Lawson has announced a new Platinum category addition to its Total Care customer support and maintenance programme at its annual Conference and User Exchange in San Diego. The firm will now be able to offer its applications in a software as a service (SaaS) model over the coming year, reducing the IT admin burden for firms.

“Our strategy is to lower more of the total cost of ownership for the customer,” said product management vice president Dean Hager. “We haven’t concluded all the types of on-demand offerings but we want to offer more flexibility for the customer.”

IBM will be the primary hosting provider for Lawson’s on-demand and hosted offerings, which include guaranteed SLAs and 99.7 percent guaranteed uptime.

But Lawson is not likely to offer Salesforce.com-like on-demand services where customers can buy and use applications without ever needing to interact with a Lawson consultant, Hager added.

“We don’t see a massive traction in the ERP space for going that way – Salesforce.com has an advantage in that area because Salesforce automation is quite simplistic.”

Nigel Montgomery of analyst AMR said the on-demand option could make Lawson more popular with larger firms if it is recognised at board level.

“In most cases, the mid-market doesn’t have a large IT department anyway so the benefits of going on-demand are minimal,” Montgomery explained. “The benefits are greater in a large organisation but the challenge is greater too because they have an empire there they don’t necessarily want to lose.”

Hager explained that the first application to be delivered as SaaS will be human capital management – an area in which Lawson is hoping to invest in heavily over the coming year to try and rival ERP giants Oracle and SAP.

The firm also announced further integration of IBM's middleware into its underlying Lawson System Foundation 9 architecture. The incorporation of IBM WebShere Enterprise Service Bus will enable customers to build composite SOA-based applications and automate business processes, enabling greater flexibility and cost savings, according to director of product marketing Pramod Mathur.

“SOA is all about integrating, building broader applications, reusing your web services and modelling new processes,” Hager added. “We will appeal to the midmarket, which shies away from technology because it doesn’t have the staff, [because] we’re offering SOA apps not SOA technology.”

Lawson also launched a new Learning Accelerator tool aimed at encouraging greater adoption of its applications by enabling users to practice using Lawson software in simulation exercises.

Meanwhile, a new version of its popular business intelligence solution, Lawson Business Intelligence 9.0.2, features support for French and Swedish and integrates with the firm’s data warehouse application.