 Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE. Covering IFS World Conference 2018, brought to you by IFS. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of IFS World here at Georgia World Congress Center. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, and along with my cohost, Jeff Frick. We are joined by Cindy Joudan. She is the CEO North America, a position she has held since 2004. Thanks so much for joining us, Cindy. Good morning, how are you? Good, I'm good. Great. Good. It's our first IFS World, that's quite a show you guys have. Yeah, we're very excited. You know, it's such a great opportunity for us to, you know, connect with so many of our great customers. So tell us a little bit about the theme of this year's conference, which is connect to what's next. What is that all about? Well, it's about connecting to what's going on next in technology, and in business, and in the economy. You know, we've got many, you know, great customers who are, you know, medium to large-sized industries, and they're having, you know, all different kinds of things come toward them around business transformation, you know, their customers are becoming more demanding, consumers are becoming more demanding, and so this conference really helps them see not only what they're facing today, but what they're facing for the future. You know, we've got many levels of people that come to this conference. You know, we've got CFOs, CIOs to power users, and so there's something here really for everyone. So you know, if you want to talk about trends in the industry, you want to talk about what's going on with our new versions of product, that's available. If you are a power user and you're in finance and you just want to go connect with that industry expert to find out how you can do your job easier, it's all here. So it's not only what is next in the technology, it's also connecting human to human. I mean, that's really what the Congress is about. Oh, most definitely. You know, it's really fun because you'll see, you know, customers that maybe haven't seen each other in person since the last World Conference, but they connect and they, you know, they talk all the time, you know, via the phone or Skype or whatever, but they see each other and they run and they hug each other and they say, oh, it's so good to be able to see what's going on. And you know, our customers share so much. And so that's really just a great opportunity and also for our customers to connect with our experts and you know, and the people that they work with, you know, from day to day as well. So you're CEO of North America. I'm the president of the Americas. President of the Americas. The Americas, yes. Which includes the southern hemisphere, right? Yes, we don't want to forget our friends in Latin America. So it's a Swedish, founded in Sweden. So how are things going in North America or South America, excuse me, the Americas? And what kind of values and things that you take from a Swedish-based company that you're applying here in the Americas, that's maybe a little bit different than a company that was founded in Silicon Valley or someplace like that. That's a great question. You know, here at IFS, we've got strong, you know, Swedish roots and Swedish heritage, which he says, you know, do what's right, work hard, stay close to your customer. And you know, and say what you can do and if you can't do something, make sure you say that as well. So it's setting that right expectations. And we've taken that, and that's really pervasive through all that we do. And you know, we want to make sure that we, you know, can do what we, you know, say what we do, deliver on what we do. And then, you know, our employees love working with our customers and I think our customers feel, you know, feel that we're partners. And it's not something that, you know, we're not just saying something to get the next deal. You know, it's not unusual for us to say, well, I'm sorry, you know, we shouldn't work together because what you want to do, Mr. Prospect, is something different and it's not really in our focus. And you know, and sometimes it's hard to do, especially if you're in sales, is to walk away from somebody who's ready to buy a business, right? But we want to make sure that, you know, the customers that we work with are really good fits for where we're going because these are really long-term relationships. Right, and how about that? It probably increases your probability of customer success pretty dramatically if you can actually deliver, you know, what they want. Oh, most definitely, most definitely. And it's, you know, certainly we also, I don't have the largest marketing budget depending on, you know, my competitors that I deal with. And so I really depend on great customer satisfaction and great customer references to help, you know, bring the next prospect on as part of the IFS family. And you and our customers, I think, are some of our best sales people out there. It's really great. One of the things that the CEO talked about in the keynote was really about building trust. And you were just talking about your marketing budget. He also said, we're not going to market nonsense. Can you talk a little bit about how you build that trust? Being honest with customers, obviously, sorry, we can't do that. We can't deliver that, but we can deliver this. How, what else, what other kinds of ways do you make sure that you are building the kind of trusting collaborative relationship with customers that you want? Well, it starts with listening. I mean, when you meet with a customer, you got to step back, you have to listen. You have to be willing to listen to what you're doing well and what you need to improve on. And then you need to be able to take that in and then, you know, synthesize it and then, you know, figure out how you're going to improve. You know, in an IFS, we're always striving to improve, not just with our products. And you can see, you know, we've just released applications 10 and that's exciting. And many, many things that are in apps 10 came from feedback from our customers and from the user group. And, but it's also listening with how we do service or how we work with our partners or do we need more partners? You know, we, you know, we have to just, you know, be very open and communicative with our customers. And I think everybody says that, you know, but you know, you don't say and say, oh, I'm not going to listen to my customer, but you really have to listen and then put it into action. Right, right. And it's not easy to be maniacally focused on your customers. A lot of people say they are, but when you peel back just a little bit, they're more focused on their products, they're more focused on the competition, they're more focused on a lot of stuff. So it is hard to be really singularly focused. But you guys are kind of in services management, management business. So you work with those types of businesses that they themselves are really active in managing that client relationship. Oh, most definitely. And when they're involved in that business, they have very high expectations of what they expect, you know, on the other side when they're the customer as well. And I think we've learned some things from them too. You know, and how, you know, and how they, you know, their service levels and things that they expect from that particular area. I also think it has something to do with the fact that when we, you know, IFS has been in the U.S. for 20 some years now, but we didn't come as the biggest player. And so we really had to