By William Fellows
Customer relationship management is a hot date in ERP, one which Lawson Software will add to its dance card in the very near future. Lawson has an internally developed CRM solution up and running – Curtis is one of the names attached to it – but our sense is that the mid-market company could end up using a mixture of home-grown and bought-in or partner software as its eventual solution.
Lawson, the healthcare and retail market specialist which is eyeing a public offering in March or April of next year is in the last month of its financial year and expects to record revenue in the region of $300m. Lawson admits that like other ERP houses, its license revenue has dipped, but doesn’t hang the blame on Y2K, which it claims has had only a small influence on its revenue curve. It does 15% of its business outside of the US; it would like to do more. CEO Bill Lawson, now in his mid-50s, says the IPO is about the future of the company and the opportunity to enable his employees – who own 60% of the company – to sell their shares.
Lawson was at yesterday’s Sun Microsystems Inc ServiceProvider.com event in New York, scoping out the opportunity for outsourcing and hosted application provision. The company has already announced a plan to portalize its software for customers and also expects that by the end of the year it will have 30 or 40 customers who rent or lease their software from third party ASP application service providers. Indeed Lawson expects rental and other ASP income will help flatten out the quarter to quarter revenue bumps. It is also working on a collection of new tools that will enable users to plug in data feeds from other application sources, including spreadsheets.
