>> Announcer: Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's the Cube.
Covering IFS World Conference 2018.
Brought to you by IFS.
>> Welcome back to the Cube's live coverage
of IFS World Conference 2018 here in Atlanta, Georgia.
I'm your host, Rebecca Knight.
We have a three-guest panel with us today.
We have Mark Boulton who is the CMO,
Antony Bourne, vice-president Global Industries Solutions,
and Brian Sommer who is an analyst at TechVentive.
Thank you so much for joining us, gentlemen.
I really appreciate it.
>> Happy to be here, thank you.
>> Happy to be here, yeah.
>> So this is a big, big event for IFS,
WOCO, as it's known.
So talk a little bit about what you're hearing already
from customers and feedback that you're getting.
>> Sure, well the first thing is
that everyone's told us Atlanta was a great choice
of venue. >> Rebecca: This time of year
in particular.
>> Well, just flown in actually, from London
where the weather is not this good.
But, we've had really good feedback so far
and still only at the end of the first morning.
But the opening keynotes and the reveal
of IFS Apps 10 went really well.
I think most people have been really pleased
with the content that they're seeing on the whole.
So feedback is good.
We know it's a big investment in time
and time out of the office for our customers
to come here.
So we need to make sure that it's time well spent,
that they get value.
And so far, the feedback is really good.
They're learning stuff,
they're seeing things for the first time.
They're meeting their peers and connecting.
So it's good.
>> And before the cameras were rolling,
we were talking about the customers interacting
with each other.
Not only just you and telling you
how they're using your product,
but also interacting with each other
and talking about things that they have learned
and sites that they have gleaned.
So can you describe a little bit about what's happening?
>> And that's a key thing
because we love our customers,
we love getting them together,
we love them talking to each other.
It's not just taking it from our words
and taking it for granted,
we want them to share the experience,
we want them to say,
okay, what to do in this scenario?
How did you overcome this?
So these events are fantastic.
I've just been talking to a customer, now, before lunch,
about how they want to upgrade based on
what they've already seen.
And we're only halfway through day one.
And it's just like,
I want to talk to my account manager,
I want a meeting about what we're going to do
and when we're going to be doing it.
So it's a fantastic event, fantastic.
>> So, how about you?
What are you seeing in terms of this new release
with IFS 10.
I mean, what interests you most as an analyst?
>> Well, I've got some clients who specifically ask me
to be on the lookout for some things over here
at today's show.
And one of them was around the new user experience
on release 10 product.
They're looking for something that's a richer web-based
kind of mobile type of experience,
or consumer-user interface experience for them.
And I think they'll be happy
with what's been announced over here today.
It will come out in phases, obviously,
but it works on everything now.
Every kind of device
and that's what the client wanted to see.
And I'll report that back.
>> Just to echo what Brian said,
we've had customers already contacting us about
because there is a certain functionality
which we've introduced to IFS Applications 10,
which they really, really want
so they've actually said okay
even before we announced it,
which we let them have some indication
of what was happening
and they said, we need that, we want that.
So its future is looking really good
for upgrades, as well as new customers.
>> One of the things that we keep hearing a lot
of how customer-focused, how customer-centric
IFS is as a company.
The metrics speak for themselves
in terms of your NPS scores and the Gartner insights.
So how, as CMO, how are you going to get the word out, really?
Because IFS is kind of known one of the best kept secrets
in the industry.
>> And it's true that we don't have
quite the brand recognition that maybe some
of the huge, massive competitors have.
But, within our industries, we are very well known
and we're known for all the right things.
Great products, well-implemented and well-supported.
We are leaders in a lot of the markets in which we play.
Events like this is actually one
of the key objectives for us.
Is to have a good presence from analysts and journalists,
the influencers, we call them.
We like to think we look after them very well.
They get the inside track on things that we're working on.
So we use a lot of tools to actually spread the word.
But, our biggest advocates are our customers.
The people that have our software and have worked with us,
they genuinely do love the products.
And for those that were in the main room this morning
when we launched--
Dan Matthews, our CTO,
he said one of our core objectives is
to design a product that people love.
And so literally our customers will go out,
as our NPS scores indicate as you mentioned,
they will do the job for us.
They tell people; they tell them very positive things
about their experience.
We did some studies.
The majority of our customers actually
are more profitable than people
than use our competitor products.
They're must faster time to solution and things like that.
So these are the things that our customers are saying
about us and these are good things
to be talked about for.
>> Right.
Brian, what would you say should be keeping companies
up at night.
I mean, IFS is doing a lot of the right things.
As you said, you're going to report back,
the customer will probably be happy with what they hear.
But what are some of the things that maybe
customers are saying or customers are needing
that you're hearing?
That kind of feedback that maybe IFS--
what would be sort of your best advice for the future?
