 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. We have a three-panel guest with us today. We have Eric Schaefer, the Senior Managing Director of Accenture. Paul Maher, GM Industry Experiences at Microsoft, and Yasushi Yagyu, Assistant Manager at NEC Corporation. Thank you so much for joining me. Thank you very welcome. So you're on this panel because you are all Platinum sponsors and close partners of IFS. We've heard a lot today about IFS's passion for customers. It's a customer-centric, customer-focused company. I'd love to hear from you, your experiences, as being partners with IFS, if you could describe a little bit about what you've experienced. Let me just start with you, yeah. Thanks, Rebecca. No, I think we've been, Accenture and IFS have been partners for many, many years. And what I've appreciated in the relationship is the customer focus, but really the focus on delivering value to both IFS and Accenture customers. It's a value-driven approach. Very industry-specific, so understanding the industry issues, leveraging IFS products and solutions to best meet these, having Accenture come in and help tailor the solution to the industry imperatives, and also leveraging digital technologies and combining these with the IFS foundation, which I think was a key term used this morning. Yeah, I mean, so Microsoft and IFS have had a very long and prosperous partnership over the last 20 years or so. But what's great to hear from the keynote this morning is obviously the announcement of IFS applications 10. And so Microsoft, obviously, being a cloud provider, we've most recently been working very closely with IFS on their move to the cloud and moving their solutions to the cloud. So this thing called digital transformation is really sort of the boss, and it's great to see that as you have probably this morning in the keynote, really disruption is really driving new innovation. And so we're really glad to partner with IFS in response to that disruption, thinking about cloud and bringing the IFS solutions to the cloud and really delivering innovation to really address the digital transformation needs of industry. And I'd love to talk with you, Yasushi, about innovation, and I'm going to ask all of you, but this is a company that really is known for having a history of innovation. How do you come together and collaborate and come up with new creative solutions? For example, we have independent with AI engine, named HML is our engine, and our customer has already implemented that kind of AI solution to predict their demand forecast. And then we have a solution is connected to the IFS production control module, or master schedule module. And then now our AI can generate our forecast data and send it to the master schedule module. I know that Accenture has innovation centers around the world. Can you talk a little bit about how you innovate with IFS? So we have four innovation centers across the world. We have one in Detroit, one in Munich, Shanghai, and Tokyo. And what we do with IFS is look at industry use cases, and then by combining IFS solutions plus some of the digital assets which are proprietary to Accenture, combining the two to deliver new levels of efficiency. And so helping our clients walking through these innovation centers, they get the wow moment where they see how IFS plus Accenture combined can deliver more value and unlock the value which is trapped in their enterprise. Can you talk a little bit about that wow factor? I mean, what are sort of, what are the lot of the challenges that your clients are facing, that your partnership with IFS has helped them solve? Well, many of our clients, and I think the term digital transformation of industry was mentioned, it is how is digital transforming the industry? I think the question is not the why. Everybody's convinced and has understood that it is happening. The question is more the how to. And this is where the combination of IFS plus Accenture, really focusing on the how to, how to leverage these technologies on very pragmatic use cases, demand forecasting we heard. It's all about artificial intelligence and computer vision for visual quality inspections, analytics on the shop floor. So it's working with IFS and our clients, the team of three, to identify these use cases and see how to leverage digital to respond and provide a solution. Microsoft, what kind of benefits have you seen with some of the IFS products? Yeah, I mean, so from a Microsoft perspective, of course, we are the vendor, the technology vendor. And say, most recently, we've been working very closely with IFS around the move to the cloud. So, I mean, certainly as I think about the partnership that we've had, I mean, it really is multifaceted in terms of, of course, we work very closely around how do we think about driving new opportunities and sales motions and IFS is one of our highest ranked managed partners. So we partner very closely there. But certainly if I was to focus on the technology innovation perspective, what we're really excited about is really that digital disruption and using the new IFS applications in particular. IFS applications 10, that's been announced at the conference, working in partnership there to really look to see how do we start to move the needle and move new customers to really achieve to their digital transformation needs and demands in partnership with the IFS solution running on the Microsoft Azure cloud. What are some of the most exciting new features in IFS 10 that you're most excited about? Yeah, I mean, well, you know, you mentioned before about sort of the buzzwords, I mean, and the on-trend technologies. And again, I'll sort of quote the keynote this morning, but what really excites me, and I think excites our joint customers, IFS and Microsoft is things like artificial intelligence. So what that can do around things like, you know, machine learning, cognitive services, things like IoT and making that a reality. So thinking about things like predictive maintenance and really being able to integrate the