Interview: Harry Debes on Lawson and green ERP

IT Week: As president and chief executive of enterprise resource planning (ERP) specialist Lawson, can you explain your firm's key differentiators?

Harry Debes: We grew up with the mid-market, our customers are not overly big or arrogant and maybe [they choose us] because we have a mid-western American background, typified by the founder Richard Lawson. I think it was the same with Intentia [which be bought] but they focussed on the manufacturing side and we focussed on services. Our differentiator is that we focus on specific industries, selecting a few segments and going deep into those segments. The best example is perhaps healthcare, where we’re leading in America, no one comes close to us – I wish it was true of all verticals. Intentia’s success was primarily in food and beverages and fashion, which is getting broken down again into retailers and manufacturers.

How do you compete with ERP giants like SAP and Oracle?

It’s about being vertical specific and building solutions that meet the needs of the customers, so they say “we have to put this vendor on our short list”. The functionality we offer and the total cost of ownership here is really important, because these people don’t have millions to spend, and sometimes the IT guys are implementing ERP part-time. The reason we’re successful is that the solutions are built for purpose. How do you compete with the big vendors? You have to look at things like customer service as a differentiator, and focus, because that’s the only way to compete – there’s no way we can be in 193 different countries and doing all the things Microsoft and Oracle are doing. So we didn’t try to compete with Oracle on middleware and instead we served our clients’ needs with the IBM [partnership]. But when you break down the market into segments we can compete very nicely: SAP has virtually withdrawn from the healthcare market now.

Is there a problem in the ERP industry with vendors over-hyping their products?

Yes, the industry is significantly over-hyped and the reality often falls short. If Oracle was doing Fusion all over again it would probably choose not to say anything about it until [the project is finished]. We delivered on what we said though; after the Intentia deal we continue to run the two product sets separately, and the new releases of M3 7.1 adds significant new functionality. We also said we’d offer our customers a broader portfolio of Total Care solutions and we are doing it with Total Care Platinum.

Can you explain your new Corporate Social Responsibility initiative?

This is a bit new – we may be a bit ahead of ourselves and the market here but we needed to take a chance. We observed a trend, we figured out that customers want tools to become responsible because it’s good politics for them and it’s good for the share value. So we worked with AMR Research to define what we should be talking about and now we’re breaking down the components and looking to provide the tools [so firms can] measure, monitor and then report back to their employees, the government or other stakeholders. The solution will be BI-related, so they will be able to do reporting and view it all in a dashboard.

About Harry Debes

Debes joined Lawson in June 2005 from SPL WorldGroup, a leading provider of enterprise software to the global utility market. At SPL WorldGroup, Debes was president and chief executive officer.

Previously, he worked at J.D. Edwards (now part of Oracle), where he was senior vice president of sales and services for the Americas.

Before J.D. Edwards, he spent 12 years with Geac, where he was president of Geac Enterprise Systems Americas and managing director of Geac’s Asia-Pacific business.