Lawson Unveils Release 9, Clears Hurdle in Intentia Merger

Published: March 23, 2006

by Alex Woodie

Last week was a busy one for Lawson Software, as the ERP software company unveiled a significant new release of software, dubbed Lawson Release 9, and overcame one more hurdle in its quest to merge with Intentia International.

Release 9 is composed of two pieces, including an underlying technological and tools layer called Lawson System Foundation, LSF 9, and the ERP solutions package, which is referred to as Lawson Business Management Solutions 9. Together, the two elements are instrumental in the company's long-term application modernization and source-code consolidation initiatives, called Landmark, which it unveiled less than a year ago. (See "Lawson Unveils 'Landmark' Project to Bring Apps to J2EE".)

Lawson is encouraging customers to upgrade to LSF Release 9 to ease their transition to the Landmark generation of technology and applications, the first of which will become available later this year. LSF Release is also significant because it's the first since Lawson formed the strategic relationship last year with IBM, and the first release to incorporate and require IBM's DB2 and WebSphere middleware. LSF 9 is required to run Release 9 business applications.

It terms of the functionality, Lawson Business Management Solutions 9 will bring notable enhancements to the company's core ERP modules, including the Human Capital Management Suite, the Supply Chain Management Suite, and the Enterprise Financial Management Suite, not to mention release 9 of the company's business intelligence suite, which started shipping last November.

On Friday, Lawson announced it received notification from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that its Form S-4 registration and proxy statement has been accepted. This had to come as a relief to the St. Paul, Minnesota, company because it has submitted this form twice and delayed the first deadline for the merger. The merger deadline is currently April 30. The S-4 details the plans of the merger, including risks and a reconciliation of the two companies' accounting figures to show how their books would have looked had they operated as a single company.

Now that its S-4 has been accepted, things look on track for meeting that deadline. This week Lawson will mail the S-4 proxy statements to its shareholders, and the two companies will also submit a Swedish version of the prospectus to the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority for approval. Lawson is planning a shareholder meeting April 17 to vote for the merger (which should pass with flying colors), while Intentia shareholders will have until April 24 to tender their shares.