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>> Hey, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage from Miami
of IFS Unleashed 2022, Lisa Martin here with you.
We've had great conversations today with IFS execs,
customers, partners.
Our ecosystem is quite robust and quite strong.
And we've had some alumni on,
I've got another alumni who's back with me,
Michael Ouissi, the group's COO of IFS.
Michael, welcome back to theCUBE.
>> Thanks for having us, my pleasure.
>> It's great to be back in-person.
>> Absolutely. >> It was great to walk
into the keynote this morning and see a full room.
I was talking with Darren Roos,
your CEO earlier this morning and I said,
it must have felt great to walk out
on stage and actually see a sea of people and customers
and partners who want to engage
and get that relationship with IFS just turbocharged.
>> Absolutely, I mean, it's been three years,
we haven't had this buzz, this energy,
and the opportunity to actually see all our customers
and also show our customers who we are, how we are evolving
and how we're becoming a different company
over the past four years.
>> And it's impressive what IFS has done in that timeframe.
All the conversations I've had today,
really reflect the strategy, the strong strategy
and vision that this company has.
But I was looking at some of the financials
and saw that your first half of 2022, which ended in June,
there was tremendous growth.
ARR up 33%, I think they're recurring revenue
is in the 70 percentile now.
Lot of new customers, a lot of of trust
that existing customers are showing to the company.
>> Yeah, absolutely.
Look, and I think the secret sauce is that
we have focused on where our strengths are,
we haven't gone astray,
we haven't tried to actually capture growth
in any other vertical.
We are really very religious about where we're going
and there, where we are going, we are going deep
and we really are trying to be the best version
of ourselves for our customers
and for those customers' business transformation needs.
>> Talk a little bit about that vertical specialization.
It's something that we don't see very often
but throughout all of my conversations today
with your executives, IFS executives, with customers,
with partners, that domain expertise,
really the granularity of the domain expertise
is really resonant that IFS has achieved that
in those five key verticals
in which you have such specialization.
>> Yeah, look, I mean, I would love to take credit
for having been the person who has done that,
but IFS has over the past 35 years,
really had this very strong focus.
But what actually was important when you try
to double a business in the space of four years,
not to be tempted to go away from that
but actually double down on exactly that
and see the opportunity in those verticals and make sure
that our customers actually are getting
the attention and the functionality they deserve.
>> Let's talk about customers.
Over 10,000 customers right now.
I was also in the keynote this morning
where Christian Peterson was sharing that,
in its first 18 months, IFS Cloud has over 400,000 users.
So the growth is tremendous.
The customer loyalty is ostensible in those verticals.
Talk about customers and their influence on the company,
the direction the technology goes, the evolution,
that kind of stuff.
>> Yeah, I mean, look, as I said,
we are all about the depth of the functionality
and that means that we need to listen to our customers,
We need to listen what's going on in the industries.
We also need to not just listen
but we need to think forward.
>> Yeah.
>> We need to have some thought leadership
on what we think is going to emerge
and then test that with our customers again.
So our customers are at the core of everything we do.
When we engage with a customer,
we start with trying to understand their business in depth.
We've got our own methodology around that
and we don't just try to push technology onto them,
but we are trying to understand
what are their business drivers
and then actually try to apply technology
to what enables them to deliver
on those business transformation objectives they've got.
>> What are some of the changes or the waves
that you've seen, especially the last couple of years
during the pandemic when we saw so many customers pivot,
we need to transform digitally to stay alive,
and then those that did that well enough to be competitive
and to thrive, talk to me about some
of the changes as the group's COO that you've seen.
>> Yeah, so when you go back,
I mean, there's two types of transformation,
business and digital transformation
but they are the same thing,
they're just a different side of the coin.
And when I talk about business transformation,
what we're seeing a lot is,
and there's this big buzzword overtization out there,
but customers going service
and customers trying to build an end to end business
that is more viable, more sustainable,
more successful in how they develop great moments
of service for their customers,
that is something we are seeing a lot.
And during this business transformation,
digital transformation has become a means to that end.
And that is something where customers have matured a lot,
where in the past we have seen a lot of the IOT,
AI, machine learning, cloud,
everything was a means or a purpose in itself
and that has changed.
It's now become actually a means to an end.
It's become a means to actually deliver
a business transformation and a business outcome
that is meaningful for their customers.
>> Has to be meaningful for their customers.
I love how IFS talks about enabling your customers
to deliver those moments of service.
