IBM teams with Lawson to target SMBs
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InfoWorld - IBM Corp. and Lawson Software Inc. are expanding their existing relationship to jointly target small and midsize business (SMB) users, initially in North America and three specific industries.
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The application server space is heating up once again as both IBM and BEA Systems tout new versions of their platforms. With its Liquid Computing strategy, San Jose, Calif.
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(InfoWorld) - Oracle is positioning itself to try and attract more SMBs as well as customers that have specific industry requirements and those with particular governance or compliance needs. The highly fragmented SMB market presents opportunities for large and small applications vendors to increase revenue if they can attract customers to adopt their ERP and CRM software. Both Oracle and its main rival, SAP, regularly come out with new initiatives designed to win more SMB hearts and minds. Oracle already believes it has done a lot of work to make it easier for SMBs to install its applications, according to President Charles Phillips. "Our next investment will be around distribution," he said Wednesday atÂ Oracle's launch of new versions of its E-Business Suite, JD Edwards, PeopleSoft, and Siebel applications. Within the next few weeks, Oracle executives will begin a "world tour for SMBs," stopping in 20 cities and looking to sign up additional partners, Phillips added. Industry-specific applications is "a wide-open area," Phillips said, where many customers have previously used customized software they built themselves. On the industries side, Oracle has established four key business units to meet the needs of retail, communications, financial services, and utilities customers. "It's a new concept for Oracle," Phillips said. Each unit has its own general manager and is responsible for its own profits and losses. Establishing the business units was vital to retaining the key management executives with industry-specific expertiseÂ Oracle gained throughÂ the acquisitions of companies, he added. These include retail software vendor Retek, communications software firm Portal, and most recently, utilities applications provider SPL WorldGroupÂ in November, as well as the 82 percent stake Oracle holds in Indian financial software vendor i-flex Solutions. "It was something of a lessons learned story," John Wookey, senior vice president of applications at Oracle, said in an interview Wednesday. He referred back to the company's experience in 1997 when it acquired Treasury Services, a profitability and risk analysis software provider. When Oracle completed that deal, it moved the Treasury developer team over to Oracle's development operation and mapped all the other Treasury staff including sales and marketing over to the equivalent organizations within Oracle. Over time, while Oracle was able to retain most of the Treasury developers, very few of the skilled sales organization who were educated on the Treasury software remained with the company. "When we did the Retek acquisition, we didnât want to lose that expertise, so we created the retail unit and, most recently, the utilities unit for SPL World," Wookey said. Oracle may look to set up additional industry business units, he added. The vendor already has a public sector group that is separately organized from the general applications sales operations. Another business unit Oracle has recently put in place is a GRC (governance, risk and compliance) organization, Wookey said, which was formed after the vendor acquired enterprise content management vendor Stellent in December. Along with content management, Stellent also provides compliance and records management software and expertise to help customers manage enterprise risk across their entire organizations. The GRC unit will be home to that part of Stellent as well as internal controls software that's featured in E-Business Suite and in PeopleSoft, respectively, Wookey said. In May, Oracle's arch-rivalÂ SAP announced its plans to establish a GRC business unit after acquiring compliance software vendor Virsa Systems. Â
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IBM is extending a hand to businesses looking to improve their communications systems with a new package of hardware, software, and support services that rely on traditional IP-based networks.
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IBM is extending its support for the products of one of its software competitors, Sybase, to present a Linux server-software package.
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InfoWorld - IBM Corp. is adding to its blade server line with an upcoming model targeted at small-to-medium-sized businesses.
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IBM has released a new low-cost eServer BladeCenter chassis and a unique set of &quot;business-in-a-box&quot; solutions to help lower the cost and speed the time it takes for SMBs to purchase, deploy, and implement blade servers.
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PeopleSoft said it will work with IBM to optimize its apps for use with IBM's WebSphere middleware and development tools, and plans to begin selling WebSphere products directly through its own sales force.
