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In a bid to attract new customers and better compete with NetSuite and other vendors moving their software offerings to the cloud, Lawson Software this week revealed plans to launch its suite of ERP and other applications on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).
Lawson will offer its core Lawson Enterprise Management Systems and Lawson Talent Management suite on Amazon's cloud computing infrastructure starting in May as Lawson External Cloud Services, said Jeff Comport, senior vice president of product management for St. Paul-based Lawson.
As part of its Lawson External Cloud Services, Lawson will also launch Test Drive, an offering that lets users test products for up to 14 days before purchasing. Test Drive will launch with Lawson's S3-directed Smart Office offering and its Enterprise Search product.
Lawson's move to the cloud comes as other software makers like NetSuite, Workday and SAP's upcoming Business ByDesign embrace cloud computing to give customers more choice and flexibility on where and how to leverage once cumbersome enterprise software solutions.
According to Comport, Lawson lost out on plenty of deals due to pricing and lack of a cloud offering, which partially fueled Lawson's move to the cloud. Comport wouldn't say which competing vendors won those deals, but said "a lot of times these went to no decision."
Comport said Lawson is targeting a new customer base and aiming to hit midsize organizations looking for full-function enterprise software in the cloud. Provisioning and set up of software instances can be automated and users can configure their capacity to scale up and down to meet peak demands.
