Lawson Software is the latest enterprise system vendor to warn that its latest quarterly earnings would come short of expectations. The company is forecasting that sales will drop almost 7% for the quarter, with new license sales falling a whopping 43%. Lawson stock dropped over 12% on the warning.
Lawson is echoing the rationale of other vendors, claiming that prospects are taking longer to make buy decisions, a weak excuse in my opinion. My experience indicates that many of those deferred decisions will never materialize.
During the anti-trust lawsuit to block Oracle's takeover of PeopleSoft, Lawson boasted that Oracle, in its defense, claimed that Lawson was a viable alternative to Oracle, PeopleSoft, and SAP in the high end financial and HR applications market. This latest earnings warning now takes most of the wind out of Lawson's sails.
Still, as I've indicated previously, only SAP seems to be exempt from a general downturn in license sales in enterprise applications.
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