The Lawson Release 9 business application suite offers a range of new management tools and tighter integration with IBM middleware

Mid-market business applications vendor Lawson Software unveiled a major refresh of its applications suite yesterday featuring new human resources (HR), supply chain, performance management and business intelligence (BI) capabilities.

Lawson Release 9 will include new tools for monitoring workforce efficiency; a Procurement Cards application for streamlining supply chains; enhanced financial management capabilities to tackle fraud and aid regulatory compliance; and a new analytical BI suite incorporating "report bursting" and workflow management functionality.

Lawson also said the new suite features tighter integration with IBM's middleware and management portfolios, which will make it easier for customers to develop flexible service-oriented architectures (SOAs) capable of creating componentised applications.

Robert LeBlanc, general manager of WebSphere at IBM, said integrating IBM's infrastructure into the application suites would make it easier for Lawson customers to develop more flexible SOA-style applications.

The new suite includes IBM's WebSphere Application Server ND 6.0, and gives customers the option to implement IBM's Tivoli Directory 6.0 and DB2 Universal Database Enterprise Edition 8.2.