 Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE covering IFS World Conference 2019, brought to you by IFS. We're back at IFS World 2019 from the Heinz Convention Center in Boston. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host Paul Gillin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise, get the best guest, Christian Peterson of the series, the Chief Product Officer at IFS. Christian, great to see you. Thank you very much. I'm happy to be here. You're first, IFS World Conference. It is my absolute response. Yeah, I'm happy to be here. It's just like getting an injection of customer input and feedback in a very short amount of time. So that's awesome, I really love it. Yeah, these events are great to connect with customers. It's kind of one to many conversations. But give us a sense of your background and why you were attracted to IFS. Why'd you join? Well, from a background perspective, I've always been in the inflection of business and technology. And my passion has always been what we can actually do with technology for businesses to innovate, to differentiate, to do new things, to automate things. Really a strong believer in the promise of software. Because that's what software is all about. So I have a past with startups that have started EAP companies. I've been with Microsoft for 15, 16 years. I've been with SAP for a number of years. So I joined IFS last year. Really, because of the transformation and the journey IFS was on and the passion that IFS has always had for the customers and the outcomes we've created for customers is just a perfect environment to realize the dream of providing value to customers, outcomes for customers and leveraging technology in the process of doing that. You're a challenger, hashtag for the challenger. Really, I mean you were at the giant SAP and going to a smaller, not much smaller, but a smaller company, what were they doing that you thought that excited you so much? Well the exciting thing again is the focus on the customer and the close proximity to customers and everything IFS does. Wouldn't SAP, I'm sorry to interrupt, wouldn't SAP say the same thing though? Let me just, let me put it this way. I went to IFS because IFS does that really, really brilliantly. So is that a nice way of saying it? Okay. So we're here for your keynote today. You sort of laid out a roadmap, a little vision, talked a little bit about digital transformation but I wanted to talk about, you made a big, big emphasis on your API platform, open APIs, embracing that. It's been somewhat a criticism of you guys in the past and so maybe it's a response to that or a response to customers but why the platform, explain its importance and how it fits into your roadmap going forward? Well the API enablement is important from many different perspectives. First of all we use APIs ourselves to create use experiences and drive a lot of the innovation with emerging technologies and so forth. That's one aspect of it. So just for our own level of innovation and the pace of which we can innovate with going forward on an API platform is dramatic. The second area is really again back to the digital transformations that customers are really driving out there. A lot of that involves really most companies becoming software companies themselves. So now we have a lot of our customers that actually have developers, they're writing software, they're driving new offerings to their customers and to get value out of these offerings for their customers, they really need to get access to a lot of the capabilities that lives inside of the IFS models. They need to get access to data, they need to get access to processes because one of the keys in digital transformation regardless in what shape or form it comes is you need data, you need massive amounts of data and you need data from within your firewall, you need data from third party and you need structured data, unstructured data and participating in that world is absolutely essential that you have that open API philosophy where you expose yourself and your own data to APIs but also so we can turn the other way and we can consume data and APIs for others so we can create similar scenarios. So it's really about being part of the ecosystem of technologies and solutions that customers rely on and that's why we joined also the Open API Foundation. You also demonstrated this morning, Orena, your new customer experience platform, talk about what that is and why it's important. Well, so it's important of course again because we are this generational shift in people that are coming into the workforce that expect and want to work differently and if you think about how people actually work to do and get things done today or think about ourselves. We're no spring chickens anymore, like we've been around the block, we've seen DOS systems. My hand went up in a 3.1. When the 3.1, did you put the mouse on the screen as well? I've really seen that. So we've been through that but the people we get into the workforce now they have a different mentality. They're not thinking about what they do. Like we are thinking about how does the system work? Where do I click? Where do I go next? The intuition that people now apply to the system and they start working with them, the systems just have to reflect that intuition as well. It has to be intuitive, it has to be immersive as well and the immersive part is really based on what the users see, what they do, the contextual information, the contextual intelligence they get in context of what they do should want them to do more because they can. So they get dragged in and the new type of users, they just have that natural intuition because that's how you browse the web. You go to one place on the web, go to the next thing, you get inspired by this, you go there and there's no reason why the systems that you get your work done with shouldn't be the exact same thing. Arena is a huge step in that direction together with our mobile enablement on multiple form factors and