Lawson: Enterprise Search, Apps, and CRM
April 22, 2009
The consensus this morning is that software and systems companies want to own digital versions of Henry Ford’s white elephant, the River Rouge facility. The idea was to ingest coal and iron ore at one end and eject Ford motor cars at the other. Like a medieval tailor, the River Rouge notion was to put everything under one roof. Today the MBAs compress this idea of total integration into the breezy “one stop shop”.
Lawson, according to the company’s Web site here,
Lawson provides enterprise software and service solutions in the manufacturing, distribution, maintenance, and service industries. Over 4,500 customers use our software throughout the world.
Our mission is simple: to make you stronger. We start by comparing your performance to industry benchmarks. We help you identify your weaknesses, bottlenecks and pain points. Then we help you implement our integrated enterprise software to alleviate – or even eliminate – those weaknesses. We measure your progress and identify the next set of improvements. Many of our customers say we help them continuously improve their operations. We make them stronger. Lawson Software used its 2009 Lawson Conference and User Exchange the CUE to make enterprise search one of the focal points of this program.
I saw a number of news items about Lawson’s enterprise search solution. The Gilbane Group reported here:
Lawson Enterprise Search is a new product to search both structured and unstructured data across the Lawson S3 enterprise system, Lawson Business Intelligence, the user’s desktop, and even their personal history such as comments entered in Microsoft Office applications.
My recollection of Lawson is that the company offers enterprise resource planning solutions. The company’s software can handle finance, manufacturing, distribution, maintenance, and supply chain functions for an organization. The on premises software has picked up additional functions over the years. Lawson can be deployed for personnel, customer support, and business intelligence applications, among others.
After reading the Gilbane Group’s news story, I navigated to the Lawson site and ran a query “enterprise search” to see how the search system performed. The Gilbane story ran down a checklist of functions that triggered in my mind a dashboard type of system. A user could run a query and then perform various tasks on the result or results. The Gilbane Group’s summary leaned heavily on search functions associated with structured data retrieval or the new “data spaces” technology I report on in Google: The Digital Gutenberg. I was also intrigued by the notion of searching “indexed data”, not the “live transaction database”. Latency becomes a key question for me in this era of real time search. After all, looking for a part that is no longer in inventory to meet the needs of a big customer means that the search must return fresh results. Getting the index our of sync with what’s in the warehouse can be a very big deal in some situations.
Web Site Search
The results of my query on the Lawson’s Web site search function were:
© 2009 Lawson Software
The first hit was a link to the Business Wire news release which I was able to determine was the source of most of the news stories about the roll out of Lawson Enterprise Search. The lingo “search keys” reminded me of my mainframe days. A “freeform” search suggested to me that I could enter a free text query. I was baffled by this statement, however: “Perform directed searches via an interest center”. I am not sufficiently familiar with Lawson to know if an “interest center” is a function in a Lawson installation or if it is a buzzword.
I clicked on the “show marked button” and the system displayed each of the terms in my query “enterprise search” highlighted as shown below:
© 2009 Lawson Software
The system did not limit the query to the bound phrase “enterprise software”. The system also defaulted to a Boolean AND, which I prefer to indiscriminate Boolean ORs favored by some search systems. I manually scanned the first 1,720 results in the list and found that two were relevant to my query “enterprise search”. The other 1,728 did not contain the terms. You can see this for yourself. Run the query “enterprise search” without quotes and click to result number 1,710 here. Neither term appears. I assume that the Lawson engine includes a term injection method that inserts the terms “enterprise” and “search” regardless of the content of the document. I would have looked at more results, but after 1,700 items, I cut off my scan. Based on this, I have questions about the relevance method used in the Lawson Web search system. The misindexed item invited me to write to Lawson at opinionizer@lawson.com. I was not sure what an “opinionizer” record accomplished.
The LSE Interface for Search
The second hit pointed to a page with links to a podcast with a Lawson enterprise search representative and an product demo. I navigated to the product demo, expecting to see something similar to the Web search system. The interface was quite different from the search system on the Lawson Web site as shown in the figure below:
The search box can be used but the idea I carried away from the demo was that the user ideally would select from one of the categories or headings shown below the search box. This narrows the result set to a collection or some other slice of the data.
The results displayed in the demo looked like this:
When I saw this display, I thought, “Database output.” The system can access unstructured data, but that seemed to require a separate click or step. The demo said that the LES system could present information from emails and from other vendors’ systems. I did not pick up any reference to the steps required to recognize new content in a non-Lawson source or the latency required to update the indexes.
Impressions from the Demo
I noted that the demo used some phrases that piqued my interest; for example, looking for information before the LSE would have “taken endless reports and countless hours” and that I could “envision countless ways” to use LSE.
I did like the use of point and click categories and the function to embed a hyperlink into a structured result. The nod to Google was a plus as well. (Some Google resellers can perform similar tricks using the Google OneBox API, Google Apps, and a Google Search Appliance.)
