>>live from Boston, Massachusetts. It's the Q covering I. F s World Conference 2019. Brought to you by I. F. S. >>We're back at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston. This is a cube, the leader in live tech coverage. And this is our coverage of I f s World 2019 Matt Smith. This year. He's a global chief architect. Paul Dylan and I are happy to have you on Matt. Great >>pleasure to be here. Thanks very much. >>Filing. You're welcome. So business value engineering is a concept that you're a fan of on one that you've sort of promoted and evolved. What is business value? Engineering. >>So business value engineering is quite a common term in the industry, but here I affects it's a little different. Fundamentally, it's, ah, collaborative process that we use working with our customers on our partners to make sure that what we do with those customers delivers financial value to their business. So it's fundamentally about making sure what we deliver delivers value. >>So I wanna ask you a question about this because your philosophy is a company seems to be the Let the customer define value. Um, it's in their terms, not your terms, not trying to impose a value equation on them. At the same time, it's nice to be able to compare across companies or industries and firm level on DSO forth. So how do you reconcile that? Is it like balanced Scorecard is sort of pay you can tailor to yourself versus some kind of rigid methodology. How do you How do those two worlds meet in >>TV? Yes, so obviously, benchmarking across industry is really important. And there are lots of people that do that kind of work, and that's part of business value engineering. Fundamentally, it's about mutual collaboration. So it's not just about using the customers framework or that all their language is about agreeing the language. One of the challenges when you're trying to build a business relationship with with one or more parties is you have to have a common shared understanding, a common vision on a common value system so that when I say something to you, it means the same thing when you say it to me. And so part of that collaborative process requires that you worked together on business value, engineering facilitates that it's not just about producing a business case. It's really more about the process and steps that you go through to get to that business case that allows you to establish trust and understanding and clarity. >>How does this enter into the customer discussion? >>And so it enters as early as you can possibly make it. Answer rights? A. Right at the beginning, you asked the very first question, which is fundamentally, what are the business initiatives that you're trying to achieve with this potential change program? And then you have a deep discussion about what they mean. So you understand and they understand, and everybody really agrees firmly what we're trying to achieve before you get anywhere near solution. And it's really difficult as technical people. I've got a technical background to stop yourself from hearing a problem and going. I've got a solution for that on it puts that a more disciplined approach to make sure that you don't straight away go to solution to help. You really understand where you're going, how you're gonna get there and therefore what the financial benefits and metrics would be to do it. Who >>were >>the ideal stakeholders when you're doing a collaboration like this in terms of getting them involved in getting their >>implements. So you might expect the answer to be C level executives on Dove course. They're important from, ah, leadership in a direction perspective. But as it turns out from a human psychological behavior perspective, there are three personality types that are really, really suitable for this kind of engagement work that's focused around change. And if you find those three personality types and quite well understood types of people, they're the ones that tend to cause change. To happen more successfully doesn't mean there any more valuable than anybody else inside an organization, but the other right kinds of people to establish this sort of work with, and it's important you have the right number of those people in a change program. >>So change agents. So I would think like a PL manager here. She's controlling a big portion of the budget. Has thousands of people working for them would be important. Maybe not a sea level executive, but a line of business executive, the son of the field General. Could that be an example of a change agent? Not necessarily because they're trying to protect their turf, >>so not necessarily right When it comes to change, change is always hard in any company you've ever been in in all of our careers. Change is difficult, right? >>Wake up in the morning. >>Let's change. It s it's more about who were the people that lay the groundwork for that change that you follow. You listen to the influences. Now, of course, you'll have people that own the budget the financial controllers on Absolutely. They're important. Of course they are. But they may not be the personality type that causes change to happen. Business value engineering is about making sure you harness the right talent, the right skills, the right people at the right time. Thio help organizations realize the benefit off change. >>If you'll excuse me, this is not seem like a typical role for a software company to take on. Yeah, change management. What? How do you Why do you put yourself in that role? >>I think this is something that all software companies are gonna have to do. And you will see the subject of business value engineering in many software vendors. Now it's true. It's a fine line between being a business analyst and being a software vendor. they were a software provider. I think software providers that don't deliver the context on the value that they are trying to achieve with software they buy in the customers are poorer supplies because they're just trying to push technology on its fun. Technologists like myself enjoy the technology, and I'd buy technology all day long. But is it really the right thing to do? So I think it's about being morally right. You have to take the high ground and conduct that engagement in a way which in some cases, and this has certainly been true in my career, you do the business value work and you realize that you probably shouldn't do the project on. You have to have that that fortitude to say to the customer. This is actually not a great idea because the financial case doesn't support this. I think it is. Taking that moral high ground is a really important stance and software companies that do that generally those customers will come back to you in a future dark time when they've got a different problem. That perhaps does fit you. So I think it's about recognizing there's a both a short medium and a long term engagement with with with the customers that you have to maintain that >>in 2019. Given all the discussion on data digital transformation A. I cloud, I would think that data plays a crucial role in these discussions. So what role does data played? Companies understand the importance of data as it relates to the business value discussion. >>Absolutely. I think I think that data driven decision making is is pretty fundamental. A lot of people say the numbers don't lie. Maybe some statistics might be bent, but numbers don't really like, so you've got to be a capture numbers and make decisions based on those numbers. Eso One of the difficulties, though, is that for many, many years in many industries, we've been using very simple terminology and simple mathematical calculations to do these value calculations. Everybody's aware of Years ago, the software industry was awash with phrases like return on investment calculators, >>R o i N P V I R R. Even >>some of those numbers of valid right for >>a business case for sure, >>for sure, but just sticking with simple things like are always is not enough >>salad. If you treat the software as an asset. A zey expense? Essentially, >>Yeah, yeah, absolutely. But then it comes to the engagement's more than your software I like. I like Thio, I think, as a human being, the software is considerably less than half the game in any change program where you're trying to achieve value and the people they're human beings they're going to do with work are the ones that are going to generate the value. The software's a tool, and the years are very important tool. But it's a tool. So you have to think about how do you build teams that can collaborate around value, achieve the value, measure the value, capture that data but at the same time physically collaborate properly to do the work? >>So how have you apply this methodology for your customers? >>So we've done a number of things, so we've established practice inside. If s, we've made sure that every country has the capability to do business value engineering. We've hired some specialists, people who do this for a living. Andi, we are working with lots and lots of customers now on this as a Maur methodical disciplines approach. But we've also recognized that we needed to measure our existing customers benefits. So what you are existing customer base achieved with our software. So we commissioned Ah, pretty big and important study. And that was anonymous. We weren't involved other than inviting the company to go and do this work on, then unleashing them on our customer base for six months across all industries, all products on asking them to go and find out and measure what our customers really achieve with the software. >>So how was that anonymous? How it was in that you weren't doing the survey. >>We weren't doing the survey and any, um, numbers that came back. Where were anonymous? Dhe. So we couldn't say. Oh, it was this company that gave this feedback with these numbers. So it gave them a sense of freedom to be other express and share that data. >>And so you were specifically asking about the business impact of of I f s software throughout some kind of life cycle, like a before and an after? Yes, Exactly. Isn't it to be or what happened? Okay, so what'd you find >>so as a couple of surprises in the results, actually eso firstly >>tell us who did the study or is that >>yes, So the study. That's a good question, because the the choices are many. There are lots of analyst firms out there that you could use A ll do this sort of work and do it very well. The team that I worked with, we would personally had a previous relationship with I. D. C. Now we really liked I. D. C. And I've done some of this work previously with I D. C. Because they arm or they're an analyst. That has more statisticians as well as analysts. So they take a really very methodical mathematical approach. A scientist. I very much appreciated that. So we we picked them to do this work, and they take it really very, very seriously. And there were a lot of strict processes they have for how we are allowed to engage with them and talk to them during this process. On that rigor, I think, allows us to be comfortable with the numbers and for our customers to be comfortable with the numbers that they obtain because of this anonymity and the rigor they put behind. That's why we picked I. D. C. That work in terms of what we found out where they found on we now just see the report on our customers can go and see this report. We published it last week. So you're just gonna free download and look at the material from I. D. C. The first thing that was interesting about the study. It was human productivity focused. So not things like, how much inventory you hold in supply chain on. Was it reduced? It was more about how did the workers get on? What kind of mistakes did I made? L. A. Faster doing their work and more successful. And they looked at lots of different categories on the returns. The improvements ranged from just a 10% improvement. So not not a huge improvement all the way up to a 94% improvement in productivity. Human productivity. If you averaged it all out, it worked out just shy of of 19% 18 and a bit percent productivity improvement across all of the different teams from the finance function, the supply chain function, human resource functions, sales team, productivity function. So we saw a range. What was good was it pretty much didn't matter. Which category of customer or size of customer or industry. They all saw pretty similar productivity improvements, which means we can extrapolate the numbers. The second thing we saw, which was a surprise, a very pleasant surprise was that usually when you see these kinds of benefits studies, most of the value is in cost. Saving on only cost saving tends to be where asset management resource planning service management happens. Just under half of the value that the I. D. C study showed was net new revenue. The customers were finding that nearly half of the benefit was new money coming to the company. Top Line benefit. That's a little unusual. >>So let me pick. Probe Adept so productivity When I when you're saying productivity, I think revenue per employee has a simple list measure of productivity. But then you're saying there was incremental revenue, a swell independent. It first of all is is revenue per employee the right measure? Or was it more like Do we think's faster or sort of more generic measurements and specific to a task? Or was it kind of boil down to a revenue per employee? And and then how did that relate to the the incremental revenue. >>Yeah, so it was done by function by by team type. So if you look to finance and auditing and human resources and supply chain and so on so that the metrics on the you'll see in the white paper are specific to the team's specifically that role specific to that, >>right, You're not really big in insurance, but a claims adjuster could, you know, get more claims done exactly, or something like >>exactly example. So you'd find, for example, one of the statistics was around filled service engineering on how many jobs per day they couldn't do. It was reasonably specific, >>and they would attribute that directly to your software Direct. Now, as a result of installing I f s, how much would you increase your etcetera per day? >>That's why it took them six months to do the study. I mean, this is quite an in depth piece on >>how many customers that the interview. >>And so it was a cross on dhe. We gave them a challenge to do this. So it was a set of about 17 fairly large customers, which sounds like a small time. >>No, no, no, >>no. But when you do these kinds of studies, >>that's a totally legitimate number. And then thes air in depth surveys. Yeah, so it's not like it's not trivial. And and as well, revenue increases specific, too. The software. So that would have been what, like cohorts sales or service, you know, follow on sales things of that nature. >>Absolutely. And that's why we were so delighted with the report when it came back, because it was it was a really nice pleasant finding. So most companies that all the companies reported the revenue increase, but some are bigger than others. On average, it was a pretty sizable chunk, nearly half of all of the benefit. Um, and when we asked, I D C well, can you give us some kind of glimpse as to why we see such a large chunk of improved revenue? I. D. C. Said, Well, you're improving the productivity of the sales teams so they can quote faster. There's more accuracy and those quotes. The service quality is improved the speed and to get a product to market is faster, so their ability to respond to bids and tenders is better. So is actually a combination of lots of things speed error quality improvements that led to their ability to bid and win faster and better business net revenue. >>Did you attempt Thio factor in less tangible factors, such as customer satisfaction, that promoter score perceived value, customer perceived value. >>So the folk note that the focus of the study was human productivity on. And it's something that I d. C do particularly well on that that's what we gave them a target. Obviously, when we doing business value engineering, you then have to take way more than just that. Things like the benchmark dated find from a study like I. D. C. Have conducted where you take into account those soft factors on other factors outside of human productivity. So value engineering is way more than just human productivity, which is why it's an engagement model. It's something you have to do mutually together. That kind of transparency, really, is what most customers are now demanding. You know, I'm not buying technology unless I know what business outcome I'm going to obtain from this. It's just the way of the world these days. >>It could take away that so it's not just your software's not just operational impact in nature. It's more strategic. It has productivity impact, revenue impacts and obviously cost savings as well. Congratulations. That's good. How did we get this study >>out of people? You said customers can download it. Can anybody down? >>Anybody can download this U S So we've published it on our website. It's very easy to find on it. Sze freely available. We obviously have to comply with the I. D. C's. They owned the rights for the report because it was their material, but we've oversee purchased the rights to the other, distribute that material. We think it's super valuable for our customers. >>What a business model >>and super well, you know, And and if I was to write business case for it, I'd be delighted with the work that was done and I'd be happy with the outcome on. I'm sure our customers will make use of the information to be a benchmark, their own work and also hold my effects on our partners to account to help build business cases. >>Well, I you know, I know it's anonymous ized anonymous to protect the customer, but I bet you some of the customers would be willing to go public with some of this information. So hit him up. Bring him on the cube, you know, well distributed for free. If you want to charge for them. Reprint rights. Great to have you on. Thank >>you. Thank you. >>All right. Thank you for watching Paul Gill and I will be back with our next guest to wrap up I f s World 2019. You're watching the Cube from Boston?

>>live from Boston, Massachusetts. It's the Q covering I. F s World Conference 2019. Brought to you by I. F. S. >>Welcome back to Boston, everybody. You're watching The Cube. The leader in live tech coverage is Day one coverage of the I. F s World Conference. Darren Russo's here is the CEO of F S Darren. Thanks for coming back in the Cube. Great TV again. So last year was your first year. He was kind of laid out your vision at the World Conference. How's progress? >>Yeah, Look, it's going incredibly well. We were really focused on how we go from being a pretty fragment of global business to being, you know, an integrated business where we were able to operate. You know, its scale globally in a very homogenous way, where the customer experience was the same, irrespective where they engaged with us. And, you know, we've made a tremendous amount of progress with it, So you know, the business is growing really strongly. Net revenues up 22% year on year. I lost its revenues up 40% year on year are clouds up in the triple digits, so you know it's tough to be critical of how it's going so far. >>That's great, Great. You're growing faster than your peers. I think the stat was you gave us three Ex factory except in the industry would be awesome. Is that means that your primary benchmark do you want? You want to gain share? You want to go faster than the big whales, I presume. I >>think two things One is customer satisfaction, we believe, is the key indicator of long term success. S O. You know, we're the number one ranked European efforts. Salmon gotten appearance sites. That's that is and always will be my number. One metric. Can we be way the number one from a customer satisfaction perspective? And then I believe the revenue stats will follow and you know that's where we are. So certainly, if you look at our our core peers, the big G R P vendors, all of them are flat on. Dhe were growing 20 ships since >>one of the things you mentioned in your Cube interview last year was one of the things that you wanted to focus on was I'll call regional alignment. Paul and I used to work for I D. G. I worked for I. D. C. You were editor in chief of Computer World. We work for a company, had more offices overseas and IBM, and it was really hard to herd the cats. And that was one of the things that you cited. Have you been able to get people generally poor or at the same time? And how has that affected your business? Yeah. Look, I >>think the big challenge before I arrived was that there wasn't really a strategy of global strategy for the business. My face had a way of working and there was a strong culture, but there wasn't really a strategy. And obviously it's difficult to be critical of people when they not following the strategy when there isn't one s o. You know, Step one was really making sure that we had a strategy on DDE that was really about being focused on the five industries that we focused on, focused on three solutions on dhe focused on the six segments of customer, which is half a 1,000,000,000 to 5 billion. So now, globally, you know, irrespective the office that you go to, um anywhere in the world, they're focused on those five industries they focused on those three solutions and they're focused on their customer segments. So it helps me. P. M >>I said during our preview video video this morning that I've been around this industry as long as I f s has, until last year had never even heard of it. Is that just me being clueless? There's something there >>that we were just saying before we started that we're the definitely the biggest software business you've never heard of. Um, and and and that's common, I think, you know, we were There are a couple of factors. One is that the business was very European centric. Andi didn't really engaged in a tremendous amount of marketing and media prison. So, you know, those are elements that, you know, I think we're doing a better job off now, But we have a long way to go. The challenge that we have is that where we compete, we win when we get in and were able to tell our story, and we're able to show the value we win. We just don't get into as many deals as we need to. And that's the challenge we have. >>Yeah, there was a lot of talk this morning about the importance of those five pillars of those five industries. If you're going to become the next S A P, you're gonna have to branch out beyond that. What is your thinking about diversify >>becoming the next? They say he is definitely not my ambition, You know, I think way remain focused on customer satisfaction. And, you know, I think that there's a there's a difference. Whatever it is leading them, it's not customer satisfaction. You worked >>there for four years. >>I worked there for four years. I know. I think the big thing for me is is that we've got to stay focused on their customer voice. They focused on what delivers value for our customers beyond just the rhetoric and hyperbole. You know, I think when you when you listen to a lot of the complexity that our customers are facing today, any customers are facing. Companies are facing increasingly disruptive times, and the tech industry is making life more difficult for them. The more best of breed solutions get both. The more fragments that potential the landscape is, the more complex it becomes for customers if they have to try and figure out. How do we integrate these things and derive value from this highly fragmented landscape? So you know, we're trying to solve that problem. How do we make it easier for customers to challenge in their industry? And that's where this whole for the challenges has check comes from. How do we help him to be disruptive in their industry? Have competitive advantage? >>That seems to be a sort of a fundamentally different thing about your approach, though. Is this focus on those vertical industry's most e r P companies did not do that. Is that something that is core to your values? >>Look, I >>think what we recognize is that as you move to the cloud, you have to drive to standard. That's just the reality of going to the cloud on what's happening for the horizontal E. R B vendors. So the locks of ASAP and Oracle is that they have one e r P solution that fits every industry. So if it's good for health insurance and it's good for a bank, then it's difficult to really get your head around the fact that it could be good for a defense manufacturer, but the functional requirements is simply vastly different on that means that you have to customize them. If you have to customize that, they can go to the cloud. So what we believe is that you have to have this vertical specialization, the five industries that we serve us all. A lot of commonality in the process is that they use. And that's why that vertical strategy is so key to our success. So you won't see us going into financial service is, or health care or retail worth that core application. We may in time in many years to come branch out. That will be a different solutions. >>So your tailor, that app for that module for that industry, Yes, just go deep, deep functionality. You're known for that, but at the same time you're also messaging. You want your customers to be able to tailor this for their environment. So square that circle for me. >>So I think when we talk about a choice and and I think tailoring is the wrong word, we talk about choice. We're talking about choice of deployments on Prem or in the cloud choice of customer choice of partner, rather who they're going to deploy with on Dhe, then The solution is really an industry solution that comes with that functional death. And we don't we don't advocate their customers customized that all. We really don't want them to customize it. What we explain to them in some detail is that the real value comes from adopting the solution for two standard and staying on a vanilla application. Because that vanilla application, you're going to be able to withstand future upgrades, the total cost of ownership gets lower. The processes that are embedded in that application or best of breed at the box. That's what they're intended to do, and that works when you have a vertical application. When you have a horizontal application and you're trying to have a do things that it shouldn't naturally be doing, that becomes company. >>Well, correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't that essentially the message ASAP had when it went through? It's hyper growth in the late nineties. I mean, there was a Y two k thing there, too, but ah, lot of the message was around. Do it our way and and then you don't have to get stuck in a rut, >>So I think that when it came out with that generation of application. That certainly was what they had hoped would happen. But what happened in practice is that the system integrators came in and the whole business process reengineering explosion happened on Dhe. That's not how it how it manifested itself. So what you see is, you see, he's very large, monolithic ASAP applications that were customized over in some cases decades, not not. You know, if a customer is deploying for two standard, then they should be able to deploy in a period mission. In weeks, we spoke about our deployment with Racing Point. If one team and going live in 12 weeks, you know, we're a 700 million global business. We deployed a knife s in 24 weeks. You know, if a customer's deploying for two standard, it's measured in weeks. As soon as they start to talk about two years or three years or five years or seven years there, customizing the solution significantly. Yeah, I >>mean, it became just sort of a perpetual upgrade, maintenance and up for the time it had a business impact. But boy, you think a cloud today agility, you know, getting rid of waterfall approaches, Missus. Antithetical to today's Look >>what I don't point fingers here. I think that this just maturity come with experience. The line of business applications you'll see our EMS and your HR solutions have taught people that you can, if you think about this is look at sea. Are Emma's an example? You had Siebel before people would implement stable. They would customize Siebel that would take long implementations. They were highly bespoke applications and then sells. Force came along and just destroyed them, and they destroyed them. Because what people learned very quickly was that there was a really easy to consume, really easy to use application that functionally might be inferior. But the compromises that you'd make from a functionality perspective will weigh, outweighed by their time to value in ease of use. And and the learnings from CR mnh are in procurement. Those line of business applications have now being backed into in the e. R. P >>world. So in terms of capital allocation, you're owned by private equity, which is actually a public company. I'm interested in how you're allocating capital R and D, where you're where your emphasis is. You don't have to you have to do stock buy back, but, you know, describe the P relationship. >>So look, one of my learning's to see survive this is that not all private equity firms or equal they have different strategies are very fortunate to be with Ekiti, who are a growth investor. They're known as a growth investor on dhe, and they buy companies that are strong growth tech firms on dhe. They've been hugely supportive of us investing because they understand that the investment in technology is important. So, you know, just looking at some detail today we invest twice as much in R and D as we did three years ago, just to give you, you know, one data point. So there's a big focus on technology, and the thing is, is that we we have to invest in technology to drive those attributes that are discussed earlier. How do we How do we enable customers to adopt a solution? It's a standard so they can go alive quicker. How do we enable customers to be able to sit down in the front of the application like we do with the mobile phone and intuitively know how to use it? How do we reduce the total cost of ownership through automation. Those are capabilities that you know that they don't come for free. We have to invest in them. So big investments in technology. And >>I think the private equity guys, at least the modern ones, have realized Why should the V. C's have all the fun they realize? Hey, we can actually put some money in tow and the transforming we can have a bigger exit and actually make much better returns than sucking the company drive. Yeah, well, look, I think the other >>thing is is that you know, in public companies, you have the downside off. You know this this courtly metric Ondas quarterly cadence. Andi, you see very compromising decisions being made because you know, people can't afford to miss 1/4. There's no long term planning that's done on dhe. That's fundamentally not the case and the private equity world, you know, not unusual now for four p firms to hold companies for 5678 years on, and that allows you to take a very long term strategic view. If if if a shift from perpetual to subscription is the right thing to happen, they can do that without worrying that, you know, because of the definite earnings are revenue that you're going to get caned by the market next quarter. Andi. I think that that needs to, I think, better decision making for the long term. >>A lot of companies are struggling. >>If you have the right P for because you get bought by the firm of events, you want to go public. But the the you said something this morning that 50% of your customers each year or net knew, How are you pulling that off >>That 50% of our license revenue? Eso way we went about 300 odd new customers a year. Obviously, that's growing, as I said, you know, 40%. But you know, it's ah, I think, having done this for 25 years, there are companies that are or good at extracting revenue from their installed based. One of the analysts here has as a hashtag wallet Fracking is what do you think It's such a great So you know, they're good at Wallick fracking and and I think the customers that that our customers off those vendors know exactly who they are and you know I think that for us to that the fact that we're able to go out and win 50% of our license revenue from net new name customers, I think is a really strong indicator of the health of the business. It's much harder to do than just extracting revenue out of the install base. You know, we don't have a compliance practice. We've never charged a customer for you in direct access. You know, these are principles that we stand by, and it's easier to say that your customer centric on get 80% of your revenue, have your installed base because you're doing compliance rounds. But, you know, we put our money where our mouth is, and that's not that's not how we do it. >>Are these net new customers? Are they? Are they migrating from QuickBooks or they migrating from a Competitors >>know, because of the segment that we're in this half a 1,000,000,000 to 5 billion? I would say the majority of them are what I would call first generation the Rp solution. So you know you're talking about you know, the original generation of Microsoft's acquisitions, the divisions and the eggs actors and the Solomon's and so on on. And then, you know, it's a P R two and our three customers you're talking about customer sitting on, you know, the solutions that in for hoovered up the matrix B picks type customers, ace 400 customers. So they're you know, they're first generation your P solutions that simply don't have the flexibility to deal with the complexity and demands of modern business world. >>From 2009 about 2017 I f. S was pretty inquisitive and then just actually, I was gonna ask you >>when I started, you stopped >>it, right? But then, you know, today you announced an extra small acquisition, But how should we think about M and a >>look? The first year for me was really about trying to build a functional business. You know, we spoke about how fragmented this really hit to Jenna's business. Andi just occurred to me. You know, if we go out and we start to buy things, how do we integrate them into a business that's completely fragments? And you know, it had no identity or culture. So, you know, the last year has been focused on how do we build their common understanding of what it is that we're doing. We now have a very clear strategy. Five industries, three solutions, one segment. And you know, when you when you have that clarity of vision that it's really easy to guard and do him and I because you know what fits and what doesn't fit, you can understand exactly how you're gonna build value for customers on dhe. That's why the S t a deal is so good for us. Because we're now the undisputed leader in field service management, you know, 8000 our customers globally, which is way more than anybody else. Scott, Andi, you know, you should absolutely expect more from us. But it will be in the five industries, three technology segments and one customers. Isaac. >>Well, in the A p I enablement should obviously facility. >>Absolutely. I mean, I was just with a partner of ours now, and they have this amazing augmented reality solution. You know, it will be a combination of off going out there to build market, share a cz well, as finding you know, really innovative solutions that can help us advance the technology that we provide customers. >>You have a new slogan this year for the challengers, which seems to be aimed at companies that that imagine themselves as challenging the Giants, which is great. But if you're not a company that season sees themselves that way. Are the studies level home with I have s Look, >>I I think I was with a group of CEOs from one of the big analyst rooms, and they had the portfolio companies and their private equity firm and analysts that CEOs of the companies are having a conversation with him about digital transformation. And I I made a rather provocative statement which, you know, got unanimous agreement, which is that all of the CEOs there with either in an industry that was being disrupted and we're trying to figure out how they respond to that disruption or they would soon not every job and they all acknowledge that they absolutely fit into that category. In other words, all of them were being disrupted. All of them were facing a challenge. It was kind of like, you know, if it is happening to all of us at a more rapid pace than we have ever had before. So my view is, is that you know if if you're in the room and you're going, you know, if it's might not be for us because we're not a challenger. Yeah, The lights may not be on >>for Long s o double click on that. What role does I s play in terms of digital transformation? >>If I could just hold on there because the thing is, there are leaders in Mama, there challenges. And there are leaders. The leaders typically are gonna go with seif solution. They're gonna go with one of the legacy our peace. So I'm not suggesting that everybody necessarily is a challenger. There are leaders, you know, Nokia was a leader until they weren't because they were complacent. Andi, I think they you know, they didn't run on I office. So, you know, I think there are two segments. There are leaders and there are challenges, and we're there for the ones that are ready to disrupt. Sorry. >>Please clarify that. No. Good. So So get back to it. Sort of digital transformation and disruption. What do you see? Is the role of AARP generally, but specifically I f s. >>Look, I think we digital information. A lot of discussion about it on the stage this morning. I've just touched on it now. I think that it takes very different forms. What most industries are finding is that they're facing a lot of non traditional competition and they're having to innovate around their business models. They can't going to market in the same way as they did before. They're having to innovate because of this non traditional competition. Andi. Understanding your your customer's understanding, your your staff, understanding your supply chain understanding your financials are all critical parts of being able to respond to whatever their changes, and that's where the RP solution comes into it. I think there's an interesting challenge now, which is that as those applications have become more fragmented and you've got more based debris cloud applications Ah, lot of the value often E. R P was that you had this integrated set of applications that you had this one source of the truth andan. Fortunately for many customers today, they don't have that because they've got import all of these best of breed applications and they don't have one source of the truth that multiple invoices made it multiple versions of their customer in the databases. Andi we still stand for a single integrated the r p. So, you know, I think understanding those elements of your businesses key. I was with a customer of ours in Nebraska a short while ago, and they were talking about our existing office customer. They were talking about the steel import duties that were imposed through the trade war with China. And they were saying, Look, that they had been able to respond to that in a way that they had good visibility of the supply chain, who was improved, imposing the tariffs, how they were going to impact them when they were going to impact them. And because they had this integrated Siara AARP. They were able to pass those pricing changes onto their customers, and they survived this. What could have been a cataclysmic event for their business had they not had an integrated your pee? They not being able to have this visibility into the supply chain and the customer base. They may well have gone out of business just because of that one change >>to meet all day and all comes back to the data, putting their putting data at the core of their business. That integrated data pipeline is essentially what they get out of that last question. So thinking about the next 18 to 24 months, what are the milestones that observers should look for? One of the barometers that we should be watching. >>So look, in the next two years, it's it's really about us building incremental scale. We have, ah, four year plan, which I built when I came in. We're halfway through that plan. We've hit all of the metrics and exceeded most the metrics that we had on their plan. It's really continue to focus on the strategy. As I said, we focus on those five industries, continue to build market share, continue to focus on those three solution types and build market share and market dominance on those three solutions. Andi in that segment that I defined before, so no change from a strategy perspective. I think there's really value in the consistency that we bring on on their talk track and, you know, along the way we passed the $1,000,000,000 mark, which we will do, I think, in 2021 organically if we accelerate, some of the money will pass the 1,000,000,000 before, but you know business. The margins continue to expand. We focus on customer satisfaction and, you know, it's a It's a pretty straight, you know, traditional prey book that we have to execute on now. >>Well, congratulations. It's a great playbook, and you're growing very nicely. So love that. Look, we really an honor to the last couple of years. Learn a little bit about the company in your industry. So appreciate meeting you guys. Thank you. All right. And thank you for watching over right back with our next guest. Ready for this short break day Volonte with Paul Gill in. You're watching the Cube from I f s World Conference from Boston 2019 right back.

>>Bly from Boston, Massachusetts. It's the cube covering ifs world conference 2019 brought to you by ifs. >>Okay. We're back in Boston, Massachusetts ifs world day one. You walked into cube Dave Vellante with Paul Gillen boss Devoss is here. He's the director of ISF I F S labs and Bob Dico who's the vice president of AI and RPA at ifs jets. Welcome. Good to see you again. Good morning bossy. We're on last year. I'm talking about innovation ifs labs. First of all, tell us about ifs labs and what you've been up to in the last 12 months. Well, I have has Lapsis a functioning as the new technology incubator. Fire Fest writes over continuously looking at opportunities to bring innovation into, into product and help our customers take advantage of all the new things out there to yeah. To, to create better businesses. And one of the things I talked about last year is how we want to be close to our customers. And I think, uh, that's what we have been doing over the pasta pasta year. Really be close to our customers. So Bob, you got, you got the cool title, AI, RPA, all the hot cool topics. So help us understand what role you guys play as ifs. As a software developer, are you building AI? Are you building RPA? Are you integrating it? Yes, yes. Get your paint. >>I mean, our value to our customers comes from wrapping up the technology, the AI, the RPA, the IOT into product in a way that it's going to help their business. So it's going to be easy to use. They're not going to need to be a technical specialist to take advantage of it. It's going to be embedded in the product in a way they can take advantage of very easily that that's the key for us as a software developer. We don't want to offer them a platform that they can just go and do their own thing. We want to sort of control it, make it easier for them. >>So I presume it's not a coincidence that you guys are on together. So this stuff starts in the labs and then your job is to commercialize it. Right? So, so take machine intelligence for example. I mean it can be so many things to so many different people. Take us back to sort of, you know, the starting point, you know, within reason of your work on machine intelligence, what you were thinking at the time, maybe some of the experiments that you did and how it ends up in the product. Oh, very good question. Right? So I think we start at a, Oh, well first of all, I think ifs has been using a machine learning at, at various points in our products for many, many years of Trumbull in our dynamic scheduling engine. We have been using neural networks to optimize fuel serve scheduling for quite some many years. >>But I think, um, if we go back like two years, what we sold is that, uh, there, there's a real potential, um, in our products that if you will take machine learning algorithms inside of the product to actually, um, help ultimately certain decisions in there, um, that could potentially help our business quite a bit. And the role of ifs lapse back in the day as that we just started experimenting, right? So we went out to different customers. Uh, we started engaging with them to see, okay, what kind of data do we have, what kind of use cases are there? And basically based on that, we sort of developed a vision around AI and a division back in the day was based on on three important aspects, human machine interaction optimization and automation. And that kind of really lended well with our customer use case. We talked quite a bit about that or the previous world conference. >>So at that point we basically decided, okay, you know what, we need to make serious work of this, uh, experimenting as boots. But at a certain point you have to conclude that the experiments were successful, which we did. And at that point we decided to look at, okay, how can we make this into a product and how to normally go system. We started engaging with them more intensively and starting to hand over in this guys, we decided the most also a good moment to bring somebody on board that actually has even more experience and knowledge in AI and what we already had as hive as labs. But that could basically take over the Baton. And say, okay, now I am going to run with it and actually start commercializing and productizing that still in collaboration with IVIS laps. But yeah, taking that next step in the road and then then Bob came onboard. >>Christian Pedersen made the point during the keynote this morning that you have to avoid the, the appeal of technology for technology's sake. You have to have it. I start with the business use case. You are both very technology, very deep into the technology. How do you keep disciplined to avoid letting the technology lead your, your activities? >>Well, both. Yeah. So, so I think a good example is what we see this world's going fronts as well. It is staying closer to customer and, and, and accepting and realizing that there is no, um, there's no use in just creating technology for sake of technology as you say yourself. So what we did here for example, is that we showcase collaboration projects with, with customers. So, for example, we show showcase a woman chair pack, which um, as a, as a manufacturing of spouting pouches down here in Massachusetts actually, uh, and they wanted to invest in robotics to get our widows. So what we basically did is actually wind into their factory literally on the factory floor and start innovating there. So instead of just thinking about, okay, how do robotics and AI for subrogations or one of our older products work together, we set, let's experiment on the shop floor off a customer instead of inside of the ivory towers. Sometimes our competitors to them, they'll start to answer your question. >>Sure. I can pick up a little, a little feasible. Yeah. Well, so in, I think the really important thing, and again, Christian touched on it this morning is not the individual technologies themselves. It's how they work together. Um, we see a lot of the underlying technologies becoming more commoditized. That's not where companies are really starting to differentiate algorithms after a while become algorithms. There's a good way of doing things. They might evolve slightly over time, but effectively you can open source a lot of these things. You can take advantage, the value comes from that next layer up. How you take those technologies together, how you can create end to end processes. So if we take something like predictive, we would have an asset. We would have sensors on that asset that would be providing real time data, uh, to an IOT system. We can combine that with historical maintenance data stored within a classic ERP system. >>We can pull that together, use machine learning on it to make a prediction for when that machine is gonna break down. And based on that prediction, we can raise a work order and if we do that over enough assets, we can then optimize our technicians. So instead of having to wait for it to break down, we can know in advance, we can plan for people to be in the right the right place. It's that end to end process where the value is. We have to bring that together in a way that we can offer it to our customers. There's certainly, you know, a lot of talk in the press about machines replacing humans. Machine of all machines have always replaced humans. But for the first time in history, it's with cognitive functions. Now it's, people get freaked out. A little bit about that. I'm hearing a theme of, of augmentation, you know, at this event. >>But I wonder if you could share your thoughts with regard to things like AI automation, robotic process automation. How are customers, you know, adopting them? Is there sort of concern up front? I mean we've talked to a number of RPA customers that, you know, initially maybe are hesitant but then say, wow, I'm automating all those tasks that I hate and sort of lean in. But at the same time, you know, it's clear that this could have an effect on people's jobs and lives. What are your thoughts? Sure. Do you want to kick off on them? Yeah, I'll know. Yeah, absolutely. That's fine. So I think in terms of the, the automation, the low level tasks, as you say, that can free up people to focus on higher value activities. Something like RPA, those bots, they can work 24, seven, they can do it error free. >>Um, it's often doing work that people don't enjoy anyway. So that tends to actually raise morale, raise productivity, and allow you to do tasks faster. And the augmentation, I think is where it gets very interesting because you need to, you often don't want to automate all your decisions. You want people to have the final say, but you want to provide them more information, better, more pertinent ways of making that decision. And so it's very important. If you can do that, then you've got to build the trust with them. If you're going to give them an AI decision that's just out of a black box and just say, there's a 70% chance of this happening. And what I founded in my career is that people don't tend to believe that or they start questioning it and that's where you have difficulty. So this is where explainable AI comes in. >>I do to be able to state clearly why that prediction is being made, what are the key drivers going into it? Or if that's not possible, at least giving them the confidence to see, well, you're not sure about this prediction. You can play around with it. You can see I'm right, but I'm going to make you more comfortable and then hopefully you're going to understand and, and sort of move with it. And then it starts sort of finding its way more naturally into the workplace. So that's, I think the key to building up successful open sexually. What it is is it's sort of giving a human the, the, the parameters the and saying, okay, now you can make the call as to whether or not you want to place that bet or make a different decision or hold off and get more data. Is that right? >>Uh, yeah. I think a lot of it is about setting the threshold and the parameters with within which you want to operate. Often if a model is very confident, either you know, a yes or a no, you probably be quite happy to let it automate. Take that three, it's the borderline decision where it gets interesting. You probably would still want someone to look over it, but you want them to do it consistently. You want them to do it using all the information to hand and say that's what you do. You're presented to them. And to add to that, um, I think we also should not forget they said a lot of our customers, a lot of companies are, are actually struggling finding quality stuff, right? I mean aging of the workforce riots, we're, we're old. I'm retiring eventually. Right? So aging of the workforce is a potential issue. >>Funding, lack of quality. Stop. So if I go back to the chair pack example I was just talking about, um, and, and, and some of the benefits they get out of that robotics projects, um, um, is of course they're saving money right there. They're saving about one point $5 million a year on money on that project, but their most important benefits for them, it's actually the fact that I have been able to move the people from the work floor doing that into higher scope positions, effectively countering the labor shortage today. They were limited in their operations, but in fact, I had two few quality stuff. And by putting the robots in, they were able to reposition those people and that's for them the most important benefits. So I think there's always a little bit of a balance. Um, but I also think we eventually need robots. >>We need ultimation to also keep up with the work that needs to be done. Maybe you can speak to Bobby, you can speak to software robots. We've, Pete with people think of robots, they tend to think of machines, but in fact software robots are, where are the a, the real growth is right now, the greatest growth is right now. How pervasive will software robots be in the workplace do you think in the three to five years? >> I think the software robots as they are now within the RPA space, um, they fulfill a sort of part of the Avril automation picture, but they're never going to be the whole thing. I see them very much as bringing different systems together, moving data between systems, allowing them to interact more effectively. But, um, within systems themselves, uh, you know, the bots can only really scratched the surface. >>They're interacting with software in the same way a human would on the whole by clicking buttons going through, et cetera, beneath the surface. Uh, you know, for example, within the ifs products we have got data understanding how people interact with our products. We can use machine learning on that data to learn, to