In An About Face, Lawson Picks Amazon To Launch Cloud-Based ERP

Not long ago Lawson Software CEO Harry Debes predicted the end of software as a service (SaaS) when he said the SaaS market would "collapse" in two years. Fast forward a couple years and the thinking has certainly changed up in Minneapolis. Lawson, a major provider of business software or ERP to 4,500 customers worldwide, has chosen to augment its on-premise software with a cloud computing option by selecting Amazon Web Services as its infrastructure partner and platform.

Called Lawson External Cloud Services the company's S3 Management System, M2 Management System, and Talent Management will be available on Amazon EC2 starting in May 2010.

Describing the change in strategy, Lawson senior vice president Jeff Comport explained, "As we look over past couple years of prospects, we certainly had deals we didn't get where customers wanted full-function ERP, but not the burden of managing" the infrastructure that's required to support it.

To give customers a real feel for the how Lawson's software will work in an on-demand fashion the company introduced Lawson Test Drive, which lets customers use "their own business processes and data" for two week trial period.

There is a growing consensus from analysts and pundits alike that declare it's time for SaaS vendors (and those looking at SaaS as a delivery option for their on-premise software) to start thinking strategically about getting out of the infrastructure business. The thinking goes that companies like Amazon, Rackspace, GoGrid and BlueLock have figured out how to do infrastructure as a service (IaaS) way better than a software company ever could. That, in short, IaaS is their core business and it only makes financial and operational sense to move SaaS-based apps to cloud providers who do this on a daily basis.

The news from Minneapolis seems to suggest that message is starting to sink in.