Lawson Software today announced it has delivered a new technology solution for Lawson M3 applications, Lawson M3 System Foundation 7.1 and Business Process Management 7.1. The new technology solution is designed to significantly simplify lifecycle management activities and provide Lawson customers with a solid business process and service oriented architecture (SOA)-based foundation for their ERP applications. By decoupling Lawson M3 Technology from Lawson M3 Applications, Lawson helps customers reduce the cost and time of upgrades and provides a sensible method for staying current with their supporting technologies - all with minimal disruption to business processes.

The Lawson M3 Enterprise Management System is specifically designed for product-centric industries with "make-move-maintain" business processes. These markets typically include specific industries such as food and beverage manufacturing, fashion and apparel manufacturing, wholesale distribution and asset-intensive industries.

The technology layer, composed of Lawson M3 System Foundation and Lawson M3 Business Process Management, includes updated technology stacks that combine Lawson's best technology, Web services and document archiving capabilities with IBM WebSphere Application Server ND v6.1 and IBM DB2 Content Manager technology. This presents a high-performance, standards-based technology solution to Lawson customers and a solid path to SOA. The new version of Lawson Web Services Designer is now 100 percent Eclipse-based and contains enhanced support for industry standards and security functions like WS-I Basic Profile compliance and a security layer provided by WS-Security.

Ecophon, a global manufacturer of acoustic ceilings and wall absorbers, has already realized the simplicity and enhanced benefits of Lawson M3 7.1 Technology. "Our migration was simple and required just a couple of days work," said Magnus Wittander, application leader at Ecophon. By decoupling the applications from the underlying technology layers, Lawson gives its customers a more evolutionary path forward and helps reduce upgrade costs. Furthermore, it enables Lawson to bring new innovations to market faster and gives customers the ability to support third-party platform changes and upgrades with a small technology release rather than having to do a full-blown technology and applications upgrade. As a result, customers can easily upgrade their enterprise applications and technology incrementally and separately, on their own timelines and at much lower costs, without disrupting their business operations.

Also introduced with this release is the Lawson M3 Document Archive Foundation, a complementing application to Lawson M3 System Foundation that leverages leading content management solutions from IBM for improved archiving, auditing and compliance processes.

"The release of Lawson M3 7.1 Technology is an important step in our continuing commitment to provide our customers a richer, simpler ownership experience and a simpler, more sensible path to greater agility through open standards and Web services - all at a lower total cost of ownership," said Lars Wettergren, technology product manager, Lawson Software. "By separating the technology and applications, we are delivering the simplicity and cost-of-ownership benefits that Lawson customers need."