Lawson taps SOA for sourcing

Lawson Software Inc. continued its drive to fuel broader adoption of SOAs (service-oriented architectures) with the release of a new SOA-based application designed to help businesses more easily manage supplier relationships, the company said Monday.

Lawson last year said it would make IBM Corp.’s WebSphere middleware the foundation for its SOA-enabled business application platform, dubbed “Project Landmark,” and that it would work with IBM to develop new SOA interfaces to its business application software. The ERP (enterprise resource planning) applications maker last month launched Lawson Release 9, which comes bundled with IBM’s WebSphere middleware stack, the DB2 Universal Database and Tivoli applications management software. It also serves as the foundation for Lawson’s future SOA-based Landmark applications.

Lawson on Monday rolled out its first Landmark-developed application, called Lawson Strategic Sourcing, which is aimed to help government organizations and other businesses better manage supplier relationships by electronically automating sourcing events, such as requests for proposal and bid analysis and awarding.

SOA applications are designed so that different parts of the application can operate independently, enabling features to be changed without breaking other parts of the application. The end goal is to allow companies to respond more quickly to changing business needs instead of relying on traditional software development upgrade cycles.

North Carolina’s Buncombe County, which has been beta testing the Strategic Sourcing application along with LSF 9, tentatively plans to fully deploy the sourcing application in July, said Sonia Burgin, the county’s project manager.

“Our suppliers can now go onto our Web site and find every bid, every event we have available, and turn their bids in to our Web site, and we have all that stuff gathered in one place, in one system,” said Burgin.

The application will also help the county improve security of bids through encryption and ensure they’re in compliance with government regulations through the application’s bid-tracking system, said Burgin.

Lawson said that although it designed the application to fit the more stringent requirements of the government and health-care industries, the application is also suitable for any kind of business.

Going forward, Lawson plans to add more SOA-enabled applications.

“We’re going to build off of where we’re already strong, in procurement, financials and human capital management and surround those core solutions with Landmark applications that will coexist and add value for us,” said Dean Hager, chief product officer, Lawson Software.