I had the pleasure earlier this week of attending Lawson Software’s conference and user exchange, aka CUE, in Boston.

The midmarket ERP apps vendor had the singular misfortune to throw its annual user party at a time of great uncertainty for both Lawson and its customers. Lawson has yet to respond to an unsolicited $1.8 billion acquisition offer from ERP rival Infor, aside from acknowledging receipt of the offer on March 11. Despite the Infor elephant in the room, CUE was a good-humored affair. Lawson execs exhibited grace under fire while customers expressed concern but remained cheerfully stoic and pragmatic.

Do you think Lawson will end up part of Infor? Alternatively, will it remain independent or will it be bought by a private equity firm and no longer be publicly traded à la Epicor? As apps vendors try to navigate fluctuating revenue mixes — rising subscriptions versus falling maintenance — being privately held may prove to be an attractive option.

Lawson is currently evaluating whether to break out subscription revenue as a separate line item in its next fiscal year. Of its 4,500 largely on-premise customers, around 350 use a Lawson SaaS product, the fruit of purchases such as Enwisen and Healthvision. Like other apps players, Lawson’s embraced Amazon.com’s EC2 as the cloud infrastructure for its HCM, M3 and S3 ERP apps. Several Lawson cloud services early adopters at CUE talked about their organizations’ experiences and there were some similarities in those stories:

• They faced hardware refreshes and/or obsolescence of the app and database versions they used
• They were already successfully running third-party SaaS apps or remotely hosted software
• They used Lawson managed services as a steppingstone between the on-premises and cloud services worlds

The $1.3 billion verdict in the Oracle v. SAP case is surprising, given that the third-party support subsidiary of SAP, TomorrowNow, was fixing glitches and making compliance updates, not trying to resell the software. The jury felt that the appropriate damage award was based on the fair market value of the software that was illegally downloaded, rather than Oracle’s lost revenues for support.

A news article by Bloomberg provides further insight into the jury’s thinking and the legal process. Quoting juror Joe Bangay, an auto body technician: “If you take something from someone and you use it, you have to pay.” Perhaps SAP should have made its case more in layman’s terms.

SAP is in a very difficult position, in that it faces the same threat of revenue loss from third-party support. It was unable to convincingly defend its entry into the third-party support business for fear of legitimizing a business that poses a similar threat to its lucrative maintenance business as to Oracle’s.

What happens to the third-party support business going forward? The size of the award potentially dampens customer interest in moving to third-party support, particularly with another case pending of Oracle v. Rimini Street. The SAP case, however, does not invalidate third-party support as a business. Third-party support, if carried out properly, offers an important option for enterprise application customers that are looking for relief from costly vendor maintenance contracts.

For SAP, the verdict is not only painful, but it prolongs the agony, because it is compelled to appeal the verdict. SAP certainly has the financial wherewithal to pay the damages but was hoping to put this embarrassing debacle behind them.

Today, IBM announced the acquisition of privately-held Clarity Systems for an undisclosed sum. The acquisition bolsters IBM’s solution set for the CFO, and complements its recent acquisition of OpenPages, a governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) vendor. Clarity, based in Toronto, had approximately 390 employees and 600 customers at the time of this deal.

Clarity Systems is a Strong Performer in "The Forrester Wave™: Business Performance Solutions, Q4 2009", offering a very good planning, budgeting, and forecasting solution as part of its flagship product, Clarity 7, along with an improved financial consolidations component. During the past few years, Clarity developed a market-leading regulatory reporting solution, Clarity FSR, which supports the process of creating full SEC filings and also embeds technology for XBRL reporting. IBM Cognos is ranked as a Leader in the same comparative evalution.

The success of FSR alone during the past two years made the large BPS vendors, IBM, SAP, and Oracle, envious of Clarity’s success. Oracle made a competitive response early this year with the release of Oracle Hyperion Disclosure Management. It seemed to this observer that SAP would make the next move by doing a deal to acquire Clarity, but IBM beat them to the punch.

As we get ready to host IT Forum EMEA June 9-11 in Lisbon, we will be conducting interviews with some of the key Forrester speakers and our invited industry keynotes. With so much attention being focused on business intelligence these days, we decided to sit down with Senior Analyst James Kobielus, who covers analytics, data mining and warehousing and business intelligence. James will be delivering a presentation for Business Process and Applications professionals.

YATES: What is the key lesson/theme that you will present at IT Forum EMEA?
KOBIELUS: I’m speaking on four topics in four different sessions with the common theme being that pervasive adoption of business intelligence (BI) can make organizations more lean, agile, and adaptable to changing conditions. I’ll be discussing “Driving Better Business Outcomes with Pervasive BI,” “Best Practices for Centralizing and Consolidating BI,” and “Transforming Business Processes Through Business Analytics” (with Derek Miers). Also at ITF EMEA, I’m moderating the SAP Espresso Lounge session on “Transform Your Enterprise into a Best-Run Business.”

YATES: How do these sessions tie into the overall theme of making business technology real?
KOBIELUS: All of this ties directly into that theme, since “making business technology real” can be defined as empowering information workers with tools that they use all the time and without which they would not be even half as productive. BI is just such a technology, because it can infuse every decision with the most comprehensive, up-to-date, and trustworthy information available. In this way, every information worker can have greater confidence in every action they take, can justify it fully, and can adjust their plans rapidly to fit changing circumstances.