Lawson enters hosting market with IBM
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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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NEW YORK: IBM said that it is making the design of its âbladeâ computer servers widely available, in a move designed to gain wider acceptability in data centres and the telecom industry.
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SAN FRANCISCOâPeopleSoft Inc. on Tuesday announced an expanded relationship with IBM that will effectively add a middleware infrastructure layer to PeopleSoft&#39;s applications.
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Rackspace Managed Hosting&#8482;, a leading global  provider of managed hosting services, today announced enhancements to  its Partner Network for all industries including System Integrators,  Advertising and Media Agencies, Consulting Firms, and Web Developers and  Designers.
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(InfoWorld) - IBMÂ hopes to bring BI to a wider audience of midmarket customers with a new software stack developed in partnership with Business Objects SA, industry sources said. The stack includes IBM's DB2 Data Warehouse Edition, Business Objects' Crystal Decisions, and a version of the Linux OS from Red Hat or Novell, the sources said. The products have been integrated and come on a single disk so they can be installed on a server at the customer's premises to get a BI system up and running quickly, the sources said. IBM has worked to simplify the installation process by automating setup and configuration tasks, reducing room for error. The result is a BI appliance that can be set up and ready to load data far more quickly than most BI systems today, according to one source. The software is expected to be announced in the coming weeks and shown at the Cebit trade show in Germany later this month. A shipping date wasn't available, and representatives from IBM and Business Objects declined to comment. The product is being tested by some customers now, a source said. It comes at an interesting time for BI software, which is used by companies to collect and analyze data and help them improve the performance of their business. On Thursday,Â Oracle announced a deal to acquire BI software company Hyperion SolutionsÂ for $3.3 billion, and analysts predict more consolidation as big vendors like IBMÂ and MicrosoftÂ add further BI capabilities to their products. The product from IBM is an attempt to make BI more appealing to midsize customers -- a market Business Objects has been targeting with its recently launched Business Objects Crystal Decisions. It may be followed by similar products from IBM aimed at bigger companies and with software from other partners. The new product is a "soft appliance," or a stack of software for a specific task delivered ready to install on a server. It differs from a true appliance server, in which the software and hardware are delivered together with the software preinstalled. Some other vendors, notably Netezza, sell data warehousing appliances with some analytics capabilities built in. IBM may be going a step further by including third-party BI tools as well -- although analysts said it's difficult to tell how innovative the product is without having seen it. Alys Woodward, an analyst with IDC, called it a new approach for IBM and one that validates the server appliance model. It could also help Business Objects to fend off a challenge in the midmarket from Microsoft, which has been adding BI capabilities to its SQL Server database, she said. Ian Charlesworth, an analyst with Ovum, said Business Objects was the right partner for IBM to pick. "Crystal Decisions is very popular. It's easy to install, and it's lightweight. If you were looking to do a one-disk install, that would probably be the best one you could choose," he said. Each server can scale up to about a terabyte of data, and an entry-level system for 100GB of data could be priced at around $25,000, including the hardware and software, a source said. Jonathan Eunice, an analyst with Illuminata, called it an attractive entry price, although the value of the system will depend on its performance capabilities and other parameters, he said.
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InfoWorld - IBM&#160;hopes to bring BI to a wider audience of midmarket customers with a new software stack developed in partnership with Business Objects SA, industry sources said.
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Big Blue plans to spend tens of millions of dollars to convert new customers to the high-end server line.
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Company expanding its reach after introducing the hosted service in the U.S. last year .
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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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Server and software company prepares new foray into market for dot-com infrastructure.
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Big Blue beefs up its WebSphere 6 application server, promising better performance, reliability and simplified administration.
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IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that Kyriba Corporation has selected IBM as its managed hosting provider for North America.
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Officials at Oracle (Quote, Chart) used its Open World show in London as a springboard to launch an application server offering for small- to medium-sized businesses (SMB) Tuesday.
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Vendor offers server, switch, and host-channel adapter bundle with increased I/O bandwidth, processing capability, and memory. By Larry Greenemeier.
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International Business Machines Corp. (IBM.N) widened its lead last year in the U.S. market for Internet hosting services as it won a greater share of the medium-sized business market, according to data recently published by market research firm IDC.
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NOVEMBER 10, 2004 (REUTERS) - IBM said yesterday it plans to offer Web conferencing as a hosted Internet service, seeking to reach small and midsize business customers while taking on more established rivals in the market.
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Targeting Unix archrivals Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems, IBM on Friday topped off the high end of its Power 5-based line of iSeries and pSeries servers, rolling out three systems all capable of hosting as many as 250 virtual servers on a single