make recommendations to do things that our software but wouldn't be able to see. So I think it's a combination. There's software bots, they're kind of on the outside looking in, but they're very good at bringing things together. And then insight you've got that sort of deeper automation to take real advantage of the individual pieces of software. >> This may be a little out there, but you guys >>are, you guys are deep into, into the next generation lot to talk right now about quantum and how we could see workable quantum computers within the next two to two to three years. How, what do you think the, the outlook is there? How is that going to shake things up? So >>let me answer this. We were actually a having an active project and I for slabs currently could looking at quantum computing, right? Um, there's a lot of promise in it. Uh, there's also a lot of unfilled, unfulfilled problems in that, right? But if you look at the, the potential, I think where it really starts playing, um, into, uh, into benefits is if the larger the, the, the optimization problems, the larger the algorithms are that we have to run, the more benefits it actually starts bringing us. So if you're asking me for an for an outlook, I say there is potential definitely, especially in optimization problems. Right. Um, but I also think that the realistic outlook is quite far out. Uh, yes, we're all experimenting it and I think it's our responsibility as ifs or ciphers laps to also look on what it could potentially mean for applications as we FSI Fs. >>But my personal opinion is the odd Lucas. Yeah. So what comes five to 10 years out? What comes first? Quantum computing or fully autonomous driverless vehicles? Oh, that's a tricky question. I mean, I would say in terms of the practical commercial application, it's going to be the latter in that much so that's quite a ways off. Yeah, I think so. Of course. Question back on on RPA, what are you guys exactly doing on RPA? Are you developing your own robotic process automation software or are you integrating, doing both say within the products? We, you know, if we think of RPA as, as this means of interacting with the graphical user interface in a way that a human would within the product. Um, we, we're thinking more in terms of automating processes using the machine learning as I mentioned, to learn from experience, et cetera. Uh, in a way that will take advantage of things like our API eighth, an API APIs that are discussed on main stage today. >>RPA is very much our way of interacting with other systems, allowing other systems when trapped with ifs, allowing us to, to send messages out. So we need to make it as easy as possible for those bots to call us. Uh, you know, that can be by making our screens nice and accessible and easy to use. But I think the way that RPA is going, a lot of the major vendors are becoming orchestrators really. They're creating these, these studios where you can drag and drop different components into to do ACR, provide cognitive services and you know, elements that you could drag and drop in would be to say, ah, take data from a file and load it into ifs and put it in a purchase order. And you can just drag that in and then it doesn't really matter how it connects to YFS. It can do that via the API. And I think it probably will say it's creating the ability to talk to ifs. That's the most important thing for us. So you're making your products a RPA ready, friendly >>you, it sounds like you're using it for your own purposes, but you're not an RPA vendor per se. You know what I'm saying? Okay. Here's how you do an automation. You're gonna integrate that with other RPA leadership product. I think we would really take a more firm partner approach to it. Right? So if a customer, I mean, there's different ways of integrating systems to get our RPA as a Google on there. There's other ways as well, right? That if a customer actually, um, wants to integrate the systems together using RPA, very good choice, we make sure that our products are as ready as much for that as possible. Of course we will look at the partner ecosystem to make sure that we have sufficient and the right partners in there that a customer has as a choice in what we recommends. But basically we say where we want to be agnostic to what kind of RPA feminists sits in there that was standing there was obviously a lot of geopolitical stuff going on with tariffs and the like. >>So not withstanding that, do you feel as though things like automation, RPA, AI will swing the pendulum back to onshore manufacturing, whether it's Europe or, or U S or is the costs still so dramatically advantageous to, you know, manufacture in China? Well, that pendulum swing in your opinion as a result of automation? Um, I have a good, good question. Um, I'm not sure it's will completely swing, but it will definitely be influenced. Right. One of the examples I've seen in the RPA space ride wire a company before we would actually have an outsourcing project in India where people would just type over D uh, DDD, the purchase orders right now. Now in RPA bolts scans. I didn't, so they don't need the Indian North shore anymore. But it's always a balance between, you know, what's the benefit of what's the cost of developing technology and that's, and it's, and, and it's almost like a macro economical sort of discussion. >>One of the discussions I had with my colleagues in Sri Lanka, um, and, and maybe completely off topic example, we were talking about carwash, right? So us in the, in the Western world we have car wash where you drive your car through, right? They don't have them in Sri Lankan. All the car washes are by hands. But the difference is because labor is cheaper there that it's actually cheaper to have people washing your car while we'd also in the us for example, that's more expensive than actually having a machine doing it. Right. So it is a, it's a macro economical sort of question that is quite interesting to see how that develops over the next couple of years. All right, Jess. Well thanks very much for coming on the cube. Great discussion. Really appreciate it. Thank you very much. You're welcome. All right. I'll keep it right there, but he gave a latte. Paul Gillen moved back. Ifs world from Boston. You watch in the queue.

>>live from Boston, Massachusetts. It's the Q covering I. F s World Conference 2019. Brought to you by I. F s. >>Welcome back to I f s world Everybody, This is David Dante with Paul Dillon and you're watching the Cube, The leader in live tech coverage. Where here from? From the Heinz Auditorium. Nick Ward is here. He's the head of OM Digital Solutions for Rolls Royce and Scott Helmer, president of the F S aerospace and defense. Gentlemen, welcome to the Cube. Thanks for coming on. Thank you. Scott. I want to start with you. We heard a lot about digital transformation. You guys are in the heart of that. Ah, defense. Aerospace is one of those industries that hasn't been dramatically disrupted. Like publishing. Are you seeing taxis? It's a It's a high risk business. It's one that's highly in trench, but it's not safe from disruption. What are the major trends that you're seeing in your space and paint a picture for us? If you would, >>uh, that's a very good question. You're right. The same level of disruption related digital transformation has not yet common aerospace. Defense is that has come to some of the other league leading industries. But this is a whether it's land based operations, naval operations or aircraft operations. This is an asset intensive industry. It's characterized by a very connected network of organizations. Be the manufacturer's operators, subsystem, part suppliers or just maintainers. They stay connected throughout the asset life cycle in its entirety. I f F f s has a portfolio capability. There's four purpose underpinning the critical business processes of those organizations that enables us to be the digital thread to continue the connection of those organizations throughout that outs of life cycle, if you will, that sees this fall come to come to be at the heart of asset lifecycle Management on provides us with the opportunity to inform information insights for our customers. Like return on experience data on aircraft engines where an old GM like Rolls Royce, for example, can harvest that data to analyze the performance of those assets and ultimately optimized thereafter after service offerings. >>Who are the customers? I mean, there's a limited number of companies that make aircraft engines so you don't have a huge domain been numbers of those kinds of companies. But are the customers channel their partners the supply chain network >>Well, the ecosystem is actually large and extensive. They're very recognizable names, and it's certainly an industry that's characterized by significant growth. On the commercial side. Amaro continue is in the midst of a boom and is likely to continue to grow, are expected to continue to grow for at least another decorate decade. And on the defense side, we see military budgets continue or increasingly moving towards sustainment and serve it ization on a performance basis. So the number of organizations that are participating in that value chain whether they're just the upstream, only am so I should just upstream. But the Austrian Williams participate in the design and development are moving into the aftermarket sustainment and service support parts and subsystem supply, or ultimately, third part repair organizations. It's actually quite an extensive network participating in that asset life cycle. >>So, Nick, you know people here Rolls Royce, they think you know the iconic brand. We're gonna talk about cars, talk about your role at Rolls Royce and what's going on in your business. >>So my role I lead our product management function looking are digitally enabled. Service's so for 20 years we've been running a service we call total care. Total care is like a fixed dollar rate. Every time an aircraft flies, we paid a dollar rate for it. Flying. What's really great about that is we're incentivizing. No, I am exactly the same way that airline isn't said device. Keep the aircraft flying. It owns revenue for the airline. It owns revenue for us on that revolutionized relationship between oh am on operator. So within my role, it's about taking four division we call The Intelligent Engine. Intelligent Engine is recognizing the way that digital is starting to pervade the way we think about service is so we've talked about physical engine, big rotating piece of metal that people see service. Is that wrap around that on the digital brain that sits behind all of those sources? That's what we call the intelligent engine. >>Yes, so people sometimes think the mission critic critical piece of air travel is the reservation system. It's not. It's the thinness of the engines available that was lost in critical system, right? You mean like it? If you don't get your reservation Oh, well, somebody else will get it. Not not the end of the world But for the maintenance piece, that's all right. >>Job. You know, our fundamental mission is every rose was powered. Aircraft flies on time every time. All right, there's no disruption. There's no delay that works for the operator, for the airlines are owner of the aircraft. It works for us. And this is why the confluence of our incentives comes together and it really works well. >>So what role has technology played in terms of evolving that that experience? I mean, I'm sure, you know, years ago, it used to be a lot of tribal knowledge. Gut feel. Joe the mechanic really knew his stuff. Etcetera, etcetera, Powers. Technology evolved and changed your your business. >>So you had to go back to the business model, right? So technology should follow. The business model business model is fundamental risk transfer. So we take the risk off cost, fluctuation, availability, whatever it is away from the airline and we take it on to us is the Obama's Rolls Royce said the money's at risk. You gotta get really good forecasting. Four. Custom becomes your core skill almost because you've got to understand all the risk drivers understand how to optimize him, understand out of work around that in order to have a successful business. And you can't forecast without data without digital twins without all I ot and cloud and all the while the enablers allow you to sort of new to new generations of capability. >>So you're forecasting what probability of, ah, component failure, the life of ah, failure. How long it takes to bring stuff back on sure >>cost really on three different levels. So we do an engine forecast which is looking at the health of the life of the