Other Observations
I did some poking around to find more information about this system, particularly its throughput, content connectors, transformation, index structure, and its text processing functions.
I turned up a few nuggets.
Technology
I did a quick run through my search files and poked quickly through the well organized USPTO. I turned up one recent Lawson patent, US7363287 “OLAP Query Generation Engine” but nothing in the immediate enterprise search space. There could be some gems there, but I don’t have that information. After scanning 7363287, I remain convinced that Lawson’s core focus is traditional structured data manipulation and querying. The “enterprise search” service may be a recent development. The company is simply not in my enterprise search data set as either a licensee of other firms’ technology or a participant in the fairly narrow search and retrieval tea party. Keep in mind that I monitor search from Harrod’s Creek, Kentucky, so if you have info that can fatten this goose, please, use the comments section of this Web log to help me out.
The Marketing Message
The caption for one of the illustrations from the roll out of Lawson Enterprise Search was, “How do you mix the Extreme Makeover concept with enterprise software and ice fishing?” I don’t understand the question, but I am an addled goose.
The ZDNet Take on Lawson Maintenance Fees
Those imbued with the Lawson spirit probably resonate with this query. I don’t. I did understand that according to ZDNet here, Lawson would not reduce its maintenance fees. Dennis Howlett, author of “Lawson: Flat Out No to a Maintenance Price Reduction But” wrote:
… the company [Lawson] has introduced a tiered set of maintenance charges: bronze, silver and gold. Each has different price components that depend upon what the individual customer wants in terms of support and value. The rationale Hagar put out was that maintenance is an important and profitable part of its business and while software sales may be soft, the company needs to maintain a level of profitability to ensure investment in the solution set…
Please, read the full ZDNet story because it includes an interesting Tweet exchange about this pricing issue. After reading Mr. Howlett’s story I took a look at Lawson’s stock price and saw, courtesy of Google Finance, this diagram:
Additional Lawson financial commentary is here.
Wrap Up
I have been watching as ERP companies have morphed from back office to River Rouge type software environments. Search has to be a part of these solutions; otherwise, no one can locate a document on which work can be built or performed. The SAP saga is fresh in my mind. I reviewed my TREX information this weekend and I thought about SAP’s venture arm investment in Endeca. I think of these giant systems like the ancient walled cities. These towns built walls to keep enemies out and to keep those inside under scrutiny. The ERP companies, including Oracle, are now finding themselves pulled and pushed in different directions. The core of these outfits is like the carbonized fruit at the bottom of my mother’s pineapple upside down cake. The best stuff is now underneath other goodies. Some folks like pineapple upside down cake. I don’t care for it too much anymore. There are other ways to round the edge of a sweet tooth. Clarabridge offers structured data and search as so many other companies.
The question in my mind is, “Are these the next generation enterprise search solutions or are these companies getting in to the game too late to make a difference?” My view as an addled goose is that time is running out for big money on premises software installations. I know the arguments for keeping everything close and in house, but in the present economic climate, companies will have to economize. The easiest way to get a kick is to dump employees, especially expensive types. So, move some functions to the cloud or use a “good enough” Web solution and start “rationalizing” the work force. This is not a question of better; it is a question of survival. If vendors are trying to fatten up product offerings to pump up license fees and support, the hockey stick of revenue may flip over and point down.
Stephen Arnold, April 22, 2009
Comments
3 Responses to “Lawson: Enterprise Search, Apps, and CRM”
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Steve,
I just want to clarify that the posting at Gilbane was simply a paraphrase of Lawson’s Press release and not a “Gilbane story.” In fact when I saw the posting on a NewsShark update, I immediately took a look at their site as you did and questioned why we even posted the notice because, as lead search analyst for Gilbane, I felt that Lawson positioning itself as an enterprise search vendor was pretty lame and I said so to our NewsShark editor. However, we do pass through these press releases with little review because that it what the feed is “tasked” to do. I hope that by reading commentary by you, me and other search analysts, readers will develop a critical eye for what is real in the marketplace and what is just marketing jargon. I didn’t write about Lawson and wouldn’t based on what I saw but PR is PR – readers need to take it with a grain of skepticism.
As far as I’m concerned, embedded search is embedded search; every software application has some form of it. That does not standalone as a search product in my list. I think we are on the same page here.
Lynda Moulton,
Sure looked like a news story.
Stephen Arnold, May 1, 2009
WHATS ON YOUR MIND, LIKE – WHY ISN’T MY WEB SITES NOT MENTIONED NOW – A – DAYS (MS) “2004”! I like being upset (SEARCH ENGINES) – Meta Tags, why (Why has those open door policy “changed” – signed U.N.)
My name is (What ever about the meek for personal gain “detergent”)
So board of directors “who?”
& dont forget about the neilson’s information hi way report “2000 – around that time”……………………. (how many dots “children this time”)
Life is not a game Associate’s (What “R” the Rule’s 2day – We are not toys). Get the point