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IBM has announced Version 6 of its WebSphere Application Server software, which is designed to protect applications from server downtime and aid enterprise efforts to build a service-oriented architecture.
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IBM is set to begin offering a range of new services designed to bring the benefits of radio-frequency identification (RFID) systems to industrial firms and mid-size businesses.
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IBM announced Monday a set of offerings from its Virtual Innovation Center for Hardware, including &quot;how-to&quot; guides and a solution sizing toolkit, all aimed at helping the company&#39;s business partners build and deploy applications on IBM technology.
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IBM has unveiled two new Rational development tools and and a Tivoli applications management offering. They can be used separately or jointly to boost the quality of a service-oriented architecture.
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InfoWorld - IBM Corp. on Wednesday unveiled three server offerings aimed at helping companies of all sizes consolidate Web-tier Linux servers in their IT environments.
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(InfoWorld) - Lawson Software continues to broaden its relationship with close partner IBM as the midmarket applications vendor Monday announced plans to enter the hosting market and use more of IBM's middleware. Building on the company's existing Total Care maintenance and support program, Lawson Total Care Platinum due out this month will cover software delivery, hosting, support, and application management services. Lawson didn't reveal specific pricing, but said the offering will be available on a monthly per user subscription basis with companies having to commit to at least a year's service. Lawson made the announcement at its Conference and User Exchange (CUE) taking place this week in San Diego. Customers had been asking Lawson to provide hosting for its ERP (enterprise resource planning) applications for some time, but lacking the necessary resources to offer the service itself, Lawson previously encouraged users to go with third parties, according to Lawson CEO Harry Debes. However, once customers made it clear they'd prefer to deal with a single organization, Lawson looked for a hosting provider with global reach and service capabilities. Over the past six to nine months, Lawson interviewed a number of hosting providers, opting for IBM because of its worldwide presence and its attractive pricing, Debes said. Customers will sign a hosting deal with Lawson that will commit to 99.7 percent system uptime, while IBM will provide hosting in its datacenters. On another front, Lawson has expanded its existing SOA (service-oriented architecture) technology partnership with IBM to allow the applications vendor to embed more IBM middleware in its System Foundation technology stack. Last year, Lawson announced that IBM's WebSphere would be the core middleware for all future versions of its applications. After making that deal, Lawson then realized there were other pieces of IBM software it should've bundled into its stack and so went back and negotiated with IBM to add in WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus, Debes said. "In each of these situations, we've not given IBM the inside track or most favored nation status," Debes said, it's just that, after consideration of other vendors' offerings, IBM has proved to be the most appropriate choice. Last month,Â Lawson announcedÂ that IBM will resell Lawson's S3 and M3 applications in North America targeting small to midsize businesses and will also be involved in the development of the software for users in the financial services, fashion and food and beverage industries. Already, some Lawson operations in Europe have begun negotiating with IBM about their own reselling arrangements using the North American agreement as a framework, according to Debes. IBM has previously resold Lawson software outside North America, notably the M3 applications Lawson gained from its 2006 $480 million purchase of Intentia, but without the benefit of a formal arrangement. At CUE, Lawson also unveiled a fresh user interface that will eventually become the common interface across its entire range of applications. The Smart Client UI developed in conjunction with designer Frog Design Inc. over the past 12 months will first appear in Lawson's M3 7.1 applications due to start appearing in May. "We'll leapfrog the GUIs that are available now, including Microsoft's," Debes said. The new UI enables users to carry out specific customization and personalization to their applications and to incorporate two- and three-dimensional graphics and video. Â
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IBM&#39;s affections for service-oriented architectures deepened today when Big Blue offered details on the impending version 6 release of WebSphere Application Server.
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IBM has unveiled virtual resources to help business partners more quickly build and deploy on-demand business applications tailored to customer requirements across all vertical industries.
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InfoWorld - IBM&#160;unveiled a Web site and IT security software application Thursday as part of its effort to compete with Hewlett-Packard&#160;and Sun&#160;for customers in the fast-growing SMB sector.