“A flower among weeds” was how Lawson M3 was described to me when I was involved with an implementation a couple of years ago and I must confess to having liked the product so Microsoft’s recently announced ‘switcher’ campaign for AX 2012 targeting Lawson customers got me interested in finding out why Microsoft thought that this flower was ready for picking.

Lawson M3 has a history that might sound familiar to many, the original company Intentia was founded in 1984 in Sweden and quickly established itself.  In 1991 as well as buying Entra Data Intentia  redeveloped its main product, then called Movex, targeting manufacturing and distribution companies and eventually established offices in 30 countries during the 90’s.  Meanwhile in the USA another company called Lawson Software had been in the ERP market since the 1970′s with S3 a financial focused solution. In May 2006, Lawson Software bought Intentia.

Many Movex diehards resented the rebranding exercise when the product became Lawson M3 “make, move and maintain” to complement Lawson S3 “staff, source and serve”, however although they now had similar sounding names they remained two very different products.

In the USA Lawson S3 is popular across several verticals such as Public Sector, Health, Government, and Services, for its Financial and HR solutions.  On the other hand Lawson M3 targets asset-intensive industries and customer/supplier relationship management and has a following across verticals such as fashion, food and beverage, and distribution.  Although its customer base is largely based in Europe and as it is a better multi-national solution than S3 most Lawson international offices are M3 focused.

Microsoft’s decision to target Lawson customers is the latest of several marketing campaigns to convert M3 and S3 users to Dynamics, an increasingly difficult task, however, Lawson itself has just been acquired by Infor for just under $2billion, the resulting redundancy programme is not being well received by Lawson employees and customers are obviously anxious about the future, so now is probably a good time to strike again and using discounted AX 2012 licenses as bait might also be seen as a winner because, although, in August 2008 Harry Debes the Lawson CEO claimed that the SaaS market will ‘collapse in two years’ Lawson moved into the cloud in May 2010 in partnership with Amazon, but it hasn’t had very favourable reviews and neither has there been a stampede for it just yet, so obviously a ripe market to introduce to the cloud.

So it should be looking good for Microsoft this time, and this could be the knockout blow.

Or maybe not!

Although $2billion may sound like a lot of money, it is potentially a bargain.  I don’t think Lawson was ever that well marketed, especially M3, yet the vendor has a turnover of around $1billion annually and its order book is healthy, so the product can obviously sell itself, although apparently not the cloud option which is surprising as the products are based on IBM’s AS400 platform meaning hardware costs are higher than the norm but customers have voted with their feet to stay with a higher cost of ownership on-premise model rather than embrace an inferior version of M3 or S3 in the cloud.

A benefit of the takeover, which makes Infor the third largest ERP Vendor globally, is the promise of a large investment in both the S3 and M3 products which, coupled with a reinvigorated and improved marketing of the products with the promise of new releases, should help to improve the sales pipeline,

So, why does Microsoft think the Lawson flower is ready for picking this time, could it be Lawson’s poor cloud offering and high on-premise costs that have drawn Microsoft’s attention to Lawson’s customers this time.  With VARs reluctant to market AX 2012 cloud to their own customers Microsoft might be hoping to encourage them to embrace the cloud by finding low hanging fruit for Resellers to pick.

A potential solution to the ‘Mexican stand-off’ that seems to be developing between Microsoft who have produced yet another good release of Dynamics AX and the existing channel that is struggling to see the benefits of selling AX 2012 to their customers.  Personally I think that Microsoft’s current marketing campaign for Dynamics CRM cloud in North America would be a better deal for everyone, give any customer currently with any other vendor a hefty sum of money for every license purchased, this money can then be used to part fund the software upgrade.