listen. We really had to work directly with those customers. And, you know, we really needed to make sure that every one of those implementations was successful because we needed to, you know, have that customer groundswell of, you know, this is the greatest, you know, greatest software out there to help us continue to grow. Really prove yourself. Exactly, exactly. We're number two, we try harder, right? I mean, it's a great person to get together with versus we're number one and we're cocky and arrogant and don't care what. Exactly, exactly. So what is next? I mean, we've seen the introduction of IFS 10 and I know that we have some early adopters that it's already live with. You've got great scores, your NPS score, your Gartner Insight scores are very high. What are some of your ambitions for growth? Well, certainly we want, you know, I look to have the Americas be the largest region for IFS. I mean, I think that, you know, we've got a great opportunity here. We've got a large market. We've got a great product. And, you know, certainly we just want to continue to grow. And so, you know, right now we are a large percentage of the IFS revenue, but we want that to be even larger here in North America and in the Americas. So I think that's certainly very important to us. And we want to grow not only with what we're doing with IFS applications in its core, but also as we're adding new pieces with IFS, new add-on products, new technologies to be able to make sure that our customers understand what we're doing there and how that can help their business. You know, I think it was interesting Dan's keynote today was talking about cloud, which was a few years ago, and now it's mainstream for us. Last time it was talking about IoT and now we've got more and more customers doing that. And so certainly we're looking about, you know, artificial intelligence. And everybody's talking about that, but at IFS we don't just want to say these buzzwords. We want to really figure out as a customer, what do you need, how can you use this technology and monetize it, right? Because no one implements technology just to implement it. You want to have it, you know, help your business. And so, you know, those are the kinds of things we're working on what's next. And then there's going to be the next thing after, you know, artificial intelligence and the next thing. And that's why we depend on labs. So we're always ahead of the curve and we can be brain what our customers need. I thought it was interesting on Darren's keynote. The other thing really is function versus experience, which he talked about time and time again and then with the arena demonstration, kind of getting to a unified UI experience across all the different platforms. Looks like in nine you had kind of a different, kind of hodge podge of five. And then he showed how arena's slowly replacing all of them so you'll have this unified experience. But that's an interesting point of view, really to focus on the experience ahead of really the function. And that seemed to be a pretty clear message in his keynote. Well, we've been focusing on user experience. That's been one of our, you know, core things for the product roadmap for many years. And I think Dan talked about that as well. And so certainly it's a balance because if you don't have the feature and function, it doesn't matter what your user experience is, you're not going to use it. But IFS is a very feature rich product. And then you need to make sure that you can make it easier to use. And so certainly it is focusing on that user experience, but continuing to add the functionality that we need to support that as well. And you know, millennials today, they expect to be able just to sit down. They don't want to go to days of training. They don't want to have to, it just should be intuitive. And that's really what we're trying to do is just to make sure that it's as intuitive to use as a consumer product, but really has the depth that you need to get your job done because our customers, they have complex businesses and complex business problems that they need to solve. And so we need to make sure that we can use both and have both of them for our customers to use. But historically in the ERP space, it was always function over experience. And a lot of the historical companies had a pretty bad rap for the user experience. So to really prioritize that and then to add some of the automation and the AI to hide certain levels of that detail that you just don't need to see under the UI, I thought that was pretty impressive. Yeah, I think it is. I think it's very special for where we're going. And if you don't, people never really get to implement all the features and functions underneath it. And what my hope is, is that with a good user experience, people will use more of the product and then they'll be able to use more of the features and functions that are there today and that we're adding for the future and they can use that to make their businesses even better. So are you working with the customers in the labs too? I mean, how, at what point, because you said, I mean, that's why you have the lab so you can experiment and iterate. And then, but then how do you know what the customer, what is intuitive to the customer and then what the customer needs? How closely? Well, we'll bring customers into the labs. We will do a labs tour. We did last year that we did that and you let some customers, you know, see that. And then our customers know that everything that we do in the labs doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to come out, because we don't want them to fail, but they have the right to fail in the labs because you learn a lot about what didn't work as well. So it's making sure that when we have events like this, there's the innovation center over there and making sure that getting feedback on what they're doing there and letting customers see there and get their input. It's all, once again, about we've got ideas. We need to bring those ideas to the customer, listen to them, get their feedback, listen and then take it back, synthesize it and go to the next step. You're literate. You talked about growth being a big objective. Are there any particular market segments that you're looking at? Well, IFS has had an industry focus for quite some time and we don't expect to change that industry focus. We're very focused on customers who make products and who can maintain and service assets. And so right now we're very strong in aerospace and defense. We're extremely strong in service. We're ranked highest on those. We've got a great customer base in industrial manufacturing and process and in those particular industries. And so we're going to continue to focus on those. I don't see that we're going to go outside those industries because there is more than enough market here in the Americas for us to focus on those and to be very good at it. And we need to focus and be extremely good at what we do. Therefore we can keep the good customer satisfaction. And then we just had Tobias on too talking about IoT and really starting to integrate multiple data sources, you know, a lot more stuff into your existing application to expand on your capabilities. Almost definitely. Yeah, you don't need to build a bunch of new stuff necessarily. Yeah, exactly. Great, well, Cindy, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. We've had a great time talking to you. Great, it was a pleasure. Thank you. Thanks. I'm Rebecca Knight for Jeff Frick. We will have more from IFS World, theCUBE's live coverage just after this.