devices. So you mentioned, you know, everybody's becoming a software company, every company is becoming, you've been in the software business for a while, you work for a software company now, you're talking about arena, you're talking about API integration, I showed you our software. My point is software is hard, right? There's a talent war for employees, we talked about the AdHoff camera. So as you see these companies digitally transforming, becoming software companies, Mark Andreessen's software is eating the world, Mark Benioff, everybody's becoming a software company. How are they doing? And what role can you play IFS in terms of helping them become a software company? Because it's so damn difficult. Yeah, I think the role of being a software company, I think the absolute differentiation they want to create through software and in differentiated offerings or other things that they really want to do, we can't really help them there because they're differentiated. Like if you're differentiated, you can't find something standard and use for that, but we can enable that. And as we are looking at a lot of the emerging technologies that we can enable them with to achieve it, that's a number of things we can do. And we are introducing the notion of an application services here, where we really enable these emerging technologies in the context of what we do. So while you hear about technologies of augmented reality, mixed reality, artificial intelligence and robotics and IoT and artificial intelligence, all the stuff that you have, we take that and put it in context of the focus industries that we focus on and the solution categories that we focus on. So ERP, enterprise asset management and service management. And in that way, our customers can focus on what they actually need to do with it versus focus on the technologies. And the API platform allows those customers to whatever they build to integrate to their ERP system, if in fact. That's correct. That's correct. And as I mentioned, we also use APIs not only on the front end of what we provide and expose all we have, but we also consume on the back end. So the way we actually consume the application services and drag them in and embed them is through APIs to these application services. I understand you're working on an entirely new architecture that you'll be debuting in the spring of 2020. How is that going to change the game? We don't really think about it as a new architecture. We think about it as a natural evolution that includes some of these things. So for instance, the introduction of the application services layer that I mentioned is more a new layer in our architecture we are introducing. So we don't think about it as a new architecture. We're just evolving what we have. And because of that evolution, that is something that our entire product portfolio will benefit from. And I already mentioned today how we are aligning the product portfolio from an experience perspective. We're bringing the arena experience to our FSM product, to our PSO product, to our customer engagement product and so forth. So we are aligning that front end experience on the same design patterns and so forth because a good experience is a good use experience. You talked about arena bot and I just, this gentleman here who's given us this talk just throughout a Gartner status that by whatever year, 20, 23, more money will be spent on bots than mobile integration, which was quite a prediction. Your thoughts? Well, there's always all kinds of interesting predictions. I think actually, I actually think the amount of money may go down, but I think the number of bots will go up dramatically. And I think we'll actually get to a situation where bots will be creating bots, right? So that's when we talk about intelligent and autonomous systems, I really believe it. Because there's no reason why we should not begin to see autonomy in software. We see it, I used the example this morning that we put our lives in the hands of technology every day when you go in your car and you use your adaptive cruise control, you're trusting technology. When you're driving your Tesla, I mean that was an example in San Francisco, I think in December last year, where the police have been following a driver for 17 miles and the car wouldn't stop because it was driving itself and the driver was sleeping. So they had to call up Tesla and say like, how can we manipulate this technology so the car actually stops so the police gradually got the car to stop. And finally the guy woke up and he probably had one too many but he claimed he wasn't driving so they shouldn't chat to him. But they did. Of course, yeah. Well, bots are getting better but I still often know when I'm talking to a bot but it's getting better, wouldn't you say? Getting really good. I know, last year I was completely fooled by our fundraising bot but I got a phone call from a bot I spoke to for 90 seconds before realizing it was a bot. So it's getting pretty good. As you look at the technology that excites you about what you're bringing into your product, you talk a lot this morning about different kinds of technology and how you want to be a leader. What technology excites you most about the markets that you're serving? I'll tell you what excites me the most is to work through the different levels of digital transformation that I talked about. I'm excited about the inflection between business and technology. I'm excited about the inflection between people and experiences and I'm excited about the inflection between automation and efficiency. We have a lot of technology at our hands that can help us achieve these different things but at the end of the day it's the outcomes that matters. The technologies are exciting and I can get super geeky about a lot of different technologies but if it doesn't relate to any, any, not technical vision or product vision but any business vision you have on what you actually want to do with it as a business then I think it becomes dangerous. But of course we have