components in the engine, looking for any reasons why the engine might be forced off the wing. We're looking at a fleet level. So we're looking at all of the things that might affect the global fleet in terms of maintenance demands need for overhaul of those such things. And we forecast that out after 30 years, really accurately, as an engine leaves the factory, we know pretty much within 90 something percent everything that engine is going to require from the maintenance 20 to 30 years and then a network level. We're forecasting the capacity demand that we then need to meet within our maintenance shops globally. >>Well, He's obviously Paul. Been progress, right? We used to fly with very common four engine plains across the pond right now. Two engines. In fact, you don't want to fly in the four engine to engine more reliable. >>You've You've been a Rolls Royce for over 15 years. What have you seen as a result of all this technology is predicted maintenance technology. What impact is that? Had on equipment of reliability on life cycle on fuel efficiency. >>Huge, huge. I think if you don't have the data and you don't have the digital twin kind of capability behind you, you have to treat every engine like it's the worst engine in the fleet because you don't have the data tell you it isn't right. So everything is treated extremely extreme conservatism. If you have the data and you have the models and you have everything else around you, you treat engines, individuals. They have individual histories, individual configuration, individual experiences. Because of individuals. You tailor your maintenance intervention to keep that engine flying as long as you can on, you don't have to be his conservative. You can weed that conservatism out of the process, and that means it stays on wing 40 50% longer. It's flying for the airline that much longer. Revenues. Passengers are flying. There's less disruption. >>So what do you What do you do with my f s? What's the what's >>So Because we created this intelligent engine kind of next generation leap forward in that capability, we need data. So we have, ah, program we call the Blue Data Threat. The blue data traded in a global initiative that we're rolling through all of our 200 plus airline customers. How do we form a win win transaction with the airlines? Give us better data will make smarter decisions. You'll see less disruption, more availability. We'll share our data. Back with you is an operator. So this is a very simple, very nice cashless transactions. So with my intern X, because we share a number of customers, Scott has got a number of airline customers. Big airline customers were operating the maintenance system. What way do together? Is reform a plug in? It's like for us. We can go to an airline, and we can say you have total care inside to borrow an intel phrase. So he complied into the rosary service is seamlessly automated. The data can flow very little burden or effort on to the I t group of the outline. The data flows into our organization. We do what we do when we can push our date again back into the airline systems with updated form, their availability >>so key to that key to that value, Jane is obviously that common customer base. But critical to the work that Rolls Royce stuns does is the accuracy and reliability of the data They get to inform their own performance analysis and maintenance, availability information and the eye if it's made installed. Base leverage is a very rich data from the return on experience of the engine utilization that Nick and is able to use this part of the Blue data threat offering back to their customers. And together we're able to deliver unprecedented levels of value to airline customers and optimizing the availability of their assets. >>Nick, have you? Are you finding new ways to monetize this data beyond just improving the customer experience, a bond with your customers or their new revenue avenues >>for you? So I think within this is absolutely key that everybody within this transaction recognizes this is this is not a revenue opportunity for Rosa. This is a cashless transactions because there's a lot of sensitivity that data belongs to the airline, right? So you have to be very clear and open. That data is driving Rolls Royce to make internal improvements, so we will save a little bit on our bottom line of delivering the service's they've already bought in order to get better. Outcomes of those service is so It's a little early for the service. You were thinking about >>this a little bit like security. In that sense, you know of bad guys are trying to get there. So So the good guys to share data. It's a cashless transaction, and everybody we >>believe is a market collaboration on data is got to be the way Ford's >>Scott could. You double click on the Ecosystem and A and D, obviously different from the sort of core traditional you know, e r. P world. The importance of the ecosystem may be what it looks like, described the >>That's an insightful question, Dave, certainly the partner ecosystem in inner space and defense is somewhat differentiated. I don't want to go so far as to say that it's unique, but it's somewhat differentiated from Corey RPS. As you duly noted partner, our four persecuted for four purpose capability around the critical process is for manufacturers. Maintainers on, uh, parts and subsystem supply organizations is all the potential, and it's a promise. But that value can only be realized to the collaboration with partners who doom or an aerospace and defense and just support delivery and implementation capability. They provide value added service is around business process, reengineering, change, enablement as well as their partners and co innovation as well. Certainly the collaboration we have with Rolls Royce is certainly a new level of collaboration around innovation that hasn't been seen before. So those partners are critical to our ability to deliver that value to our customers. Secondarily, we have our partners are actually a route to market in the traditional sense of referral system like you would see in Corriere P. But more importantly, as an indirect route to market as channels to their end customers, almost I s v ng. Our capability to support the delivery of service is to their customers. >>So it's the it's the manufacturers of the Plains, For example, it's the airlines themselves. It's manufactured the engine defectors, >>the maintainers. So the M R organizations that do the work around repair, and it's the entire ecosystem of organizations to support the supply chain. Our partners are both in themselves as well as partners in delivering the capability to those organizing. >>And it's a data pipeline throughout that value chain a digital thread that you guys actually have visibility on, correct your value. Add to the and >>we have the opportunity to play a vital role between within that equal system in allowing and enabling the connective ity of that network between Williams and their customers between the operators and their maintainers. For example, we've got a collaboration with an airline right now where we're going to connect them directly with the third party organizations that they rely on for airframe repair. For example, >>I want to ask you about the aerospace business it used to be that used to be a very small market in terms of the number of customers. Now we've got Space X. We've got the private areas, three private aerospace companies. We've got different countries now. India, China getting involved. What impact is that having on your business. >>Certainly we're seeing the emergence of spatial program's playing a taking up a larger share of off of government or public sector budgets. And people are beginning to think about how to leverage or harvest the value from utilization of spatial assets and again are enabling capability. To be a collector of that data and supply it back as an information in sight to those were reliant on the data that is collected is a vital role that we play in that ecosystem. >>So when I was when you were describing the ecosystem value chain, it strikes me that there's there's clearly a whole lot of metrics going on. Are there new levers, new metrics, emerging new levers that you can pull to really drive a flywheel effect in the industry? One of the key key performance indicators that you're really trying to optimize visiting? This is >>Certainly this is certainly an industry that characterizes as an intensive, complex mobile and in this case complex in mobile or a pseudonym for very expensive assets. So everything around availability, reliability are all key drivers are performance indicators of our customers ability to realise the value from those assets and our role in that is to provide them with the information inside to be able to make optimal decisions to maximize that availability. >>Anything you dad, >>I think in this day and age things like technical dispatcher alive. Relative engines is so high, high 99 sort of percentage. You have to start focusing on things like the maintenance costs to achieve that. Driving your maintenance costs down, but still retaining your really high availability. That becomes a really interesting balance. You could have under percent of relevancy. What it's gonna cost a fortune. You don't want that. >>Well, gentlemen, thanks so much for coming on. The cute, really fascinating discussion. Thank you. Great to have you. All right, you're welcome. And keep it right there, buddy. Paul Gill on day Volante from I F s World in Boston. You're watching the Cube right back Right after this short break

>>live from Boston, Massachusetts. It's the Q covering I f s World Conference 2019. Brought to you by I >>f. S, I say, What a minute. I didn't cash it. Everybody welcome to I f s World 2019. You watching the Cube? The leader in live tech coverage on day Volante with my co host, Paul Galen. Marty Martin is here. She is the president of the service management division of I F s and C e o of work wave. Marty, good to see you. >>Yeah, it's great to be here. I'm so excited. >>A lot of action going on. You guys. Service management, Field Service management particular. You guys had an acquisition today. We're gonna talk about Let's start with your role you came in and 2017 with the >>pretty acting. Actually, >>2018 finalized the acquisition. I think they announce it in 2017. So tell us about how you came in and where you're at today with >>Certainly. So work wave the company. I lied. Join the effects family in 2017. Darren Ruess, who joined I f s in April 2018 recruited me into form a global business unit around service in August of 2018 and the reason why we did this is service isn't only a part of our economies all over the world, but it's a super great growth area that almost every business can go after in in progress both revenue and margins. So we had a lot of great software products, and we really wanted to improve our go to market around this. >>So why, why all of a sudden today, this talk about service management? Why's it becoming so hard? I mean, everybody's always been focused on customer service, but why this service management generally and field service management while the buzz. >>So first off, you've had the evolution of a number of line of business applications and service certainly has been a part of maintenance organizations or break fix where you're going out in repairing thing. What we're realizing now when you talk about service ization, how o E EMS air building what's called aftermarket revenue? There is literally $100 billion of revenue that you can get from that you look, we had Melissa did a nano from Souza. If you think about open source software, they make money from sirve ties, ing, open source software and the products. You look at apple how they're doing APs. So people are starting to realize that service is an engine for brand loyalty, customer experience, not just a cost center. How it used to be, what the >>customers do. Ah, companies do wrong with service one of the areas where they tend to have the greatest inefficiencies where you can help him. >>So first off, I'd say that often in the C suite, unless they're pure place service companies. They don't understand how transformative service is and how important it is to their brand. Many times now, if you have digital enablement of a new customer, the first time they see a face of your brand might be your service technician. So getting the awareness of the C suite is Step one, because we want to start talking about outcomes that grow revenue and profits and getting them to invest in service. So you know, many times will say, Oh, I want to do a C. R M project. I want to do