Companies that foresee industry tech innovations and lead the market with solutions will come out ahead. Enterprise resource planning company IFS AB’s strategy to stand out in a crowded market includes creating an end-to-end process tailored to customers needs, according to Bob De Caux (pictured, left), vice president of artificial intelligence and robot process automation at IFS.

“It is not about the individual technologies themselves; it’s how they work together,” De Caux said. “The value comes from that next layer up, how we tape those technologies together in a way that we can offer it to our customers.”

Caux and Bas de Vos (pictured, right), director of IFS Labs at IFS, 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 the IFS approach in the market, the advancement of software robots, and expectations for new technologies like quantum computing (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Experimenting on the ‘shop floor’ to find the right solutions

Many underlying technologies are becoming more commoditized over time, and that’s not where companies are differentiating, according to De Caux. “Algorithms, after a while, become algorithms,” he said. “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.”

To create the right products, IFS has been building a very close relationship with the customers and engaging in collaborative projects with them. The idea is to “experiment on the shop floor of a customer instead of inside of the ivory tower,” as some competitors do, De Vos said. “There is no use in just creating technology for the sake of technology.”

When IFS began to increase the use of machine learning in its products, for example, the company turned to different customers and engaged with them to see what kind of data and use-cases were available, according to De Vos. “And, basically, based on that, we developed an insight into AI, and it really went well with the customer use-case.”

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: IFS AB sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither IFS nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE