Thursday, January 25, 2007

New faces at Lawson

It's always good for a company when top executives are coming rather than going. So, I made note this morning that Lawson has picked up three new senior members for its management ranks. Scott Swoish, formerly of PeopleSoft/JDE, is coming in as senior VP of sales operations; Fady Sfeir, formerly of Oracle, will become VP of indirect channels in EMEA, and Barry Wilderman is being named VP of business strategy.

Barry's announcement is most interesting. I met Barry a couple of years ago at an industry conference. At that time, he was a senior analyst at Meta Group, and he had authored one of the best reports I've ever seen on the ERP marketplace. That report, based on a survey of actual ERP implementation experiences, compared the total cost of ownership of SAP, Oracle, J.D. Edwards, PeopleSoft, QAD, and Lawson. As I recall, QAD and Lawson came out the clear favorites in terms of TCO.

According to Lawson's press release, Wilderman "will lead initiatives that link Lawson's overall business strategies and value stories with the organization's sales objectives." His previous work at Meta is certainly consistent with the story that Lawson will want to tell.

Related posts
Lawson's performance better than it appears: CEO

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Wow! I worked at PeopleSoft but don't remember a Scott Swoish perhaps he was a JDE guy. I definitely remember Barry Wilderman; Lawson did well to get him. To me the whole TCO thing with Lawson ties in with your previous post about re-plumbing aging technology. Lawson did a decent job of keeping their technology basic which appealed to less sophisticated shops. That one of the primary reasons they sell well into retail and healthcare. These two industries are notoriously thrifty and are less inclined to take chances on ‘new’ technology, nor spend the dollars in resources it takes to implement it. If they’re fighting with Oracle and SAP over price, something is wrong. They should be fighting over technology and the cost to own it.