Here’s a quick quiz. Name a top Swedish enterprise software company that was founded by a group of students in a tent and today delivers service management solutions to major customers, such as Pepsi Co., SAAB and Motorola Inc.

The answer is IFS AB, and the firm has been quietly carving out its own position in the enterprise resource planning, asset and service management space for more than 30 years, delivering solutions to over 1 million users worldwide. Considering that it’s up against established firms such as Oracle Corp., SAP SE and Microsoft Corp. in the competitive enterprise software business, it’s a bit of a surprise that IFS is not more of a household name.

That may be about to change. The company recently hired a new CEO — Darren Roos (pictured) — who took over on April 1 following the 12-year tenure of Alastair Sorbie. Roos was the president of SAP’s global enterprise resource planning cloud software business, with 5,000 people and responsibility for all product and marketing functions.

Roos has been quick to articulate the approach he expects his new company to take. “The IFS philosophy is, don’t worry about the buzzword, don’t think about artificial intelligence or [“the internet of things”] or any of these things,” he said. “Focus on the business pain you’re trying to solve and then leverage technology to solve that problem.”

Roos spoke with Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick) and Rebecca Knight (@knightrm), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at the IFS World Conference in Atlanta, Georgia.

Watch the complete video interview with Roos below:

In separate interviews, Frick and Knight spoke with Bas de Vos, director of IFS Labs at IFS; Dan Matthews, chief technical officer of IFS; Yasushi Yagyu, assistant manager at NEC Corp.; Paul Maher, general manager of industry experiences at Microsoft; and Eric Schaeffer, senior managing director at Accenture. They discussed recent product enhancements announced by IFS, a service model focused on customer need, anticipating future technologies, and use cases for the company’s solutions. (* Disclosure below.)

AI and cloud computing are key factors

The global ERP market is expected to reach revenue of $47 billion by 2022, and two factors that will influence that growth are the integration of artificial intelligence and the continued migration toward cloud computing. The major ERP players have all doubled-down over the past year in the implementation of AI strategies, including a commitment last summer by Infor Inc.

IFS is seeking to capitalize on these trends through enhancements to its core service known as IFS Applications 10 and the newly announced launch of IFS Aurena. Applications 10 is an ERP suite. It’s designed to assist customers in capitalizing on technologies that support the service-oriented organization, particularly manufacturers with aftermarket operations and firms requiring an integrated enterprise suite to better fit a business model.

The company recently announced a number of enhancements to Applications 10, including the management of service or contract bids inside the CRM platform, work-in-progress and cost control accounting, visualization tools for resource demand, and additional capabilities for managing contractor work flows. IFS has also added micro-service organized APIs, designed for data integration with IoT, Microsoft Office 365, AI and various cloud solutions.

Aurena is a productivity tool for employees that uses an AI-powered bot to converse with users via text or voice. It can perform a variety of functions using natural language processing for everything from administering an absence to taking employees through the application steps for a longer leave. The tool can be launched from Skype, Skype for Business and Facebook’s Messenger platform.

“People are using so many different kinds of devices today,” Matthews said. “We built one experience that adapts to all of these different environments and do that really well.”

Watch the complete video interview with De Vos and Matthews below:

The enhancements come from perceiving customer need and tailoring solutions that get as close to the business model as possible. “Proximity to the customer is a major trend that we see,” Roos explained. “We want to own the outcome for the customer, the value delivery and assurance.”

That closeness to the customer is ingrained in a business strategy defined by IFS as “servitization.” All apps, devices and functions are becoming services on their own, and technology will dictate the value. This means that customers will buy enterprise software based not only on what it can do, but how specifically it will affect an important business outcome.

Another important aspect of the IFS servitization vision is being able to anticipate where the technology will move before it actually gets there. This is one of the critical missions of IFS Labs.

“Instead of looking at a customer problem and trying to find a solution, we look ahead, a couple of years into the future,” de Vos said. “It allows us to experiment and come up with innovative solutions that might work for tomorrow.”

How are some of these solutions being used by IFS customers? A Finland pest control company — Anticimex — uses IFS IoT Connector to solve the problem of having to send its agents out on a regular basis to check rat traps. “Now they put sensors in the traps, and they report back when they’ve been triggered,” Roos said.

Partners leverage tools

IFS partners have been fully engaged in leveraging new solutions as well. NEC Corp. has found the company’s technology to be helpful in master schedule and inventory transaction processing.

“Our AI can generate forecast data and send it to the master scheduling module with [IFS tools],” said NEC’s Yagyu.

Microsoft is following a similar path, envisioning additional uses for IFS Aurena and other technologies for IoT, predictive maintenance and various supply chain purposes. “What really excites me, and our customers, is artificial intelligence,” Maher said.

Accenture has been integrating IFS tools in a number of customer solutions, driven largely by changes in product technology and new ways to support them, according to Schaeffer. “What we do with IFS is look at industry use cases and then by combining IFS solutions … we deliver new levels of efficiency,” he explained.

IFS has built its position in the ERP arena by focusing on a fervent belief that if it can be initiated, managed or purchased through cloud software, it’s a service. Customers are also transitioning from selling products to selling business outcomes, which plays into the strategy outlined by the newly arrived Roos. The key question to be answered over the next year is how strongly IFS can ride the wave of global ERP interest if the competitive market grows as expected.

Watch the video interview with Maher, Schaeffer and Yagyu below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the IFS World Conference. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the IFS World Conference. Neither IFS, the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE