 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. We are joined by Darren Roos. You are the CEO of IFS. Thanks so much for joining us, Darren. Great to be here. Thanks for making time. So the conference is buzzy. We're really picking up a lot of excitement here. But I want to talk about you just starting a CEO in April, brand new to the role. What drew you to the role? You know, as I did my due diligence on IFS, what you found was there was a customer base that was super engaged with what we were doing. If you look on Gartner peer insights website as an example, we're the top ranked ERP solution amongst our peers. If you look at our NPS scores, we have a 34% bump on our top five competitors. So when you have the opportunity to lead a business of scale with half a billion euros in revenue, with a super happy customer base, that's a great opportunity. So, you know, I couldn't pass it up. So it was, and this is something that you also talked a lot about in your keynote and the number, the metrics speak for themselves, but it's the customer focus, the relentless customer focus. How do you maintain that? I mean, what is the secret sauce? Yeah, you know, I think it's not one thing. It's loads of different things. You can think about the business model that we have, but another data point that I love about the business that the average tenure of our employees is nine years, right? And to really understand ERP, to understand how our customers are using the technology, you have to have tenure, you have to have account managers and pre-sales people and consultants who've had the time to engage with the business, to go on this journey with them, to understand how the technology works, how the industry works, and really be able to move the needle in a meaningful way. And you know, most of our peers just don't have that tenure. They're focused on other things. And I think that the fact that we're able to bring in young talents, like we saw Tyler on stage this morning, talking about the technology, but with great people like Amy on stage who have had great experience with our customers, that balance of tenure and experience and innovation is really how we've managed to drive those results. It's a really hard thing to maintain because they've got to feel engaged, obviously, with their customers and feel good about having, hoping their customers, but they've also got to feel really good about the management and the company behind them that enables them to deliver the innovation, to be engaged and to have that institutional knowledge. Because if you lose the institutional knowledge, both the customer's institutional knowledge, as well as your own organization, it's really hard to replicate and expensive. Yeah, look, it's difficult to do. And the reality is it might be expensive to replace the people, but you can't replace the knowledge, right? You just can't do it. So, you know, we've been nominated as a great place to work for the last nine years, I think it is. So, you know, the fact that we've able to maintain that status together with the customer satisfaction scores are really the reason why we have the buzz that we do here today. So, this is your first World Co, World Conference, as you're calling it. What do you hope attendees come away with? Yeah, look, you know, we're not as big as some of our peers. And I think it's really important that our customers come away from this understanding that they've bought the best technology that there is in the market. And really, when we talk about the Gartner Peer Insights rankings, that's the validation for me. I'm not talking about, you know, some nebulous metric that I invented. You know, if our customers say we're the best or the customers in the market say we're the best, then that's a good validation for me. So, the customers that come here and the partners that come here can be proud of the fact that we are the number one in this industry when it comes to the quality of solution that we deliver. So, that's one thing that I want them to know. And then another thing that is really unique about IFS is that we don't sell software. We sell an outcome. When we engage with the customer, they have a specific business benefit that they're wanting to derive. And we stick with them, we really partner with them to deliver that outcome. And again, I say that in a very meaningful way because a very large proportion of our business are the services to implement our own software. So, we work very closely with our ecosystem of partners in order to deliver it, but we're always on the hook to deliver that customer success, too. So, those two messages for me are, you have great technology, be confident in what you've bought. It's recognized as the best on the market and know that IFS will always be in your corner. I was just going to ask about the culture because you also talked about that being one of the things that really drew you to IFS. And the need for candor, too. So, how do you make sure that customers are telling you things, even sometimes things you don't necessarily want to hear? Because you also made a point of saying that on stage. Come on, talk to me, I want to hear it. Look, I think how you encourage that, and this is my leadership style, is not to become defensive and to show customers that when they give you that feedback, that you value it and you take action. And I think that's a very self-fulfilling approach to take. So, I'm a straight shooter, I've always have been. It's what my reputation is. And I think that it's a good match with the IFS culture because that just tell it how it is approach is how IFS typically does things. And you know what, I think it comes from the fact that we're a Swedish company and it's a very open culture, a very straightforward and honest culture. It's not hierarchical. And that's a good fit with the way I like to run the business. It's still hard though because nobody wants to tell the boss bad news, right? So, I mean, the fact that you have that, and it's the right thing is to actively search out the negative, right? To actively look for people. No one told them that they don't like to tell the boss bad news. No, people are quite happy to tell me the bad news when there's bad news to tell me, no, no. Well, that's the only way you can fix it, right? Absolutely. So, I want to kind of talk about digital transformation. I could probably drop about 100 buzzwords with IoT and cloud and AI and dead smart people that get branded interesting things. But really, it comes down to something you talked about in the keystone. That's getting closer to the customer. Getting close to the end user. Whether that's you and your customers or your customers and the consumers of their products. How do you see, I mean, is that really the essence of digital transformation? Is the enablement of getting closer to the end customer? I think that proximity to the customer is a major trend that we see. And whether it's through servitization of product or whether it's through the example that I gave on stage this morning with just all companies, whether they B2B or B2C, getting to know their customers better, I think it's a trend that we see. But really, the IFS philosophy is don't worry about the buzzword. Don't think about AI or about IoT or about any of these things. Think about the business problem. Think about the business pain that you're experiencing and then let's figure out a way to leverage technology to solve that problem. When you have the business pain in mind, whether that's an inflated cost base or whether you're trying to drive incremental revenue, trying to launch a new product, whatever it is, then it's much easier to come up with a tangible benefit that you're trying to achieve and specific metrics. And that's what IFS is focused on. So on the did you know slides before the keynote started this morning, we spoke about the incredible, tangible benefits that our clients have recognized in terms of their improvements in profitability, their improvements in revenue. And these are specific metrics and we track them because we're engaged with customers focused on that outcome. So I think from my perspective, forget about the buzzwords, really focus on what the business pain is that you're trying to solve and then leverage technology to solve that problem and measure whether you've managed to solve the problem. And that's how they should focus. And very often today, in a disproportionate number of cases, that's about somehow getting closer to the end user customer, understanding what they're looking for, how they want to transact, and we see that in every industry. I'm just curious from a historical perspective, you've been in ERP for a long, long time. And I remember when kind of the first big ERP wave hit, I don't know, 30 years ago, 40 years ago, you know better than I, right? There was this huge leap in productivity and efficiency. Are you amazed still today that there are these giant opportunities for efficiency improvements? It just staggers my mind that there's still so many big opportunities to squeeze so much more value out of processes and assets. I think the reality is that technology, while it is the enabler, it's also very often the inhibitor. So, you know, what we see is we see as these new technologies come on board, that we're able to unlock new capabilities that the technology just simply didn't enable before. We have a great customer, Antisemix, who are in the pest control market. And the way pest control companies at Antisemix are an example is that they would put rodent traps out, and then they'd have to sell, send field service agents around to go check whether the traps had been activated. And now they put sensors in the tracks, traps, the traps report back when they've been triggered, and they only send field service agents out to go and check when a trap has been triggered. Clearly, that's the level of efficiency when pre-sensors and pre-IOT connectors that we have today simply weren't possible. So it's really about the way in which innovation, technology is enabling us to do things that simply weren't possible before. So now, it's, you know, you can understand why it happens. Yeah, well, then the other piece that you talked about there is really kind of this API economy with, you know, connecting to very disparate databases. So that's a big piece. And then the other pieces we're surrounded here is the ecosystem. I wonder if you can speak a little to, you know, how the ecosystem plays in helping you deliver value to your customers. So IFS, as I've said before, I've always had an approach which is that we want to own the value, the outcome for the customer, the value delivery, the value assurance. And I think now what we're looking at is, is how do we leverage the ecosystem to do a bit more of the work so that we can make sure that we can scale? Because as we win bigger and bigger customers with global footprints doing bigger rollouts, they're wanting to engage with partners who perhaps have a bit more experience from an industry perspective or from a horizontal functional perspective. So, you know, as we engage with partners like Accenture or like PWC or other partners like that, it really gives us the ability to scale the business to a greater extent. So the ecosystem are critical for us in doing that. But for us, we can't compromise on the quality. It is always quality first. It's always a case of making sure that our customers will still realize the benefits while we give them some more options on how they can deploy. So the theme of this conference is connect to what's next. So we want to know what is next for IFS, particularly as you were talking about doing your due diligence, and it has these great metrics. It's kind of this best kept secret, really, in this industry. So how are you going to get the secret out? Look, I think, you know, from my personal planning perspective as CEO, we have some work to do around standardizing our operating model. At the moment, we're a fairly fragmented business. We have eight regions, and those eight regions don't all run in the same way. So we have some internal homework to do, and we'll get through that pretty quickly. After that, it's really about leveraging the global partnerships that we have. You know, Microsoft are here as an example, Accenture are here as an example, as Platinum sponsors, and leveraging those partners to get better known in the market. And those are some of the discussions that we've kicked off. And I think there's lots of ways for us to try and leverage the, you know, the secrets to, you know, try and kind of open the box a little and show people the power of what we've got. But I think we're going to, you know, we're a relatively small business store, and we're going to have to leverage those partnerships as a springboard to get to more people. And this is your first U.S. World Conference. Are you guys about other conferences in North America, but not your big one? I think they've done one there before. I think we did Boston a couple years ago. But I don't know, I think that was more kind of a North American one, maybe you're America's than the World Conference. But what I can tell you is that we're nearly twice as big this year at the World Conference as we were at the last one, and I anticipate the next one will be twice as big again. So, you know, we're seeing phenomenal growth. We're seeing strong growth in our revenues, we're strong growth in our headcounts, and we're seeing strong growth in the number of people who are interested in our technology. So, you know, things are good. Great. Well, Darren, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. We've had a great conversation. Thank you. Thanks. Thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight for Jeff Frick. We'll have more from IFS World Conference 2018 in just a little bit.