 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 guest panel with us today. We have Mark Bolton, who is the CMO, Anthony Bourne, Vice President of Global Industry Solutions and Brian Summer, who is an analyst at TechVentive. Thank you so much for joining us, gentlemen. I really appreciate it. Thank you. Happy to be here. So this is a big event for IFS. Woco, as it's known. So talk a little bit about what you're hearing already from customers and feedback that you're getting. Sure. Well, the first thing is, everybody's told us Atlanta was a great choice of venue. This time of year, yes. Yeah, well, I've just flown in actually from London where the weather is not this good. But no, we've had really good feedback so far. We're still only at the end of the first morning, but the opening keynotes and the reveal of IFS apps 10 went really well. I think most people have been really pleased with the content that they're seeing in the hall. So yeah, feedback is good. We know it's a big investment in time and time out of the office for our customers to come here. So we need to make sure that it's time well spent, that they get value. And so far, the feedback is really good. They're learning stuff. They're seeing things for the first time. They're meeting their peers and connecting. So it's good. And before the cameras were rolling, we were talking about the customers interacting with each other, not only just you and telling you how they're using your product, but also interacting with each other and talking about things that they've learned and sites that they've gleaned. So can you describe a little bit about what's happening? And that's a key thing because we love our customers. We love getting them together. We love them talking to each other. It's not just taking it from our words and taking it for granted. We want them to share the experience. We want them to say, okay, what did you do in this scenario? How did you overcome this? So these events are fantastic. I've just been talking to a customer now before lunch about how they want to upgrade based on what they've already seen. And we're only halfway through day one. And it's just like, you know, I want to talk to my account manager. I want a meeting about what we're going to do and when we're going to be doing it. So it's fantastic events, fantastic. So how about you? What are you seeing in terms of this new release with IFS 10? I mean, what interests you most as an analyst? Well, I've got some clients who specifically asked me to be on the lookout for some things over here at today's show. And one of them was around the new user experience on the release 10 product. They're looking for something that's a richer web-based kind of mobile type of experience or consumer user interface experience for them. And I think they'll be happy with what's been announced over here today. So, you know, it will come out in phases, obviously, but it works on everything now, every kind of device. And that's what the client wanted to see. And I'll report that back. Just to echo what Brian said, we've had customers already contacting us about the release because there's certain functionality which we've introduced with IFS applications 10, which they really, really want. So they've actually said, okay, even before we announced it, we let them have some indication of what is happening. And they said, we need that, we want that, so that its future is looking really good for upgrades as well as new customers. One of the things that we keep hearing a lot of is how customer focused, how customer centric IFS is as a company. The metric speaks for themselves in terms of your NPS score and the Gartner insights. So how, as CMO, how are you going to get this, the word out, really? Because IFS is kind of known as one of the best kept secrets in the industry. Yeah, and it's true that we don't have, you know, quite the brand recognition that maybe some of the, you know, the huge massive competitors have. But within our industries, we are very well known and we're known for all the right things. So, you know, great products that are well implemented and well supported. You know, we are leaders in a lot of the markets in which we play. Events like this, actually, one of the key objectives for us is to, you know, have a good presence from analysts and journalists, the influencers, as we call them. We like to think we look after them very well. And, you know, that they get the inside track on the things that we're working on. So we use a lot of tools to actually spread the word, but our biggest advocates are our customers. The people that have our software and have worked with us, they genuinely do love the product. And, you know, for those that were in the main room this morning when we launched it, Dan Matthews, our CTO, he said, one of our core objectives is to design a product that people love. And so, literally, our customers will go out and as our NPS scores indicate, as you mentioned, you know, they will do the job for us. They tell people, they tell them very positive things about their experience. We did some studies, most of it, you know, the majority of our customers actually are more profitable than people that use our competitor products. They're, you know, much faster time to solution and things like that. So these are the things that our customers are saying about us. And these are good things to have, to be talked about, you know, the topics to be talked about for. Right, right, right. Brian, what would you say should be keeping companies up at night? I mean, IFS is doing a lot of the right things, as you said, you're going to report back. The customer will probably be happy with what they hear. But what are some of the things that maybe customers are saying or customers are needing that you're hearing, not kind of feedback, that maybe IFS, what would be sort of your best advice for the future? Well, I think IFS plays in a bunch of different parts of the world. And there is no