Darren Ross recalls that the European market represents 60% of IFS’s business: "Our heart is in Europe"

MIAMI, Oct. 20 (Portaltic/EP) –

The Swedish IT services company IFS celebrated last week in the city of Miami (United States) its IFS Unleashed annual eventin which hundreds of customers and ‘partners’ shared their experiences and learned first-hand about the latest developments in software solutions from a company that, in the words of its executive director, Darren Roos, “still has its heart in Europe”.

“Business in the United States is growing, but Europe continues to be our home”, pointed out Roos, emphasizing that there are very few European software companies valued at more than $1 billion. “That is something that makes us proud,” added the manager, while recalling that IFS was born in Sweden and that the European market “still represents 60 percent of the business” of the brand.

In an interview granted to Europa Press within the framework of this international event, Roos assured that he also have “exciting new customers” in Spain, a “priority” market for this multinational company, which has 4,000 employees and more than 10,000 clients in the world, and which has registered an increase of 14 percent of its income during the first half of 2022, with 3,700 million Swedish crowns invoiced (almost 350 millions of euros).

THE CLOUD “DEMOCRATIZES ACCESS TO TECHNOLOGY”

The CEO of IFS has made clear his company’s commitment to the cloud and states that what this jump to the ‘cloud’ has done is “democratize access to technology”. “In the ‘on premise’ era (of own facilities) only large companies, with powerful IT departments, could undertake ambitious digitization processes. Now even the smallest companies can access these tools and start selling from anywhere in the world. world,” he asserted.

The IFS Cloud solutionwhose novelties have been revealed in IFS Unleashed, seeks precisely to help companies to adapt your processes to a ‘cloud’ environment. Thanks to this suite of applications, customers manage all their products in a unified way on a single API-based platform designed for the cloud, but executable anywhere.

The pandemic has forced companies to switch to digital business models, especially cloud services, and IFS wants to make this path “easier and simpler”. But beyond the ‘cloud’, Darren Roos points to Artificial Intelligence (AI) and, mainly, the automation of processes, as the “key element” in this digital transformation of the companies.

“Everybody recognizes that. It’s going to be a huge factor in every industry and for any job. There’s no doubt that the jobs of the future – because of this automation – are going to be different than they are now and the only question we can ask ourselves is when, not if this is going to happen or not,” The manager has reiterated, who also advances that this new context makes the competitive challenges “enormous”, with rival companies “of any sector, size or country”.

CUSTOMERS SET THE PACE OF DIGITALIZATION

But all these technological changes and the important advances with regard to digitization are not born in most cases by the impulse of the companies themselves, but by “The growth of customer expectations“, as the executive director of IFS analyzes. “If they want to buy something and they cannot do it online and quickly, the company may lose that sale. Companies must speed up their processes precisely for this reason, to meet the high expectations of customers, which have grown during the pandemic “, he added.

And this adaptation process is not the same for everyone. Roos emphasizes the complexity encountered by some large companies, which have invested hundreds of billions in legacy systems (computer equipment or applications that, although they are outdated, are still used because they are difficult to replace) and it is “very difficult for them to make a change in their operations”. This happens -as the manager explained- to many Spanish companies, which are taking a little longer to digitize processes.

“At the conference there have been cases of companies that have made those investments and that have spent a lot of money to keep those old systems active. It is a very common story. Large companies, with large investments and with technology that no longer responds to the needs of the market and it is a very complex process to reverse“, adds Darren Ross.

Faced with these situations, the IFS director recommends not focusing on technology or looking for the most innovative and striking tools, but on “analyze the specific business problem” that the company has at that moment. “With a small cost, thanks to the experience we have with other clients in the same sectors, it is possible to solve problems that at first might seem complex,” she asserts.

Lastly, he pointed out that events such as IFS Unleashed serve to celebrate the advances of its ‘partners’ and clients, which show what they are capable of doing with the company’s solutions. “That’s the biggest validation for me,” she says. “IFS is successful in its results, in its profits, in its growth, in its evolution* but all of this only happens if we have happy customers and we make technology that has a real impact on them”, he stated.