GEC NEWS WIRE‘Driving Innovation’ has been the modus operandi of IFS since its inception.
At GISEC 2017, we sat down with Bas de Vos, director at IFS Labs, and Luis Ortega, Managing Director for Middle East, Africa and South Asia at IFS for a crisp conversation on what this innovation means for IFS.
“At IFS labs, innovation is not just a word,” says Bas. “We look into how technologies and trends are either disrupting the way consumers do business or how it is going to influence our solutions and offerings. Innovation for us is doing something in a different way and for us technology brings that difference.”
Recently, IFS has revealed findings from its Digital Change Survey that polled 750 decision-makers from 16 countries including 38 from the Middle East. This survey was commissioned by IFS to assess maturity of digital transformation across industries on a global scale. Nearly 90 percent of firms surveyed (87 percent in the Middle East) have ‘adequate’ or ‘advantageous’ funding for digital transformation, indicating a strong willingness to invest and an appetite to evolve their business in order to stay competitive and grow. When asked about prioritized investment areas, the top three choices were IoT, ERP and Big Data & Analytics. These are reflected by the Middle East respondents with Big data & Analytics leading with 52 percent followed by ERP and IoT.
Talking about their business model, Luis said, “We focus majorly on intensive industries like manufacturing, oil and gas, utilities etc that has complex supply chain process. They have a better appetite for IFS solutions. Traditionally IFS was a different type of ERP vendor and we used to distribute our solutions on our own but then that created some types of constraints. We have changed our go-to-market model in recent years and we now have a full-fledged IFS partner program and IFS academy wherein we train our partners. We work with various SIs regionally and globally and we also have some major technology partners who complement and enhance our offerings.”
IFS also recently launched the new version of IFS Field Service Management that offers embedded integration with IFS IoT Business Connector and a reimagined user experience to deliver the most complete, connected field service.