single answer that will solve every customer in every part of the planet. And there's some very realistic problems that some companies have in areas where there's spotty electric power, spotty internet access and the like. They're going to probably continue to want a non-premise kind of solution. There are others in developing countries where they've clearly bypassed an entire generation or two of technology and they want to go straight into cloud. And I know these guys, they've got a number of different cloud modules or applications that, in like field services, one of those areas. And field service is a great one for the cloud simply because that's what that business is all about. It's about a bunch of people carrying tablets and cell phones and smartphones, whatever, in and out of customer locations. That's fine, anyway, but by and large, one of the clients went, well, I think what they want more than anything nowadays is they want to get out of the data center business and more and more clients are looking at utility computing and they're expecting vendors eventually to get them out of maintaining and running on data centers because they have more confidence that vendors and or partner technology provider can do a better job at a tech, web security maybe than they could in-house by themselves. Just to echo that, I think one of the key differentiators from the IFS offering is the fact that we give our customers choice. We say, what do you want? We have the solution for you. Do you want it on-prem? Do you want it SAS? Do you want it in the cloud? What is best for you? So that's where we can offer the customers something different than what some of the competition may offer. Right, right, right. And just one more thing on that topic and Darren mentioned it in his keynote this morning, but in North America, 50% of our customers are deploying on cloud now and that's for core ERP. But in FSM, it's not quite 100% but it's almost and that's not dependent on a geography. Wherever we sell that product in the world, most people are choosing to deploy on cloud, on the cloud, you know. So that is very real now, that trend. People see the benefits. I think obviously the majority of the industry are marketing cloud solutions now but they really are tangible benefits and I think the customers have got it now and the move is real. If I could add on, I think one of the big things that is changing is that customer after customer or client-to-client I go to, they've got a name for project they want to take on. It could be the factory of the future. It could be a modernization, ERP modernization or IT modernization. It could be a process transformation, digital transformation, business process redesign, whatever. They've all got a name for something. They don't know quite what it is. They really have a hard time defining it but they're on this journey and what they're looking for is more than just a basic transaction processing ERP product. They want something that'll handle like IoT technology. They want connectors that connect up things beyond the four walls of the enterprise. They want to connect up to their assets as well as to assets that are out in the field either with customers, what have you. And that's really where the future of this space is going right now. One of the things that we've also heard about in the keynote was the real emphasis on time to value is that the customer really wants to be able to see a return on investment almost immediately. Is it difficult to keep up? I mean, it's almost an unrealistic expectation to see that value right away. I think it's down to what solution they're trying to solve and then the ease of use, the implementation. And as we've said from an IFS point of view, we want users to love the application. That means it needs to be easier to use. With what we've introduced today with IFS applications 10 does make it easier for customers and users to actually get the benefit out of the solution as quickly as possible. And are you able to keep up with the pace of change? And how do you keep up, I mean to say? There are a number of different ways. Because we focus on our core industries, we belong to industry organizations. We often have customer advisory meetings at customer's premises because we invite all the customers to it or as many as we can so that we can talk to them. They can give us feedback about what they want to see in a product going forward. And we can channel that in addition to the trends that we see in the industry because we've got a lot of people that come from the industry. So they have that experience embedded in them. So they know what the industry wants, but we need to keep up with the trends to ensure we give them that benefit once they implement the solution. And one of the things I would add is that, you know, time to value is improved if the product is a good fit in the first place. If you've got to do a lot of modifications, firstly, you're adding cost, you're also adding time and complexity and risk to the project. And the industry expertise that Antly talks about, which comes in from a number of directions into our R&D and is reflected in our product, we've done a number of charts over the last few versions of our software. And if you go back like 10 or 15 years, you'd see that maybe 25%, 30% of the project was going into modifying the software to make it do what the customer needed before they could even turn it on live. Today, we have a lot of clients who've upgraded from eight to nine or now nine to 10. And they've literally, they're running standard software. And so there, your time to solution is really rapid. It's as quick as you can, you know, move data and so on. But if you're not modifying it, that's key. That's the key, exactly. Well, Mark, Antony, Brian, thank you so much for joining us. It's been a great conversation. Thank you. Thank you very much. No problem. I'm Rebecca Knight. We will have much more from IFS World Conference just after this.