 Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE. Covering IFS World Conference 2018, brought to you by IFS. Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of IFS World Conference 2018 here in Atlanta, Georgia. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Jeff Frick. It's been a great day here. We've had a lot of wonderful conversations, great panels. Last one to go. You can tell that the atmosphere is getting. Reeling out all the alcohol, I think, for the reception this evening. But we have saved best for last. We have Dan Matthews, who is the CTO of IFS, and Bas Davos, who is the director of IFS Labs. So Bas and Dan, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you, you're welcome. So, I want to talk, we've heard a lot about IFS Apps 10, and this is the big news, but what we haven't talked about too much is arena. Can you describe to our viewers this new user experience and what it means? All right, well, IFS arena, like you said, it's a new user experience for IFS applications, and that's something that's really important to us, because it's important to our customers, because what they want to do, is they want to put great tools in the hands of the people, right? And we all know when it comes to software, how great a tool is, is a large part down to the user experience. Right, right. So, that's what we've done it, and what we've done is create something that we think is more inspired by really well-designed consumer software, but we've adapted that for these big enterprise applications that we are doing. It's pretty amazing in your keynote, because you showed, I think, five different UIs based on different devices in the prior versions, where now you're coming to, you know, kind of a standardized single, this Aurora experience across various platforms or across various devices to actually interact with the application, and that's got to feel good to get that down to a kind of one responsive design. And to a degree, that's just resending to realities, right? Right. Because you used to think about, you had your PC, and you had a way of doing that, and then your mobile app will maybe, I mean, people are using so many different kinds of devices today, so if we were to purpose-build something, you know, just for your iPad, something for your phone, something for this, something for your TV, we'd be safe forever, right? So what we did instead is we said, let's build one experience that actually adapts to all these different environments and get that really, really well. It's not that easy, but in the end, you know, it's a much better way of approaching it. Right, and I thought the part that I liked was, you know, when you're new to something, you don't necessarily want a high density of information in a screen or whatever, because you're just not, you're not sure you're learning whatever it's new, but then as you become more experienced, obviously your comfort zone goes up, you want a lot more dense information, and really, in your world platform you demoed earlier today, you have a lot of options, whether you want kind of the more consumer-y, more pictur-y, less efficient way, or do you want the, you know, I know this well, and I want the thick content. And what we've basically done is we flipped it upside down, because if you look at enterprise software and ERP and asset management and these kind of stuff, it always used to be designed for the professional, right? And then you would try to simplify it for the newbies that are coming into the business. Can we remove some things, hide some things away, configure some things? Now we're done it the other way around. So the default is it's designed for the novice person that's just coming in, seeing this for the first time, and then as you learn, as you say, you can expand and grow and make it sort of, you know, more rich in the data you're seeing. And this is really, really important, right? Because people aren't staying that long in the jobs anymore. You know, so if you think about people moving around, they know the business, but they might not know the business application. So the ability to come in, I'm a purchasing guy, come in, pick up the purchasing system directly, that's really, really important. Right. Needs to be intuitive. Yeah, make it intuitive first, and then, you know, progressively let people discover more, rather than give all the options and all the complexity and expect them to simplify it. That's harder. So Baz, I want to talk to you a little bit about the development process and how you come up with these kinds of things. Can you describe how it works at IFS Labs? What approach you take? Yeah, yeah, of course. And then perhaps Dan can add to this a little bit later as well, but because IFS Labs is just a part of the process, right? But if you look in our general development process, for us it's very important to stay close to our customers, right? What do our customers need today? What do they need tomorrow? And we have to basically be able to deliver the functionality they need for their problems right on time. And IFS Labs plays a part in that. We are basically ahead of that curve. We're sitting before that. So we approach it a little bit the other way around. So instead of looking at a customer problem and trying to find a solution for that, we basically look ahead. We look a couple of years in the future. What kind of technologies are coming up? What kind of possibilities are there? And can we find a problem for it? And that sounds strange, right? Because we're not in the business of finding problems. But it does allow us to experiment and come up innovative solutions that might work for tomorrow. But before we actually move that into production or hand it over to regular R&D development, well, we do step back and go to our customers and say, hey, wait a minute, this is what we are thinking, Labs. What do you think about that? Does it work for you? Does it help you and validate it with them? So it's an interesting challenge for Labs, for looking down the road, because I think Steve Jobs is a famous quote that we don't necessarily deliver just what our customers ask for. They're not asking for things that are down the road. So you've got that responsibility to look down the road. On the other hand, nobody likes technology that doesn't have a problem to solve. So you've got to be delicate, because if you just build something for the sake of building something, maybe there's some ancillary value, but at the end of the day, someone's got to use it and they've got to drive direct value. So how do you kind of play that balance beyond, yes, we listen to customers, but there's this other stuff coming that maybe they're not too aware of? Yeah, that's true, totally true. I completely agree with you. And I think that is the role of IFAS Labs, right? So if you look in the overall process, the fact that we have a labs with an experience and license to experiment with trying out stuff, validating that with our customers, we can basically, yeah, try that out before we actually take a decision to build something that our customers are not waiting for. So exactly the problem