$1.5 Billion Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina Selects Lawson's Enterprise Business Management Solution.

MINNEAPOLIS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 20, 1997--

Market "Influencer" Win Reinforces Lawson's Competitive

Lead in Healthcare; Lawson's Technology, OLAP,

Web Strength Overpower Peoplesoft and Oracle Bids

Lawson Software, the Web Enterprise Company(TM), today announced that Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina, the state's largest health insurer covering 1.6 million subscribers, has signed a license agreement for the LAWSON INSIGHT(TM) Business Management System. The win is Lawson's most recent in a string of more than a dozen key healthcare victories over industry competitors PeopleSoft and Oracle, including Mission St. Joseph Medical Center, Arcon Medical and Sutter Health.

Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina's "short list" vendors were rated on five main criteria: the availability of an activity module that is fully integrated, on-line analytical processing (OLAP) integration for evaluation of strategic cost and decision support information, Year 2000 compliance, completeness of Internet/intranet products and the flexibility to facilitate large-scale business process reengineering.

"Lawson provides a fully-integrated, client/server solution that will allow our management to access financial information via the intranet," said Kathi Gaines, director of information management-finance for Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina. "Lawson's multi-tiered architecture is way ahead of the competition and will let us use technology to put operational efficiencies in place that will help us respond to the pressures of an ever-changing healthcare industry."

Lawson executives credit the deep investigative efforts by software buyers that are leading them to pare through the sometimes intentional blurring of architectures and web capabilities by competitors lagging in the new technologies. "Companies like Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina are seeing through the marketing smoke," said Richard Lawson, chairman of Lawson Software and executive vice- president of Internet products. "Our customers are those that scratch below the surface of the various marketing messages. It's not hard to see that companies just entering the Web arena now after frantically upgrading architectures to three-tier designs, are not going to be in a position of catch-up for many years to follow. In fact, other vendors will have to rearchitect to become multi-tiered before they can even meet companies like Lawson half-way on the Web."

Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina will begin accessing the Web with standard on-line purchase requisitions. By utilizing the potential of corporate intranets through Employee and Manager Self-Service Centers, they will increase overall efficiencies and productivity throughout the company.

"Lawson continues to surprise its high-end enterprise software market competitors with the sophistication and value of its Web-based solutions," said Edward Black, director of enterprise business applications, Aberdeen Group. "The company's comprehensive, yet highly adaptable technology infrastructure has allowed it to move past simple self-service web-forms and -- based on its Self-Evident Application(TM) technologies -- deliver the first commerce-capable, Web-process applications ."

Lawson's OLAP (on-line analytical processing) integration will give Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina a flexible, packaged information delivery solution for complex financial analysis. It will also provide dynamic, multi-dimensional analysis of consolidated enterprise data in the form of data "cubes." The cubes enable analysts, managers and executives to gain insight into business operations through fast, consistent, interactive access to a wide variety of information.

In June, Lawson Software was ranked number 40 of the top 100 healthcare information systems vendors by Healthcare Informatics magazine. With a growth rate of nearly 160 percent in license fees in the healthcare sector for fiscal year 1997 (ended May 31, 1997), Lawson is among the top 10 fastest growing vendors in the healthcare information systems marketplace. The company was also named number one in web enterprise product revenue for 1996 by International Data Corporation.

Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina purchased the LAWSON INSIGHT Financial Suite, Procurement Suite and LAWSON INSIGHT OLAP(TM) The solution will run on IBM's RS6000/SP2 hardware and an Oracle database.

Lawson Software, the Web Enterprise Company(TM), is a $140 million provider of Web-deployable client/server business solutions to healthcare organizations. With several hundred healthcare market customers including industry leaders Memorial Healthcare System, Sutter Health and Peninsula Regional Medical Center, Lawson is the healthcare market's leading provider of mid-to-large-sized enterprise application software solutions. Lawson markets and supports a healthcare-specific version of its LAWSON INSIGHT product line which includes Activity-Based Management and Web procurement capabilities that provide rapid return on investment to companies in this industry. Additional information about Lawson Software and its products and services is available on the company's Web site, URL: http://www.lawson.com, or by calling [phone].

Lawson and LAWSON INSIGHT are registered trademarks of Lawson Software. Other company and product names are the trademarks of their respective companies.

CONTACT: Lawson Software, Minneapolis

Judith Rothrock, Vice President,

Corporate Communications

203/459-4774

[e-mail]

or

Nancy Harrower, Director,

Corporate Communications

612/362-4766

[e-mail]

Alison Minaglia, ARM Communications

203/328-9695

[e-mail]