Monday, May 09, 2005

Update on Lawson's pitch to JDE customers

As I wrote in January, Lawson has been aggressively courting existing customers of JDE, who are now by no choice of their own, customers of Oracle. I took the opportunity this afternoon at Lawson's user conference to check with a Lawson representative about the success of their efforts.

It appears that Lawson is in discussions with about 30 JDE customers, mostly those on the older World software, although a few are running JDE One World (now EnterpriseOne). Although none of these deals have closed, Lawson hopes to have some wins within the next two or three months.

I pointed out that installed base customers, by nature, are a conservative group, and I wondered what would motivate them to consider switching to Lawson. Lawson indicated that most of these JDE customers are concerned about the long term commitment of Oracle to support them on the IBM iSeries platform and a fear that they will be forced to migrate to Project Fusion. Lawson also feels that they have a strong story to tell regarding total cost of ownership, although to me the low cost solution is to not undertake a new system implementation.

There are several aspects to Lawson's offer. First, Lawson is giving JDE customers a discount of up to 50% on Lawson software license fees, along with a prebuilt tool to assist in file conversions from JDE to Lawson. If additional IBM iSeries hardware is needed, IBM's standard discount to ISVs will apply. Finally, through its relationship with Ciber, a third party systems integrator, Lawson will even provide maintenance and support of the customer's JDE system during the transition to Lawson.

Update May 17. Revised the final paragraph, based on additional clarification provided by Lawson.

Related posts
Competitors swarm around PeopleSoft customers

No comments: