Infor Lawson Evaluation

Lawson Hosting and Software Pricing

For HR and payroll software deliverability, Infor Lawson offers traditional on-premises deployment as well as two hosted services:

• Hosting can reside on Amazon's Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) as an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solution. This is what the company refers to as the Lawson External Cloud.

• Hosting can also be delivered by Infor Lawson by accessing Lawson Managed Services for full hosting and application management (including software upgrades, 24x7 critical incident support, software modifications, administration of software installations, database administration, and system maintenance).

The Lawson Managed Services option is likely to be the most valuable to those customers lacking or wishing to outsource the IT infrastructure and staffing needed for an on-premises HCM software system. The data center used by Lawson for this option is provided by Velocity and is SSAE 16 and ISO 27001 certified.

However, Lawson’s use of the Amazon public cloud offers some unique features and may a more popular option for many customers.

• Amazon offers the same HCM system that is delivered as an on-premise solution (consistency of service as standard), but customers who decide in the future to migrate from the cloud to on-premise may be restricted to Windows-only environments.
• HCM software installation and management of this option lies with Lawson staff, while the application itself operates in virtualized servers with Windows OS.
• Interestingly, the Lawson External Cloud is not a multi-tenant database architecture, which provides significant challenges for software updates and upgrades.
• Lawson's full ERP software is available on this cloud platform. Customers looking for a single business application provider rather than just the HR and payroll software may find Lawson on Amazon appealing.

An enticing option for the Amazon cloud is that Lawson offers a Test Drive option, allowing HCM buyers to use the Infor Lawson software with their own data and processes for a limited period (often 14 days) without committing to a HR or payroll software purchase.

Lawson Hosting and SLA

A Service Level Agreement (SLA) is provided to clients who opt for the Amazon EC2 cloud. However, Lawson declined to offer any significant details about the standards in this agreement, including what (if any) uptime is guaranteed and whether remunerations in the form of credits or refunds are granted in the event of SLA non-compliance. However, research with customers already using this public cloud environment indicate a 99% uptime guarantee and inheritance of much of the standard Amazon SLA which is normally a 99.95% guaranteed uptime.

Lawson Software Pricing

While the Infor Lawson did not provide pricing information (either for the payroll software or the wider HCM application), it is known that subscription costs for the hosted solutions are primarily dependent on the size of the employee population. The Lawson Flexible Subscription pricing model consists of an annual subscription fee which covers license, maintenance, managed services and Amazon hosting. Hosted customers can convert their subscription licenses to perpetual licenses for lump-sum payments.

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