you just sketched, I think that our answer is IFAS Labs. Yeah, to resolve that. We've seen this happening throughout history, right? If you look at how IET started, for us it started with a product in IFAS Labs, with together with one customer, learning and understanding how this should be applied to the kind of businesses and industries that we serve. And then it went into mainstream R&D development and then we have real solutions and now we have customers who've been live for years using this kind of stuff. So that is exactly the process we want to have. Try it out and when we have a grasp on how this relates to our customers, then we up the next level of investment and take it further. And similarly, we had projects in IFAS Labs that we tried out and after a couple of months or even longer, we said, this is not going to work for our customers, it's actually not helping them today. Might be a couple of years from now, but today, let's stop it. So was this how your kind of integration of AI and machine learning into the applications took place? You look forward, this is a cool new thing. We need to play. At the same time, we're not going to name it after a smart dead guy. But really bake it into the applications where it makes the most sense. And that sounds like that's kind of your execution strategy. Yeah, definitely. And AI is a very, very, very big topic, right? It's an umbrella for so many different types of applications. So then was talking this morning about the three main areas where we think AI makes most sense for our products. It's basically human machine interaction, predictive maintenance and service and automation. But each of those areas, they basically have their own life cycle, right? So if you look at human machine interaction at the morning, this morning we were talking about the AI of a Serena bot. We're actually in a proper development phase. So that's much further ahead in that cycle while other AI related topics, like doing mass automation on a European level, that's earlier in the cycle and that's still in lab. So although AI is a big umbrella topic, the different topics in there follow that same approach. Can you be a little more specific about the projects you're working on or is it top secret? At the World Conference, everybody wants to know our secrets, right? Luckily at the World Conference, we share them. So this is between us four. Yeah, nobody's listening, right? We're watching. So yeah, at this World Conference, we're hosting an innovation area. And in the innovation area, we're showcasing a wide range of basically possible technologies and how you could apply them to future business. We basically took the approach of depicting an end-to-end autonomous business. So basically go all the way from mining stuff in a mine in the ground to using that in a factory to producing products for the customer. And we basically build all kinds of technologies in there to make that completely autonomous. Might not all be possible today, but it's really there to inspire our customers to look ahead. Some examples of the things we're using, a blockchain inside enterprise asset management. Mixed reality with Microsoft HoloLens to do service repairs. Digital twins in virtual reality. Autonomous vehicles. So there's a lot of interesting stuff going on there. That's great. Those are all the great buzzwords, but you put them all within application. They're not just stand, they're just stand alone. What it does really well is it kind of illustrates how these technologies are used in context, you know, all of these things. It's super. You are an IFS veteran. You came as a developer and now here you are CTO. Tell our viewers a little bit about how the company has changed in your opinion and also now as you are sort of making a bigger push into North America. What we can expect? Well, what has changed, if I go back, I've not been with this company for more than 20 years. But what has changed is we've got a lot more professional course. I mean, we're a bigger organization now. And the way we run things, the way the business is run is a lot more professional. You go back to the late 90s, this was before the dot-com boom. You know, everybody was pouring money into the IT industry. So that was not an objective. So we were doing R&D, but we were also burning money. And I think after that bubble burst, we will learn to become proper business people as well. I'll tell you one thing that hasn't changed, though, and that really is the kind of atmosphere that's within the company, right? That how close we are to our customers and how the customer's reality always comes first and how we will help each other support. I mean, that really hasn't changed, you know, despite the fact we're so much bigger and we're 20 years on and all that kind of stuff. So why do you think? Because maintaining culture is really, really difficult. And we go to a lot of shows and we often talk about, you know, if it's a founder led and if they're a good CEO too, you know, double benefit to keep that culture. But when you got turned over at the top, you know, how do you maintain the culture that you guys have built? I think in the beginning, I think it was a lot of that founder led, right? It was really led by the founders and one of the founders was a CEO for many, many years. But then it kind of got ingrained a little bit, maybe in the Scandinavian culture that is quite, you know, open, quite sort of, you know, friendly, helpful, not so hierarchical. And that then sort of spread out as the business expanded internationally. And we kept it also on the R&D side. We do a lot of R&D in Sri Lanka, for example, which has a surprisingly similar feeling in the culture actually. So I think it just got so big and so strong in the company that it just naturally, you know, new people come in, you naturally sort of carry on with that same way of being that we've had it before. Yeah, it's great. They adopted and embraced it. Because that was Dan, Dan said when he was doing his due diligence, right? The culture was a huge piece of why he came to the company. They're the way around, right? We've seen that when we brought businesses in as well, right? That it's, right, these guys have a similar culture, that's great, fantastic, you know, business to bring into the IFS family. Yeah, that's what we're going to say. Yeah, I was going to say, in the end, also you're attracting people to your company and the people that are staying are also the people that feel at home and that feel comfortable I'm a little bit shorter than inside the company for two years now. But basically, I feel the same with the culture, right? And it fits me as a person and therefore I think I'm inclined to stay longer with IFS than if the culture would not fit me. And as you attract people with the same mindset together, it only gets stronger. Great. Well, Dan and Baz, thank you so much. This has been a really fun last panel of the day. So we appreciate it. My dear. Good luck on your keynote on Thursday. Thank you very much. I'm Rebecca Knight for Jeff Frick. This has been IFS World Conference 2018. We will have more after this.