>> Well, I think IFS plays in a bunch
of different parts of the world.
There is no single answer that will solve
every customer in every part of the planet.
And there are some very realistic problems
that some companies have
in areas where there's spotty electric power,
or spotty internet access, and the like.
They're going to probably continue
to want a non-premise kind of solution.
There are others in developing countries
where they've clearly bypassed an entire generation,
or two, of technology and they want to straight into cloud.
And I know these guys,
they've got a number of different cloud modules,
or applications, in field services, one of those areas.
And field service is a great one for the cloud,
simply because that's what business is all about.
It's about a bunch of people carrying tablets,
and cell phones, smart phones, whatever,
in and out of customer locations.
That's fine.
But by-and-large, what do the clients want?
Well, I think what they want more than anything nowadays,
they want to get out of the data-center business
and more and more clients are looking
at utility computing.
And they're expecting vendors, eventually,
to get them out of maintaining and running data centers
because they have more confidence that vendors,
and or partner technology provider can do a better job
at web-security, maybe,
than they could in-house by themselves.
>> Just to echo that.
>> I think one of the key differentiators
from the IFS offering is the fact
that we give our customers choice.
We say, what do you want?
We have the solution for you.
Do you want it on prem?
Do you want is SAS?
Do you want it in the cloud?
What is best for you?
So that's where we can offer the customers
something different than what some of competition may offer.
>> Right.
>> And just one more thing on that topic.
And Darren mentioned it in his keynote this morning.
But in North America, 50% of their customers
are deploying on cloud, now.
And that's core ELP.
But in FSN, it's not quite 100%, but it's almost.
And that's not dependent on the geography.
Wherever we sell that product in the world,
most people are choosing to deploy on cloud.
So that is really real now, that trend.
People see the benefits.
I think, obviously, the majority of the industry
and markets, and cloud solutions, now.
But there really are tangible benefits
and I think the customers have got it, now.
And the move is real.
>> If I can add on, I think one of the big things
that is changing, is that customer after customer,
client, client, I go to, they got a name
for a project they want to take on.
It can be the factory, the future,
it could be a modernization, ERP modernization,
or IT modernization.
It could be a process transformation,
digital transformation, business process redesign,
whatever.
They've all got a name for something.
They don't know quite what it is,
they really have a hard time defining it.
But, they're on this journey
and what they're looking for is more than just
a basic transaction processing ERP product.
They want something that will handle,
like, IOT technology.
They want connectors that connect up things
beyond the four walls of the enterprise.
They want to connect up to their assets
as well as to assets that are out in the field,
either with customers, what have you.
And that's really where the future of this base
is going right now.
>> One of the things that we've also heard
about in the keynote was the real emphasis
on time-to-value.
The customer really wants to be able to see a return
on investment almost immediately.
Is it difficult to keep up?
It's almost an unrealistic expectation
to see that value right away.
>> I think it's down to what solution they're trying to solve
and the ease of use; the implementation.
And as we've said, from an IFS point of view,
we want users to love the application.
That means it needs to be easier to use.
With what we've introduced today,
with IFS Applications 10,
does make it easier for customers and users
to actually get the benefits out of their solution
as quickly as possible.
>> And are you able to keep up with the pace of change?
How do you keep up, I mean to say?
>> There are a number of different ways.
Because we focus on our core industries,
we belong to industry organizations,
we often have customer advisory meetings
at customer premises.
Because we invite all the customers to it,
or as many as we can so that we can talk to them,
they can give us feedback about what they want
to see in a product going forward,
and we can channel that,
in addition to the trends that we see in the industry.
Because we have a lot of people
that have come from the industry,
they have that experience embedded in them.
So they know what the industry wants.
But we need to keep up with the trends
to ensure we give them that benefit
once they implement the solution.
>> And one of the things I would add is that time-to-value
is improved if the product is a good fit in the first place.
If you've got to do a lot of modifications--
first you're adding in cost, you're also adding time,
and complexity and risk to the project.
And the industry expertise that Andy talks about,
which comes in from a number of directions
into our RND and it's reflected in our product.
At least we've done a number of charts over
the last few versions of our software.
And if you go back like 10 or 15 years,
you'd see that maybe, 25%, 30% of the project
was going into modifying the software
to make it do what the customer needed
before they could even turn it on live.
Today, we have a lot of clients who've upgraded
from eight to nine, or now nine to ten,
and they've literally--
they're running standard software.
And so there, your time-to-solution is really rapid.
It's as quick as you can move data and so on.
But if you're not modifying it, that's key.
>> That's the key, exactly.
Well, Mark, Antony, Brian,
thank you so much for joining us,
it's been a great conversation.
>> Thank you. >> Thank you very much.
>> No problem.
>> I'm Rebecca Knight.
We will have much more from IFS World Conference
just after this.
(upbeat techno music)