IFS Carves Out ERP Niche from World Turmoil
According to one CEO in the manufacturing space, socio-political turmoil coupled with the Internet of Things is actually helping to secure the role of enterprise resource planning (ERP) software throughout the industry.
At the IFS World Conference in Barcelona this week, IFS CEO Alastair Sorbie pointed to tragic events such as the ongoing Syrian civil war, attacks on North African and Middle Eastern oil installation and even the Boston Marathon bombings as sparking the company to spend more on developing its ERP software to suit the needs of defense and homeland security.
“There is a perfect storm brewing for our market, you can add the socio-political aspects to a new industrial revolution driven by the Internet of Things, machine-to-machine (M2M) computing and 3D printing—last week Manchester police discovered that gun parts had been produced using 3D printing,” Sorbie said.
“In our industries, so far only basic parts have been widely produced for products using 3D printing but that is about to rapidly change,” he added.
As a result of M2M connectivity and the eventual Internet of Things, Sorbie believes there will be even more demand for business systems to make sense of these growing data volumes.
Right now IFS is looking to make a name for itself among bigger names such as SAP, Microsoft and Oracle as far as the ERP space is concerned. But the company has begun to carve a niche for itself when it comes to military and aerospace, oil production, energy generation and manufacturing sectors.
But unlike its larger competitors, IFS can’t keep up on its own when it comes to new industry tech such as mobile, social media and analytics, which has led it to seek out industry partners who can help fulfill these needs.
When asked if this put IFS at a disadvantage relative to SAP, Sorbie said, “In the recent past we’ve acquired smaller companies to address specific functions, but we don’t want to get into the Oracle territory of buying large operations and then not quickly integrating them [like when Oracle acquired Peoplesoft and JD Edwards for instance] into our product suite.”
IFS CTO Dan Matthews followed up, saying, “We’re not looking to develop the best social media engine or the leading in-memory data analytics system, but we can offer smaller systems with what we’ve got and what we’re developing.”
Currently the company is in the process of pushing out the IFS 8 update that was released in 2012, which now can be used in the Microsoft Azure cloud.
