 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 here at Georgia World Conference here in Atlanta, Georgia. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Jeff Frick. We're joined by Tobias Person. He is the IoT Services Lead here at IFS. Thanks so much for joining us, Tobias. Thank you, it feels really nice to be here. So I want to start out by having you explain to our viewers what you do at IFS as an innovation service lead. Yes, I'm heading up the IFS IoT Innovation Services Team that came to official in six existence in May last year. It's there because of the fact that we want to get the IoT message out there. We want to be out there to mission about IoT, actually helping our sales and pre-sales to do the business discussions with people, with our customer studies, as well as actually implementing solutions and rolling them out. So we're kind of like, from idea, talk to the customer to real time, or sorry, real roll out. That's what my team does. So you said you want to get the IoT message out there. And what is the IoT message from the IFS vantage point? Well, coming from a tech background myself, I've been involved in the IoT space for quite some years. And the biggest challenge or difference between normal IoT and IFS IoT is the fact that you can actually do something with the data itself. Typically, when you're talking about IoT historically, it's driven by R&D. It's not a strategic effort at all. It's mainly done to figure it out. And it has been taking some, it has taken, IoT has been taking some steps since then. And we're providing a way to actually shortcut your IoT data directly into your most business critical system and doing something with it, providing like huge efforts and benefits of the bad. And you guys are really integrating IoT into the existing applications, the existing workflow. So trying to grab that value, not as a standalone science project or something that's on the side, but really integrating it into your existing applications and the existing work that those applications are managing. What are some of the impacts that you've seen? Or some of the customer, I guess the customer impacts that they've seen. Well, it's all about the ultimate step in a sense. Well, at least that's the first step. I mean, we have seen customers that's just taking the data out and getting the running hours out, for example, as a first step. That has huge implications on the amount of time you spend entering stuff, as well as having the data with quality just so you can do something with it. But the biggest thing is really to automate stuff, like send out a work order, for example, automate that, or send out a replenishment for some consumable or whatever it is. So anything you can run or post or trigger in IFS applications, field service management or UI, is actually triggerable by an IRT observation. So can you describe to our viewers how the process works? I mean, I know that IFS really prides itself on being so customer-centric. So how do you work closely with customers from the very beginning, from the idea to the actual product and implementation? Well, taking it from the start and from the top, we obviously have a full set of IRT industry directors that really are really skilled in seeing what's next for their market, being out there to communicate the message. Observed decision is obviously one and digitalization is another one. So we're talking about this in all kinds of places, right? My team comes in in kind of like the second stage where this sales and pre-sales have done a demo with the generic tools that we're providing them with and taking the discussion from there. And we're usually building something that is quite specific for the customer, using their data, really any kind of data to prove the point, some kind of Power BI dashboard, some kind of actual IRT observation going out. And the thing is, when we do that, they tend to really get it when they see things coming in from the physical world into their kind of, this would be your FSM or applications environment. And they see an observation comes in and suddenly boom, there's an action going on. So that's what we're trying to do. And we're kind of involving ourselves quite heavily in how to define what's your IRT use cases, running workshops with customers and pinning it down. We have a, well, it's not rocket science or anything, but it's kind of our own methodology to pin down what's your first step? What's your IRT use case that you aim for? And how do you plan to get there? That's what we are trying to achieve with our team. It has been a big integration challenge to go to devices and sensors and kind of that IRT world and to plug that back into the application. Well, that depends a bit. I mean, our application or our solution is really dependent that it gets sent to data or actually picking up the data from an API or a database. We haven't seen a project yet where we're actually picking up stuff directly from the assets. What we usually see though, is that the customers has taken that step already. So they're getting data into some kind of, it could be a printer management system, it could be a whatever management system and we're getting it from there. We are talking to partners that will allow us to get the data strictly from an industrial context. An industrial protocol and a specific machine, whatever it is. But as of now, we are reliant on the fact that somebody is sending stuff to the IoT Hub, which is the official Azure component. So you're just really taking advantage of that data flow that's already there and really adding an extra layer of value that they can extract by pumping that into your application. Operationalize the whole thing, yes. But that is really the key and really the differentiation is that you're not just seeing the data, you're now saying, okay, what is this data telling us and now what do we do next? What do we do with it? So can you give us a real specific example with Antisemax and this is the rodent control, pest control company and sort of how this company is using your product and seeing a real return? Yeah, from what I know, Antisemax Finland has deployed this, they have about 3,300 traps in effect out there at the moment and they're using this for, well the traps are connected obviously. So they send the data for like shots fired, how full it is, battery levels, stuff like that to the IFA solution. Shots fired, I love it. Shots fired, yes. So it's not like a single off, you have to empty it directly, it's kind of a pressurized air container doing all kinds of killings in a row, if you will. And you need to know how are my traps doing? So truly again, just another layer of efficiency improvement by not just setting and coming back after so much time but actually having the data for the activity in those traps. No, in a sense they have opened their eyes, they know how their assets are doing, they know when they're full, they know when to pick it up and even if they don't have to go there today, that's also a good information, obviously. So they're doing this to optimize their service visits and doing like a full automated work order kind of flow. I think the statements from UC Ulinen, the managing director of Antisemax Finland that will be here as well later on, they have been doing something like 6,000 automated work orders in the last six months, which is a huge productivity. 6,000 automated ones, so these are the ones coming directly out of the system based on the feedback from the IoT. Not passing any employee at all. Wow, that's a huge improvement. How revelatory is that for a company to have all of those service visits be automated? How much of a change is that? I think it's huge, actually. I think it's quite easy to imagine that that would be a good idea. However, until now it's been kind of a hassle to get there. And I personally do think that our solution provides that gap and serves as a shortcut, as I mentioned before, to get there. But I would imagine too, it's a process flow on the customer side too, because they've got to now accept the fact that they don't know exactly what the schedules are going to be for the next several weeks or for those days, because they have to allocate some portion to the automated process or they're feeding that in at some level upstream to make sure that that gets integrated into all the rest of the activity. You could have if you want your manual intervention in all stages, if you want to. Like you need to, probably if you're on a oil rig of something that you have a critical part, automated order coming in, that should be accepted by someone along the way. That's perfectly fine as well. So it doesn't have to be fully automated if you don't want to, but it can be. So I know that you're not only an IoT evangelist with an IOS, you're an IoT evangelist in general and in your professional life. So can you talk to us, big picture, big strategy, where you see IoT going in the world, but then also as it relates to IOS? What does the future hold? Well, the easy answer is, you may have seen the old commercial, well, they state like we need to be on the web. Why? It doesn't say, I mean that kind of, you know that you need to consider this, but you don't really know how to get there. That kind of approach is somewhere along the line where we are right now with IoT. I mean, it used to be something like a buzzword, people tried to figure it out. Nowadays it's more like people have taken steps, they have the data somewhere, it's usually stored somewhere in some database or some system or whatever, but it's the actionable part that's missing. And I don't think people actually look for, tend to look for the actionable part in an ERP company, but that's exactly what we're providing. So I think in a few years to come, it will be seen as suspicious not to have your stuff connected and not to have your open data, instead of being the other way around. I think this will be a very natural part of not being blind to how your assets are doing. Why would you like that? I mean, that's the old fashioned style. So I think this will be a very natural step in any kind of product development as a center or service-centric company in years to come. And do you think it's indicative of people accepting just a lot more data sources into their decision-making processing? And adding that layer of automation, because the piece you didn't talk about that's obviously part of that, is AI at some point in time, right? Because now you've got the automation, you've got all this stuff coming in and you can't send the entire fleet out tomorrow if you only have X number of vans and you got X number of 6,000 service requests. So then you add that AI component, the machine learning component, the prioritization component, and again, moving more of this kind of manual scheduling process or routine scheduled maintenance into a much smarter way to execute the details. It's all in the step of going from, you know, data collection, data acquisition, figuring out the technical stuff behind connectivity and getting the data out. And now the next step in the revolution comes, how do you approach that with AI, with machine learning, with actionable insights, whatever. And to be quite frank, I mean, I don't think people necessarily don't want to see that. They want to see what comes out of it, but they don't want to see behind the curtains on that. Right, right. So maybe, just maybe in the near future, people will need to bring in someone that knows machine learning from A to Z in their companies, or at least use someone that does their insights for them. Right. So how will IFS expand its IoT offering at the next World Congress next year? Well, as you know, we have had a few early adopters, sorry, yeah, well, a lot of the programs for IoT, yeah. Antisemax and Song & Offshore being the first ones out, they're live right now and they have a really good story to tell. So that's good. So in a sense, we are taking it from the heavy asset or asset centric for one rig. That's one part we have taking some steps. Service is the next one being Antisemax and Coursera. We believe that connected field service is the main thing to go for. The real good IoT use cases is for connected field service with assets or sending data throughout. And to me, the next strategic step since we're having a whole lot of revenue coming from manufacturing is actually connected manufacturing or connected manufacturing lines. Industry 4.0, whatever you like to call it. That's our next strategic move with IoT, as I see it. The lines have been connected for giving data but not necessarily for actionable data back into the lines, right? That's where the really big changes for the automation back into it. Yeah, yeah. You have the full-scale automation pyramid where you have the PLC that runs the low-level control system. Then you have the SCARD and the MACE systems as well. The thing with IoT is not only do you get the data for a specific asset, you also get the full picture of how are my factories doing on this level to this level. So it becomes more like a less operator, more kind of strategic view on the whole thing. But you need to be able to get the data out from different levels and actually access it and make sense of it. Which factory is doing best? Right, and then what are you managing to? You're managing to the device so you're managing to the whole output. So maybe based on economic factors, you want to run things hard, which is maybe not optimal for maintenance, but because of the economic situation, you're going to press it. So it's really, that variable management opportunity is a very different way of kind of looking at your output. And one way, one view really, actually a scalable view really. There is a stand just behind us where we'll show an industrial demo together with Accenture that will actually trigger a service request from a physical device, an engine in this case, that goes into the system, the IFS system, that is actually scheduled sent to a prayer guy that comes out wearing a HoloLens and fix the problem, fix the issue. So that's like end-to-end thing. It's actually manageable and doable with the solution. Great. And that is one of the things that the CEO talked about during the keynote too is that it is automating certain tasks but then really leaving sort of the more unique tasks up to the human and the human connecting with machines and also with other humans. So tell me a little bit about the differences that you've seen in the market. So IFS based in Sweden, many of its senior leaders in London, but of course you have places all over the world. Do you see any differences in terms of the customers in Europe versus the US and sort of how you're thinking about maybe making a bigger push into the US? It's a really good question. Think about that for a while. I think what we are seeing in my team at least, that's kind of on our horizon is that the German, Germany in general, or heading to our industry 4.0, that's kind of like a really hard driving fact that's like stated even by the government. So we need to get into that as well as pushing for field service management as a solution. US, I think we should be doing more in. Let's put it that way. Great, great. Well, we look forward to hearing more about what you're going to be doing in the US. More. That's a good thing. Tobias, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. We've had a great time with you. Thanks for having me. Thank you. What's the pleasure? I'm Rebecca Knight for Jeff Frick. We will have more from IFS World here in Atlanta, Georgia just after this.