And when we think of, in our consumer lives,
many of us flew here, and you think about
what's the moment of service for an airline?
Well, it's being able to get on that plan on time,
have it leave on time
and meet my expectations as a demanding consumer.
But regardless if we're talking about aerospace,
energy, manufacturing, engineering,
the customers on the other end expect to have
an integrated seamless experience that's not fragmented,
that is able to deliver moments of service
that then help drive up their revenue.
So what IFS is doing is so embedded
in what your customers are able to deliver
to their customers.
>> Yeah, absolutely.
And look, if you look at all the things
that have to come together to actually
have a plane taken off at the right point in time
or if you take any other examples,
but there's so many things that need to go right.
Crew scheduling, you need to have the right crew
at the right point in time.
You need to have them actually
with the right experience to fly the right plane.
You need to have airplane maintenance going right
to have the plane available at the right point in time
and no technical failures and so on and so forth.
And we look at that as between customers, the people,
and the assets that an organization has,
you need to coordinate between all those dimensions
in everything you do to make sure that this one moment
of service where your plane takes off on time,
you actually catch your connecting flight
at the other end, that this actually is being delivered.
And that's what drives us,
that's what customers are driving
into our product development, into how we embed AI,
machine learning and so on in our technology
to make it relevant to exactly that moment of service.
>> That's what we as those consumers want.
We want relevance, we want personalization,
we want that relationship to know who we are
and how to serve us best.
Let's dig into the Jotun case study.
He was going to join us, our CEO was going to join us,
couldn't make it.
Talk to me a little bit about Jotun,
what type of business is it and then let's kind
of start unpacking how they're leveraging IFS technology.
>> Yeah, so Jotun is the seventh largest paints
and coatings manufacturer in the world.
And they've got obviously a home decoration part
of the business, but they've got an industrial part
of the business where one large part
of the business is also a marines part.
So they actually provide paints, coating,
for all sorts of large ships and it's quite astonishing
what you learn about that customer.
I mean, we are now partnering
with them for more than 20 years,
so we are very intimate with that customer obviously.
But when you see all of a sudden, three, four years ago,
they started going onto a journey where they looked at apart
from paint and coating, what actually can I provide
to my customer in the marine industry
to actually make their business more efficient,
to actually make it easier for them to get a ship
from A to B in an efficient way, in a timely way and so on.
And they developed something called Hull Skating Solutions
and those Hull Skating Solutions are integrating all sorts
of weather data, all sorts of other data
and provide them to the marine companies
that actually then help them drive this...
Well, actually get this ship
in a more efficient way from A to B.
And at the same time, also where there's predictions
as to when you need to clean that ship,
and they've got Hull Skating Solutions,
which then actually clean the ship automatically as well.
So it's quite an astonishing thing
for a paints and coating manufacturer
to then think about what do I need to know
about my customer's business
to provide that additional service to my customer?
Great solution and great way of dealing with
or delivering that great moment
of service to their customers.
>> Absolutely, the evolution of that business
from paint manufacturing into the marine industry
is not a stretch based on how you described it,
but it's very innovative.
How is IFS enabling them to do that and do it well?
>> Well, one, they went on a modernization program
for all their factories for all these kinds of things
that they need to integrate then deliver to their customers.
And we are in the central part in being that agile partner
that actually delivers those technology solutions
that enable them to, well, first of all think about
that service, provide that service to their customers
and make sure that they run a very efficient,
very integrated version of IFS
and can actually harmonize globally to make sure
that wherever the customer is,
they can deliver on that promise.
>> Fantastic, let's talk a little bit about
from your team's perspective, the go to market.
We talked about the five verticals
in which IFS specializes energy, aerospace and defense,
engineering, manufacturing and there's one I'm missing.
>> Utilities.
>> Utilities, of course.
>> Yeah.
>> In terms of the domain expertise,
are there vertical teams that are focused?
I imagine that there are,
talk to me a little bit about that specialization
from that lens.
So obviously, I mean, there are so many dimensions.
There's our sales teams, there's our pre-sales teams,
there's our industry teams which actually are working
with the customers on receiving their feedback,
on actually providing thought leadership
and then organizing the feedback loop
into our development teams who are providing
these solutions then
that hopefully our customers will cherish.
So we are very specialized in that respect.
We are driving the industry specialization.
We've got a complete aerospace and defense business unit.
We are in the market unit, specializing in the industries
where we work in the various different territories
with just those industry teams.