our geek sessions where we geek out on all these different things but we try to separate that from when we actually deciding and building things directly into the product but we need the geek sessions to get inspired and understand what is available so we can put it in the context of what our customers need today and also what they'll be needing in the future. Since you have some decent observation space on digital transformation, I want to ask a question. Our partner ETR, they have a data platform and I was down in New York last week just talking to them and one of the theories is suspending starting to slow down a little bit overall in the macro. One of the theories is that digital transformation is the last two years, there's been a lot of experimentation. There's a lot of try and everything and now they're going into production with what they feel will deliver business value and two things are happening is their premise. One is they're narrowing down the focus on new technologies and making bets for all the disruptive technologies. The other is a lot of the legacy stuff, they're pulling out saying okay, we're moving on. Are you seeing that? Are you seeing the sort of that, the bellwethers anyway, going heavy now into production with digital transformation? What are you seeing? I think it's a progression. I think it's scenario-based. I don't see companies making an all-out bet from one day to the other. It's mixed. It's mixed and I think you need to take a cautious approach because when you're in the technology world, you don't always get it right in the first go. We certainly don't get it right the first time all the time, right? So oftentimes it's important to get something out there, learn from it, innovate, fail fast sometimes. The worst thing you can do is not acknowledge when you've made a mistake. And I think that's a risk that some companies also bear with digital transformation is if you need to adjust what you thought was the right thing to do, make the adjustment as quickly as possible. Talk to your keynote about tailoring solutions and I want to understand your philosophy. How dogmatic are you about not making customizations versus allowing your customers to make those tailored? And how do you manage that from a cloud and SaaS delivery evergreen, I think you call it standpoint? We absolutely believe that customers should have solutions that match exactly what they need and so forth. We also heard from states today that a good philosophy, and I really subscribed to that philosophy, that if you're doing things that, it's not really differentiating you as a company or something, just use the standard process. Why do something custom, if it doesn't mean anything, then you can adjust your processes to that. But if you have things that really differentiate you as a company, you obviously want to have the technology to support that. And since that is differentiated, you're not likely to have a standard package for that. So in that process, what we need to enable is, we need to enable these scenarios where you can extend, we call it extend on the inside, extend on the outside, you can achieve what you want, but do it in a way where you do it in a declarative way, not by creating a modifying code. So instead, we want to make sure that the core that we have, that is part of the standard product, can actually interpret declarative code. And that means that when we have upgrades and all that stuff, we upgrade the core, but the declarative code that the customer has that is specific to them, remains there and stays there. And that's why the API platform is critical. You said no product will be announced or shipped without API enablement. Here at the end. We cannot because we cannot create a user front end to anything that doesn't, that isn't API enabled. So it's very simple. That's a modern architecture. I'm curious about, you said that one of the reasons you're at IFS is it's so customer focused. What is it that this company does differently from companies you've worked at in the past that exemplifies that customer focus? I think it goes deep, not only into the culture, but also how we actually have people in all the way into the individual development teams. I've been in other software companies and the development teams you have developers, you have QA's, you have testers, you have program managers that write the specifications and so forth. We actually have industry solution specialists embedded in the development teams. So we are probably our own worst critic. And of course then working hand in hand with customers in that process is essential. But again, if we don't provide the value and the output from what we create for our customers, then it's worth nothing. And that's really the philosophy. If we do not provide value, technology means nothing. So the intersection of domain expertise and software development. Chris, the last question is sort of, what do you hope to get out of this event? Things that you hope to take away or learn or convey to your customers? Well, I always look to get feedback. Like I'm a sucker for feedback and input and learning. So first of all, I can't wait to walk the expo floor here and really see what all our partners are bringing to the table of innovation because they're doing amazing things. So I always enjoy spending a few hours on the expo floor. In the process, get to meet a lot of people. And then during the sessions, I always encourage feedback from people. During the session, if we can, or I'll always end any presentation with an email address. Like anybody, any customer, any partner will always be able to email me directly. And I, you know, sometimes a little hard to keep up, but I will respond to every single request. Feedback is a gift. Kristin, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. Feedback is a gift. It was great to see you. All right, thank you very much. All right, thank you for watching everybody. Keep it right there. Our next guest, we're at IFS World, Boston. You're watching theCUBE.