Infor set to acquire Lawson Software

Business software firm Infor is to snap up rival Lawson Software in a rumoured $2bn deal thanks to financial backing from San Francisco-based private equity firm Golden Gate Capital.

The deal follows Infor's decision to hire 400 new software engineers and ship 60 per cent more products and enhancements than in 2010.

Infor chief executive and former Oracle co-president Charles Phillips argued in an open letter that the deal would enable Infor to offer a more complete ERP suite, combining Lawson's strengths in enterprise financials and human resources with its own manufacturing, supply chain and asset management expertise.

Phillips was also keen to point out that both firms' products were ‘service enabled' and so would be integrated with ease through standards-based middleware.

Phillips promised a renewed vertical push, explaining that Infor will expand into more industries and processes thanks to the acquisition.

"Our goal is to radically improve how customers deploy, use and upgrade enterprise applications," he said.

"Enterprise applications are generally too complex and expensive to deploy, and fragile to maintain and upgrade, and not much has changed in a decade. We have the unique opportunity to rethink and reinvent."

Key to this strategy is likely to be the use of cloud computing. The combined companies will have over 75,000 customers and more than one million users already supported in the cloud, Phillips explained.

"Without the need or desire to build datacentre infrastructure, we can dive deeper into industry business processes," he said.

"We will be indifferent as to whether that infrastructure comes from third parties or the cloud. Infrastructure only exists to run applications. The resources of Infor and Lawson will translate to 8,000 technical professionals focused on one thing: enterprise applications."