Mid-market enterprise resource planning software developer Lawson Software announced March 15 the next iteration of its namesake suite of applications, Release 9--an upgrade that's <A HREF="http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1938532,00.asp?kc=EWRSS03119TX1K0000594">stacked on IBM's middleware platform</A> to help both Lawson and its users evolve to a service-oriented architecture. Lawson announced at its CUE user conference last year that it would standardize on IBM's middleware platform moving forward. It's done that with Release 9, which includes IBM's WebSphere Application Server ND 6.0, Tivoli Directory Server 6.0 and DB2 Universal Database Enterprise Edition 8.2--though the latter two implementations are optional.