IBM and Lawson International have announced a significant expansion of their strategic alliance. Lawson NZ general manager Dougie Beck says the initiative is designed to help customers integrate their business processes for enterprise and supply chain management through a consolidated software offering. As part of the alliance, Lawson will standardize and ship its J2EE-based Movex collaboration applications on IBM's open middleware and hardware running on Linux, OS400, UNIX and NT. The companies will also expand their joint sales, marketing and development activities.

Beck says Lawson's strategic focus to grow and extend its mid-market and enterprise share by strengthening the Movex application suite with an open, scalable foundation is achieved with the decision to standardise on IBM infrastructure software. Lawson's J2EE-based Movex applications running on IBM infrastructure can enable customers to develop and implement collaborative enterprise solutions across different computing platforms at a lower cost.

At Lawson's Swedish HQ, CEO Björn Algkvist says the ability to collaborate, anticipate opportunities and respond quickly to changes transparently throughout the supply chain is an important element of an on demand environment. "Customers can have the flexibility to integrate solutions both within and across the enterprise with their suppliers, partners, customers and other members of the extended value chain," he says.

Lawson will pre-integrate its Movex applications with IBM's WebSphere Application Server, WebSphere Portal - Express and DB2 Universal Database. As such, every order from a medium-sized business will be shipped with IBM's enterprise-proven technology embedded inside the Lawson application suite. The Movex suite is built on Java-based technology.

Lawson will also develop an optimised version of Movex for Linux, a low cost and reliable platform that continues to gain momentum in the mid-market. The Movex collaboration application groups include: Enterprise Management, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Supply Chain Management (SCM), Business Performance Measurement, Value Chain Collaboration and e-Business.

"Leading ISVs are crucial to IBM's strategy for supporting mid-market customers with on demand solutions," says IBM's Marc Lautenbach. "Together, IBM and Lawson can deliver the benefits of best-in-class application functionality on a secure, solid foundation in a convenient, user-friendly package to customers. Through this strategic initiative, IBM and Lawson have united to better serve our customers by providing collaborative commerce solutions that meet the requirements of an on demand environment."

Under the terms of the agreement, IBM and Lawson will jointly market and sell the solution to target segments and customers worldwide.

November 2003