an E r P project. That's certainly things were good at it. Here I a fest, but we can coach them through how you take the market opportunity for your company and service enabled by our technology and transform. Tomorrow I'll be with Accenture, one of our many great partners, and we're talking about adapting the business, the service transformation, sometimes digitally, sometimes with workflow transformation. But that opportunity and service is huge and almost never. There's no company I know of that's taking 100% of their service market share. That's the difference, especially in slower growth. Asset manufacturing are more mature verticals. >>So I was here last night walking the floor, and I went to the extent you Booth, you know, anytime you see, except you're in a show like this. Okay, Censure. You think Large company Global. I was actually quite impressed a little bit surprised to see you know, their presence here because they they go where the money is, right? And so my specific question is, think, except you think big companies. But you guys obviously focused on what range of companies smaller midsize company. So what's the landscape? Looked like? What's the difference is between sort of smaller and larger companies, >>so that's a great question. I'll take it in part So if you think about a neck censure definitely they looked a large. I also have had meetings with the Lloyd McKinsey Cap gem and I dxc etcetera Also tcs Tech Mahindra which a little bit or more telco focused. So if you think about at the very large and you have telco utilities, large manufacturing O e ems that our customers and definitely the customers I'm pursuing Maur with this focus But we also with work with go down to the S and B We had panels also of, for example, female owners of franchises and also males as well that are creating new service businesses and they're starting maybe with one truck in out providing service. So the fact that we can handle not only the breath and depth of complex service needs, but through work wave we also can encourage the small service businesses to reach their full potential is fantastic. And you know that makes me excited every day. And part of why I focused on service specifically is you are delighting customers. You are the face of a brand and you're making a difference. It's not something that s 02 is esoteric. This is about really value that we're delivering, >>always interested in the dynamics of serving the SNB market >>because one of >>these small companies don't really have that. Maybe family owned there found her own. They don't really put a lot of value on technology. How >>do you >>get in the door? How do you convince them that automating the service function is actually worth the investment? >>Well, first off, I'd say that even the big companies are struggling to go paperless. Okay, so, you know, I think some of the challenges we see survive, if you will, big to small, especially when you look globally in different countries. What have you. But the approach we take in the S and B is that we want to be a software as a service provider, and we were to really handle everything they need in their business. So everything from how they grow leads how they have c r m type functionality. How, then they're delivering service, how they're cross selling service, how they're billing service. So at the at the S M B level, we're putting that kind of all in one technology and there's really not that much integration or I T Service is around that right. We want it to be easy and fast, etcetera, as you go more into the mid market and then definitely into the enterprise. Then you start getting more complexity. You get more I t service's integrations, more configurable ity, sometimes even some customized software. So there is a definitely a difference in the complexity. But the fundamentals of what a service business needs really isn't that much different to your >>customers that you mentioned customize and you guys were SAS space. That's one of the text that we'd like to sort of explore a little bit. A lot >>of >>times SAS companies want to avoid, you know, custom mods. But at the same time, you guys are trying to offer a choice. So help us square that circle. How do you What's the conversation like with customers in terms of how you advise them, You guys obviously do a lot of deep functionality, you know? How do you sort of advise them whether or not to go heavily custom or try to go out of the box? >>Certainly. So in the true, I'd say the small business of a medium you start getting some crossover, but in the small business, Absolutely avoid customization because you won't be able to stay evergreen. It's going to be too hard to maintain. You don't have the subject matter experts, et cetera, so that's really a truce. Ask that from a community. A product engagement. We need to be driving the partnership with the customers that they can use a software out of the box in ways that matter to them. As you start getting into the mid market and especially the enterprise, then it becomes more of a choice, right? How much money do you have to spend? How robust is your organization and set trek? And in general, I advise customers if they care about evergreen software, et cetera. If they care about ease of upgrades, don't customize that Being said, we recognize sometimes in the field with your brand experience Custom mobile. You may need to customize a little bit, so it's Ah, say, a chicken and an egg. You have to weigh the benefits of the costs, and that's what we work through with our >>customers. Specifically morning. What's the upgrade cycle like? There's a customer having the choice Thio upgrade at a particular time, Or do they have a window? >>So it varies primarily, there's a few exceptions, but in general, with the work way, Family of products is true SAS. So it's almost like you're Apple Phone. We pushed the upgrade and you have to take it. Okay, And that's the true SAS model at I. F. S. And this is something Darren talked about in his keynote. We pride ourselves on offering choice. So even though we do have regular release cycles, we encourage customers to upgrade regularly. They have the choice on when they take upgrades and also how they deploy. We have some markets with things like data, privacy and what have you that they may, for that reason or for other reasons, go on premise even still today. So we give them the choice on how they upgrade as well as where they host. >>I'm fascinated by your product line. You have products for pest control. H V. A. C. Plumbing cleaning service is long and landscape. How different are these industries really in terms of their their automation needs? >>Well, I'll tell you one of the personal factors that Darren wanted to make sure I was comfortable with was multitasking. And that definitely is the case, because an I f s, we serve five key industries. So if you think about manufacturing utilities, telco service providers and Andy Okay, that's more at the enterprise level. If you think then when you go toe work wave. Those verticals that you mentioned are all the ones we service at work wave, and they are different. So you know what? Work wave. It's primarily service industries where you're going into ah, home and a little bit The commercial aspect and I effects were also doing more some heavy industries, some very large asset base, things like that. So I like to think about it as a product I service consumer based service. And then you can also differentiate across verticals with what are called high value assets versus, you know, Mork consumer size assets. >>So what >>are >>the one of the key technology enablers that are driving service management today? I mean, obviously, cloud, we talked about sas a lot of push on you X and customer experience, but what other key ones? >>So all the three that you mentioned mobile is huge. You know, Pete and even today, like I run. I work mainly from my phone, and that's really what people want. They want efficient work flows that are configurable on mobile, tied to the customer, the asset, the business. And that's an area that we're continuing to make investment. We also try to prioritize how we bring in the new technology trends into service. Because every technology trend that you see has applicable ity and service supply chain and how you run spare parts specially globally, you can see applications for Blockchain augmented emerged Reality how you can connect the field tech with an expert resource or remote resource to the consumer. That is obvious, right? So you talked about the enabling technologies like Cloud, how we're thinking about data platforms and Data's the currency. Of all of that, we need to d'oh. His service is really about a an execution engine, right? Because to deliver a customer experience that makes people come back to your brand. To purchase Maur, you need great service, so any time somebody talks about customer experience, but they don't talk about service. I want to say you're really naive because you can just get the customer. You have to delight the customer. >>Uh, the, uh, there's a lot of interesting technology going on now in the area. Fleet Management making fleets more efficient How does that figure into the service is? You offer. >>So Fleet management is an important part, and it's one that you have a very tangible return on investment when you deploy route management route optimization, fleet management. So you have the aspects that are very tangible, relate to how do you get the person or the truck where it needs to be when it needs to be okay, and that's pretty well understood. Then how do you get the most efficient schedule that minimizes miles driven gas, used et cetera? And then, of course, you also are thinking about health and safety. There's some cool things now that you can partner that if you have these fleet technologies installed in a way that is integrated in your service business, you can actually get lower insurance premiums, right? So it's not just the conventional use. Cases were starting to think in this kind of gig economy, how you can also be thinking about bringing in Maura what's called a contingent workforce. So if you have surge capacity in a certain period or you want to just do more third party service, probably your appliances. You know they're not the employees, if you will, of a g e or a world polar and LG right there Probably a contingent workforce. And that's a model that's also evolving. But to do Fleet Management across say, contractors, not just employees is an area that were thinking more and more led by some of the uber ization, if you will, of the of the marketplace >>right up against the clock, Marty. But to last questions You made an acquisition today, Vashti Uh, yeah, uh, I thought of it as a tuck in acquisitions, although Darren essentially sort of said, it's gonna make you the leader now in service management. Um And then I want to understand how you guys differentiate from some of the big whales. >>So, you know, overall, we're on track to be about 700 revenue this year in service management. We're working to get to 200 million, right? So this year will probably be around maybe 1/5 50 ish per se. Don't quote me on that check with our coms team, but the point being is that we have the ability to use these tuck in acquisitions and service to accelerate our lead, not just from a revenue perspective, which is what we were just talking about. But from a product perspective, you might have followed Salesforce acquiring Click. That means we are the only independent. Aye, aye. Optimization engine that is field tested. Battle ready. So that's great. This s t a is how we consolidate our dominance and complex service. So what darren was speaking to is not on Lee the service management segment of our revenue and how we continue to accelerate over the oracles in the S a. P s and the service maxes et cetera of the world. But how we take what we're already dominant in and really put the hammer down. Honesty is part of that. >>Your differentiation then if I infers, is focus. Um, you're you're deep customer customs agent deep >>domain expertise. Yeah, So really, when you think about a i optimization, which drives a ton of business value and the ability to handle the complex service cases that then drive business outcomes and outcomes based service models, we are number one and s dea tucks into that, even though it is very strategic on how we position ourselves with leadership and service. >>All right, Challenger becomes number one, Marty. Thanks very much. All right, Keep it right, everybody. Dave A lot with Paul Galen. You're watching the Cube from Boston Mass. I f s world 2019 right back.