We've got specialization in the pre-sales teams.
So we take that really deep down and very seriously
to make sure that whenever we talk to a customer,
we also have the understanding and we have also got
the curiosity to understand more of the customer's business,
and that is something that is part of the IFS DNA.
>> It's a differentiating part of IFS' DNA
that not only having the domain expertise,
and a lot of people talk about, well,
we got to meet the customer where they are,
wherever they are digitally,
wherever they are in business transformation.
But you're actually talking the customer's language.
>> Yeah.
>> By industry, which I would imagine really helps
to not only solidify that relationship,
but you actually get to really do a double click
and get much more tightly connected
with the customers and the outcomes that they're wanting
to achieve so that those moments of service happen.
>> Well, that's so true.
And actually this is not just while we are selling
to the customers, but it's actually throughout
the whole life cycle of this application
and the technology in Jotun's case more than two decades.
And we've got a lot of customers who are actually
that long with us because we don't run away
once we've implemented a solution,
but we actually stay close to it because first of all,
we want to learn from our customers continuously.
We want to actually give to our customers also
what we are learning outside of the conversations
we have with these customers.
And we make sure that these customers continuously evolve
how they think about their business,
how they think about the application of our technology
and then in turn, we can actually develop technology again,
for their use cases.
>> It's a flywheel.
>> It's a complete flywheel and that creates loyalty.
>> Yeah.
>> That actually creates the longstanding relationships
we have with many, many of our customers, yeah.
>> I was speaking with a number of your executives,
Marni Martin was here and we were talking
about brand recognition and the loyalty,
but that intimate customer knowledge
that IFS really works hard to gain with its customers.
'Cause as consumers, we bleed into our business lives
and we have very little tolerance, very little patients.
I think that was one of the things in COVID that went away.
People were just not tolerating this rapid change
and we had no choice.
But I don't know that patience is going to come back
at the level in which we experienced it before COVID.
So customers expect businesses and brands to know them
and help anticipate what's next for me, how do I get there?
And it sounds to me like IFS has really nailed that
from a customer relationship perspective.
>> As I said, I mean it's really part of our DNA
and we try to preserve that culture
while we're doubling our business and hopefully,
doubling our business in the next three years again,
because that is really the secret sauce
to being that successful,
and not only with our existing customers,
but also with the net new customers.
And we are driving almost 50% of our revenue,
which is very, very much a benchmark in the industry
from net new customers that we're winning
while we're actually keeping or staying close
to our existing customers and try to apply that knowledge
to our net new customers.
>> Yeah.
>> But it's something that we absolutely have to preserve
to be as successful as we've been in the past four years,
also in the next four years.
>> So coming off a great first half in the summer,
when I teased Darren, "Any nuggets you want to say?"
He said financials for Q3 are coming out
in the next couple of weeks.
And I said, I imagine that trajectory
is up and to the right.
>> Yeah. >> What are some of the things,
Michael, that excite you
for where you've seen this company go in your time there
and the rocket ship that it seems to be on today?
>> Yeah, look, I mean, what's amazing to me is...
And if I look back, I joined four and a half years ago,
and only the first one and a half years
were under normal circumstances.
>> Right.
>> The other three years were a major pandemic,
now a major war and recession and we've got all sorts
of economic and macroeconomic headwinds.
And what what impresses me about the company,
about our customers, about our employees
is the resilience we've got to just carry on
with what we're doing.
And I mean, I don't give too much away when I say
we had a pretty good Q3 as well,
and we are looking forward to a really good 2022
as a full year, and there are no excuses that actually
the organization makes, it has just taken along.
And we are facing the economic headwinds
and we are going through that time hugely successful.
And I'm very optimistic about the year
and about 2023 as much.
>> Fantastic, it's kind of hard to believe
that calendar year 2023 is literally around the corner.
But Michael, it's been great having you on theCUBE.
Thank you for coming back, talking about what's going
on at IFS from the overall COO's perspective,
the customer synergies that IFS has,
the work that you do to really get granular
in those industries, it's impressive
and congratulations on the success.
We'll have to have you back next year
to talk about what else is new.
>> Thank you very much, Lisa.
>> All right, my pleasure. >> Thank you.
>> For Michael Ouissi, I'm Lisa Martin,
you're watching theCUBE's coverage live
from Miami on the show floor of IFS Unleashed.
We'll be back with our final guest in just a minute.
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