It’s always interesting to be an HR guy inside of an ERP company – and that is especially true when we make major announcements about our product or technology direction. Last week was no exception when we announced our plans to offer our products on the Amazon Web Services Infrastructure. There is a fair amount of interesting news here, but none of it dramatically different from the approach that we HCM-specialists (inside of Lawson) have been following for the better part of a year.
The bottom line is this: give customers a Choice. Choice in how they license our software, how it’s deployed and who maintains it. And our announcement with Amazon changes the game for us with respect to deployment. What’s powerful about the model with Amazon (we haven’t told the full story about this yet, but will) is that it opens up opportunities for deployment efficiency that will ultimately rival that which is derived from a multi-tenant SaaS infrastructure.
Now I have made it a habit to never jump off the cliff to discuss publicly why we do (or don’t) offer a multi-tenant SaaS solution – there are plenty of others out there ready and eager to debate the issue on our behalf. But the reality is this – if a software vendor in the HCM space can deliver great functionality, with a service level that satisfies its customers, at a fair price while still meeting obligations to its stockholders to earn a profit, that’s what matters. And we will always take our direction on technology strategy in that context – regardless of the tenancy model (s) we ultimately decide to support.
