentia merger. I had done a lot of mergers and acquisition work in my previous history. I had also done international work. Before joining Lawson, I spent about 50 percent of my time working globally.
Can Lawson stay competitive against ERP giants like Oracle and SAP? You can be smaller and nimbler and find segments not well served by the giants. You can do things with customers [that] they'd never get from SAP. You spend time with smaller firms face to face, building relationships. Our whole client experience isn't just a bullet on a PowerPoint slide. We plan to do about eight or nine verticals and get really, really good at those. We don't need to be in a 150 countries. We don't want to do technology or middleware -- just applications. We'll surround that software with a whole range of value-added services.
What is the status of Lawson's new Landmark applications? We kept it fairly quiet and didn't offer a lot of marketing hype around Landmark. We said to the developers, "Let's get real and make this happen." The good news is [the Landmark developers] have done everything we asked them and more, and it's not necessary to be that cautious now. We're not scrapping all the legacy code we have, and we still have a lot of customers using our existing core systems, and we'll continue enhancing them as we bring out new modules in Landmark.
Does Lawson plan to offer hosted applications? There's so much talk about online software, and I scratch my head and wonder where it's coming from. I rarely get questions by customers about it. However, we are going to offer a hosted human-capital management service by midsummer and see what happens.