The global enterprise resource planning market is expected to grow from USD 32.44 billion in 2017 to USD 49.03 billion by 2023. According to Tata Consultancy Services Ltd., an IT consulting firm, ERP is core to digital transformation — and the company is partnering with IFS AB, a company that delivers enterprise software for customers around the world who manufacture and distribute goods, maintain assets, and manage service-focused operations.

Why is this partnership so key, and why is ERP so crucial to digital transformation? 

Michael Ouissi (pictured, right), chief customer officer of IFS AB, and Rahul Saha (pictured, left), managing partner of enterprise application services at Tata Consultancy Services Ltd, spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Paul Gillin (@pgillin), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the IFS World Conference in Boston, Massachusetts. They discussed their partnership, customer needs, and why ERP is relevant to digital transformation (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s note: The following has been condensed for clarity.]

Vellante: What is it about the ecosystem that’s attracted to IFS?

Oiussi: I think the ecosystem has now understood that we have renewed our commitment to the ecosystem. That is something — a shift in mindset in IFS — that is demanded by our customers, that our customers actually ask of us, especially while we’re moving into also more global corporations and win more business there. They appreciate the choice of either IFS or our partners or a combination of our partners and IFS actually helping them deliver the value that they expect from an ERP solution.

Vellante: So TCS — you’re a platinum partner, so you’re making a big investment. What’s happening in the marketplace? Where’s the momentum with the tailwind?

Saha: TCS is obviously helping customers to become business 4.0 organizations — which is all about harnessing the abundance of possibilities around digital technologies and getting more intelligent, better, lean, harmonized, standardized. And we are trying to leverage the ecosystem. And one of the ecosystem partners are IFS, which is a strategy partnership for us. And we believe that the investments that IFS has made, and some of the unique last-mile solutions, are going to help us to deliver those different shaded offerings to the customer and create newer partnerships with them.

Vellante: What’s the nature of the partnership; what the history of the partnership? How did it start, and where do you guys want to take it?

Saha: We’re customer-first organizations. And, obviously, the investments that IFS made, especially in the … ERP area … is helping. Because ERP [is] … one of the strategic levers for an organization to elevate their digital agenda and get the right infrastructure in place, the right partner in place, to ensure that they create a differentiation and create exponential value for the customer. And that’s exactly where IFS and TCS are looking at the market and ensuring that we are helping our customer create exponential value for themselves in the market.

Oiussi: We share the same belief as well that actually the time of the monolithic ERP — one solution for a huge enterprise … those days are gone. I think it’s about blended solutions where the ERP is much more agile. It has to be much more open and allow for much more agile deployments and much more agile development around the core ERP so that actually customers can digitally transform, because it’s all about speed. And TCS sees it the same way, so we’ve got the same view.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the IFS World Conference. (* Disclosure: Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Tata nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE