IFS, the global enterprise applications company, unveiled its evolved industry-focused architecture at IFS World Conference 2019 in Boston.
Christian Pedersen, Chief Product Officer
Christian Pedersen ensures that IFS products integrate the industry-leading functionality that customers demand, partners can proudly promote, and competitors cannot match. Partnering with IFS senior vice president, Product Development, Christian’s remit encompasses management of IFS products and solutions including IFS Applications, IFS Maintenix, and IFS Field Service Management
With a passion for developing, refining and adapting technology Christian is widely recognized in the industry as an innovator who places customer value above all.
Faced with uncertainties driven by the pres-sures of digital transformation and threats of disruption, businesses around the world are in need of software vendors whose primary focus is on outcomes rather than exclusively on technology. At the conference, IFS demonstrated its outcome-centric approach by revealing its vision for how new technologies will be incor-porated into its core application architecture and delivered to customers in context of their unique work and industry needs.
The evolved industry-focused architecture is scheduled for availability in 2020 and will be the new home to IFS’s entire portfolio of products across manufacturing, project management and service solutions. In essence, this new approach will allow customers to integrate enabling tech-nologies such as internet of things (IoT), aug-mented and mixed reality (AR/MR), artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) in pragmatic and focused ways so they can optimize, automate, predict and interact better across their business.
IFS has been evolving its technology founda-tions over an intensive and sustained period of engineering development. The focused work has encompassed model-driven declarative develop-ment, the intuitive IFS Aurena user experience (UX), and native API enablement of the entire set of capabilities. These enhancements will let IFS and its entire ecosystem innovate at a higher pace and deliver new functionality to customers faster. Designed to ensure speed, elasticity, and choice, the evolved architecture is built for both cloud and on-premises using container technology and Kubernetes which allows for running at hyper-scale in the cloud while ensuring portability across clouds and on-premises. It will provide data management and readiness that empowers customers to plug and play advanced technologies such as AI, ML and robotic process automation (RPA) with any solution set in the IFS offering.
At the IFS World Conference, IFS previewed how these technologies play in reality. The subjects discussed were; digital twins and monitor-ing of assets, real-time predictive maintenance of planning and AR/MR- powered remote assistance for service and maintenance scenarios.By establishing an ‘evergreen’ approach, IFS gives customers the option to always be on the latest version of their applications without the disruptions that come with full-scale upgrades. This also provides customers greater visibility, predictability, control and flexibility in planning their own business development and adopting new capabilities from IFS.
Christian Pedersen, Chief Product Officer, IFS said “The blueprint is underwritten by a fully operational plan to deliver an open and scalable architecture to our customers with the right set of capabilities needed for their industries.” For IFS, this has always been about building a core for our applications that would be fundamen-tally open and enabled. We are demonstrating that we are delivering on the promise of a core that has choice quite literally built into it, enabling our customers to benefit faster and easier for new and emerging technologies in context of their business needs and opportunities.”