>>from Boston, Massachusetts. It's the Q covering I. F s World Conference 2019. Brought to you by I F s. Hi, buddy. Welcome to Boston. You're watching the cubes coverage of I s s World in the Heinz Auditorium in Boston. I'm Day Volonte with my co host, Paul Gill and Paul. This is the the largest enterprise resource planning software company that our audience probably has never heard of. This is our second year covering I f s World. Last year was in Atlanta. They moved to Boston. I f s is a Swedish based company. They do about $600 million in annual revenue, about 3700 employees. And interestingly, they have a development center in Sri Lanka, of all places. Which is kind of was war torn for the last 15 years or so, but nonetheless, evidently, a lot of talent and beautiful views, but so welcome. >>Thank you, Dave. I have to admit, before our coverage last year, I had never even heard of this company been around this industry for more than 30 years. Never heard of this company. They've got 10,000 customers. They've got a full house next door in the keynote and very enthusiastic group. This is a focus company. It's a company that has a lot of ah ah, vision about where wants to go some impressive vision documents and really a company that I think it's coming out of the shadows in the U. S. And it will be a force to be reckoned with. >>So I should say they were founded in the in the mid 19 eighties, and then it kind of re architected their whole platform around Client server. You remember the component move? It was a sort of big trends in the in the nineties. In the mid nineties opened up offices in the United States. We're gonna talk to the head of North America later, and that's one of the big growth areas that growing at about three. They claim to be growing at three x the overall market rate, which is a good benchmark. They're really their focus is really three areas e r. P asset management software and field service management, and they talk about deep functionality. So, for instance, they compete with Oracle ASAP. Certainly Microsoft and in four company we've covered in four talks a lot about the last mile functionality. That's not terminology that I f s uses, but they do similar types of things. I'll give you some examples because, okay, what's last mile? Functionality? Things like, um, detailed invoicing integration, contract management. Very narrow search results on things like I just want to search for a refurbished parts so they have functionality to allow you to do that. Chain. A custom e custody chain of custody for handling dangerous toxic chemicals. Certain modules to handle FDA compliance. A real kind of nitty gritty stuff to help companies avoid custom modifications in certain industries. Energy, construction, aerospace and defense is a big area for that. For them, a CZ well as manufacturing, >>there's a segment of the e r P market that often is under uh is under seeing. There's a lot of these companies that started out in niches Peoples off being a famous example, starting out on a niche of the market and then growing into other areas. And this company continues to be very focused even after 35 years, as you mentioned, just energy aerospace, a few construction, a few basic industries that they serve serve them at a very deep level focused on the mid market primarily, but they have a new positioning this year. They're calling the challengers for the challengers, which I like. It's a it's a message that I think resonates. It's easy to understand there position their customers is being the companies that are going to challenge the big guys in their industries and this time of digital transformation and disruption. You know, that's what it's all about. I think it's a great message of bringing out this year. >>Of course I like it because the Cube is a challenger, right? Okay, even though we're number one of the segments that we cover, we started out as a sort of a challenger. Interestingly, I f s and the gardener Magic Corners actually, leader and Field Service Management. They made an acquisition that they announced today of a company called Asked. He asked, U S he is a pink sheet OTC company. I mean, they're very small is a tuck in acquisition that maybe they had a They had a sub $20 million market cap. They probably do 25 $30 million in revenue. Um, Darren rules. The CEO said that this place is them is the leader in field service management, which is interesting. We're gonna ask him about that to your other point. You look around the ecosystem here that they have 400 partners. I was surprised last night. I came early to sort of walk around the hall floor. You see large companies here like Accenture. Um and I'm surprised. I mean, I remember the early days when we did the service. Now conferences 2013 or so you didn't see accent. You're Delloye E Y p W c. Now you see them at the service now event here that you see them? I mean, and I talked to essential last night. They said, Yeah, well, we actually do a lot of business in Europe, particularly in the Scandinavian region, and we want to grow the business in the U. S. >>Europe tends to be kind of a blind spot for us cos they don't see the size of the European market, all the activities where some of the great e. R. P. Innovation has come out of Europe. This company, as you mentioned growing three times the rate of the market, they have a ah focus on your very tight with those customers that they serve and they understand them very well. And this is a you can see why it's centuries is is serving this market because, you know they're simply following the money. There's only so much growth left in the S a P market in the Oracle market. But as the CEO Darren said this morning, Ah, half of their revenues last year were from net new customers. So that's that's a great metric. That indicates that there's a lot of new business for these partners to pursue. >>Well, I think there's there's some fatigue, obviously, for big, long multi year s AP integrations, you're also seeing, you know, at the macro we work with Enterprise Technology Research and we have access to their data set. One of the things that we're seeing is a slowdown in the macro. Clearly, buyers are planning to spend less on I T in the second half of 2019 than they did in the first half of 2019 and they expect to spend less in Q four than they expected to in July. So things are clearly softening at the macro level. They're reverting back to pre 2018 levels but it's not falling off a cliff. One of the things that I've talked to e t. R about the premise we put forth love to get your thoughts is essentially we started digital transformation projects, Let's say in earnest in 2016 2017 doing a lot of pilots started kind of pre production in 2018. And during that time, what people were doing is they were had a lot of redundancy. They would maintain the legacy systems and they were experimenting with disruptive technologies. You saw, obviously a lot of you. I path a lot of snowflake and other sort of disruptive technology. Certainly an infrastructure. Pure storage was the beneficiary of that. So you had this sort of dual strategy. We had redundancy of legacy systems, and then the new stuff. What's happening now is, is the theory is that we're going into production. Would digital transformation projects and where were killing the legacy stuff? Okay, we're ready to cut over >>to a new land on that anymore, >>right? We're not going to spend them anymore. Dial that down. Number one. Number two is we're not just gonna spray and pray on all new tech Blockchain a i rp et cetera. We're gonna now focus on those areas that we think are going to drive business value. So both the incumbents and the disruptors are getting somewhat affected by that. That slowdown in that narrowing of the focused. And so I think that's really what's happening. And we're gonna, I think, have to absorb that for a year or so before we start to see new wave of spending. >>There's been a lot of spending on I t over the last three years. As you say, driven by this need, this transition that's going on now we're being going to see some of those legacy systems turned off. The more important thing I have to look at, I think the overall spending is where is that money being spent is being spent on on servers or is it being spent on cloud service is, and I think you would see a fairly dramatic shift going on. They're so the overall, the macro. I think it's still healthy for I t. There's still a lot of spending going on, but it's shifting to a new area there. They're killing off some of that redundancy. >>Well, the TR data shows couple things. There's no question that server and storage spending is has been declining and attenuating for a number of quarters now. And there's been a shift going on from that. Core infrastructure, obviously, into Cloud Cloud continues its steady march in terms of taking over market share. Other areas of bright spots security is clearly one. You're seeing a lot of spending in an analytics, especially new analytics. I mentioned Snowflake before we're disrupting kind of terror Data's traditional legacy enterprise data warehouse market. The R P. A market is also very hot. You AI path is a company that continues to extend beyond its its peers, although I have to say automation anywhere looks very strong. Blue Prison looks very strong. Cloudera interestingly used to be the darling is hitting sort of all time lows in the E. T R database, which is, by the way, that one of the best data sets I've ever seen on on spending enterprise software is actually still pretty strong. Particularly, uh, you know, workday look strong. Sales force still looks pretty strong. Splunk Because of the security uplift, it still looks pretty strong. I have a lot of data on I f s Like you said, they don't really show up in the e t R survey base. Um, but I would expect, with kind of growth, we're seeing $600 million. Company hopes to be a $1,000,000,000 by 2022 2021. I would think they're going to start showing up in the spending >>service well again in Europe. They may be They may be more dominant player than we see in the US. As I said, I really had not even heard of the company before last year, which was surprising for a company with 10,000 customers. Again, they're focused on the mid market in the mid market tends to fly a bit under the radar. Everyone thinks about what's happening in the enterprise is a huge opportunity out there. Many more mid market companies and there are enterprises. And that's a that's been historically a fertile ground for e. R. P. Companies to launch. You know J. D. Edwards came out of the mid market thes are companies that may end up being acquired by the Giants, but they build up a very healthy base of customers, sort of under the radar. >>Well, the other point I wanted to make I kind of started to about the digital transformation is, as they say, people are getting sort of sick of the big, long, ASAP complicated implementations. As small companies become midsize companies and larger midsize companies, they they look toward an enterprise resource planning, type of, of platform. And they're probably saying, All right, wait. I've got some choices here. I could go with an an I F. S, you know, or maybe another alternative. T s a p. You know, A S A P is maybe maybe the safe bet. Although, you know, it looks like i f s is got when you look around at the customers, they have has some real traction, obviously a lot of references, no question about it. One of things they've been digging for saw this gardener doing them for a P I integrations. Well, they've announced some major AP I integrations. We're gonna talk to them about that and poke it that a little bit and see if that will So to solve that criticism, that what Gardner calls caution, you know, let's see how real that is in talking to some of the customers will be talkinto the executives on members of the ecosystem. And obviously Paul and I will be giving our analysis as well. Final thoughts >>here. Just the challenge, I think, is you note for these midmarket focus Cos. Has been growing with their customers. And that's why you see of Lawson's in the JD Edwards of the World. Many of these these mid market companies eventually are acquired by the big E R P vendors. The customers eventually, if they grow, have to go through this transition. If they're going to go to Enterprise. The R P you know, they're forced into a couple of big choices. The opportunity and the challenge for F s is, can they grow those customers as they move into enterprise grade size? Can they grow them with with E. I. F s product line without having them forcing them to transition to something bigger? >>So a lot of here a lot of action here in Boston, we heard from several outside speakers. There was Linda Hill from Harvard. They had a digital transformation CEO panel, the CEO of soo say who will be on later uh PTC, a Conway, former PeopleSoft CEO was on there. And then, of course, Tony Hawk, which was a lot of fun, obviously a challenger. All right, so keep it right there, buddy. You're watching the Cube live from I F s World Conference at the Heinz in Boston right back, right after this short break.