IFS solutions on the Microsoft Azure platform, leveraging IoT to really help in those sort of sort of scenarios is great. And then, you know, really super excited about some of the new innovation opportunities. So thinking about things like blockchain and what that can do as you think about, you know, sort of the broader opportunity around supply chain and payments and so on. So I think that closer together of the platform, but also, I mean, you know, we've had such a close partnership with IFS, so thinking about really sort of a business problem led first approach, followed by how can the technology innovation help our joint customers, I think is really helping us as we're looking to innovate in the world of digital transformation. And I know that NEC has recently come out with an announcement about AI and heterogeneous mixed learning technology. Can you tell our viewers a little bit more about that, Yasushi? Yes, we have AI engine, HML, and our customer has implemented that kind of AI solution to demand forecast or machine failure prediction or quality analysis operations. And some of our AI solution do collaborate with IFS applications. For example, at NEC booth, we can demonstrate our demand focused solution and demand information of each product comes from IFS, master schedule or inventory transaction as input data into AI engine. And then AI generates focus data automatically and send it back to that module, yeah. So here, IFS, we've heard a lot today too about the metrics, how it measures its success and we've heard that it has very high NPS score, its Gartner insights score far above competitors. And yet it is kind of this best kept secret in the industry. What would your advice be to IFS in terms of getting the word out about its products? Yeah, I mean, I think everyone's looking for opportunities to further their market share and drive net new innovation and sales pipeline. I think the, I mean, the best guidance I would give is that IFS really is a first class company and has first class products. So I think it's continued to innovate and be true to the core and just work with partners like good friends here to really get the word out. But I mean, it's really not about doing unnatural acts. I think it's really about building an empathy and understanding of what's needed in the industry. And I think the storytelling and the brand awareness will grow. I think from what I was hearing this morning, I mean, the conference even this year has already grown by 20%. So I think, you know, sort of, you'll see those sort of leading indicators of the word getting out and the brand profile out there. So I think it's a cautious approach as a strategic approach by using partners and not doing unnatural things. Let the innovation that's happening at IFS and with those partnerships almost do the storytelling and the brand awareness and just be true to the competency and listen to the customers. When you think ahead at what we're going to be thinking about and talking about at Woco 2019, 2020, what are sort of the big trends that you see? I mean, we've hit a lot of the buzzwords with AI and machine learning. What else do you see on the horizon? What is sort of keeping you up at night? Or are you thinking about? Well, what I do see is that, so we mentioned all these digital technologies, they will force manufacturers, I believe, to completely reinvent their products and services. And so the products of tomorrow will be with a lot of AI, a lot of digital technologies inside the products, also outside of the products. So products will be very different from today. And so you can easily imagine that the way you engineer, the way you manufacture, the way you support these products will also be completely different. So I think next year, 2019, we'll be all about how digital is reinventing the products and services of the manufacturers. Right, we keep thinking about how it's reinventing our workforce and changing the way we're doing things, but it's actually going to be reinventing what's coming out, too, these processes. Yeah, I mean, you've touched upon some of the bugs boards. I mean, I think it's also the maturity of the technologies. So I mean, I think that's certainly what excites me is the maturity and the capabilities has grown. So things like machine learning isn't necessarily new, but with breakthroughs around the algorithms, that's kind of bringing sort of the pragmatic reality of it being able to drive the innovation needed. Capabilities such as the cloud is providing that ability to scale up, scale down, the ability to provide processing power that wasn't there previously possible in a price-performance way. So I think it's great to sort of focus on some of the shiny things that are coming up, but I think it's also important to look at saying the things that sort of yesterday that isn't that far off, it's the maturity that they're reaching, and so it's really making sure that they are taken advantage of and really taking that pragmatic approach of it's got to be, again, sort of business-led versus technology-led bringing that innovation into industry. Yeah, Sushi, do you see any big trends on the horizon that you're thinking about at NEC? Absolutely. A big technology trends, things that you're thinking about, maybe you're worried about, concerned about. Yes, I think IoT technologies have been reached to early majority stage already, and recently many users successfully gather correct bias kind of data through and revalid the data to improve actual business operations. And then as a next step, I believe AI technologies will be widely applied for demand forecasting or that kind of fail-up reduction, and that case of success in each industry will become solution models or templates, and then which will accelerate the progress of AI introduction. Great. Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. As you see, Eric Paul, I really appreciate your time. It's been a great conversation. You're welcome. Thank you. Thank you. We will have more from IFS WOKO 2018 just after this.