IFS Combined CollABorative: Tech Talk with Raymond Jones, SVP Unified Support

Date of Meeting: 24 September 2024 10:00 AM US Eastern Time

Raymond Jones Presentation:

Slide: IFS Combined CollABorative – Unified Support

• I’m Raymond Jones, I'm the head of the Unified Support organization. What that really means is, I'm responsible for the teams that provide our global support to all our customers, so this is the application support as well as all the cloud services customers. And there's a clear distinction on this where we have on-premise customers that just buy a maintenance contract with IFS that require product support that will be delivered under the Unified Support organization. And then we also have a large amount of cloud services customers where we run our solution in our cloud service and that team is responsible for making sure that the infrastructure and the cloud services all operate in accordance with our commitments contractually with customers. That's all the fun stuff that happens in order to run all the services. 

Slide: Agenda

• The way that I've orchestrated the presentation and just this CollABorative session is really just give you all a sense of what is available to you as customers of IFS. In particular, if you have a maintenance contract or IFS cloud services contract and how you can get the most from those services that we deliver.
• The second aspect is to give you behind the curtain, of how the transformation has transpired. We undertook a transformation exercise, and then keeping you informed and how you can keep up with the latest and greatest that IFS has to share in terms of both communication, product and information about all the cloud services that are being released through the release cycles that we issue the product.

Slide: IFS Unified Support

• What is unified support and how is it orchestrated, and how is it organized itself? It's fair to say it is a global support organization that has locations dotted globally, and it's designed to do this for many purposes. We may have customers that have specific residency requirements that may have particular language support that we have contracted to, and we provide these services in these global footprints. And as you can see, we have about 1000 people globally that are providing services back to our customers. We have over about four and a bit thousand customers that have a maintenance support contract or a cloud services continue with us. We have regional data centers that are dotted globally as well to provide our cloud services. And then we obviously back up or support natively with our partners, who also may provide a partnership agreement with IFS, or you may prefer to deal with a partner and you have a preferred partner, and you deal with them first and then you contract with IFS to deliver the rest of the services. And what I wanted to first state here and I think I mentioned this the last time I presented, we have global data centres, and if you're looking at this global view, and you're making an obvious distinction that says, well, I don't see a global data centre for where my business is located, there are obvious reasons for this. We commit to contract in all the major locations, but also because we have a strong partnership with Microsoft, that we partner at an R&D product level to get us the best performance, the best protection around how we design our product and our cloud service, is that not every data centre globally within the Azure platform is alike. We only deploy into P1 data centres as Microsoft would coin it, and a P1 data centre would be that it has all the high availability services that we would have to use to deliver our cloud services. It natively has all the services to perform a disaster recovery, both in region and then obviously outside of that region. And then obviously it needs to have all the services that we would need to run that cloud service that have been tested and designed specifically for how we construct our cloud service. And that's the reason why we don't have, because Azure obviously does have more data centres globally, but it's not the ones we chose because we don't either get the performance or the commitment or they don't have all the services available to them at that particular moment. As Microsoft on boards new regions or new data centres in those countries, we then work with them to perform and validate all the services available, and then we will bring to market those offerings. And so that's the particular reason why those services are not always available from a cloud services perspective.
• Natively, while I look at this graph, we have large teams in North America. Teams that provide application and cloud services support in North America, either in the United States or in Canada. We have teams in the UK and in Europe specifically for customers, and the reason for Europe and North America, so to speak, is for if you are a public sector or a government customer or you're providing services into those types of verticals, there may be a requirement that you may need national support, as in residency type support. So local nationals providing the support or the cloud services, but you may also have the extent of having data residency, where data cannot breach beyond the border of where the solution has been deployed or where that product has been supported. We have offerings in both North America and we have offerings in Europe. A large proportion, as most of you know of our support location is based in Sri Lanka. That's our home. It's also a development home as well, where we have a lot of the R&D organization and product teams. We are sitting side by side them in helping them perform tasks and provide input into the products. We're also standing up a second site location in IFS India. Two things. One is to grow with the growth of the business. But also to provide some business criticality support should this large part of our business is when you look at our investors, we need to be able to ensure that at any point in time whatever happens in the world, either economically or politically, that you're all still able to focus on providing good support services. We're building a capability in India, and we're also standing up a an offering and services in that Japan market to service Japan. So we're expanding those services as well in those markets.

Slide: Services in Context

• So trying to put this in context in terms of the service in context. What I wanted to do is try and home in is when you're engaging with IFS, some of your customers of IFS. And this doesn't preclude you from the discussion we are about to have, you may be net new or thinking about coming to IFS as well, is looked at the road map of how you engage with IFS and try to make it quite clear to where does the IFS cloud service or where does the support arm come into play quite strongly in the engagement of a customer when it's contracting with IFS. When you look at the delivery side, implementing your solution, realising your benefits, ensuring continuous success around the solution and the value proposition you bought, that's where the IFS cloud service and that's where the maintenance or the unified support organization stands. And obviously there's this anticipating awareness, discovery and design piece which you work with the account structure either with your sales organization or the delivery part, which is the consulting part of IFS that starts to build in that momentum as it then hands over to the unified support organisation.
• What is the support and maintenance mean and what does it get me as a customer versus the cloud service? Well, the support and maintenance piece is really about access to all the product information, all the release notes, getting product support, getting perhaps product defect acknowledgments, getting all the releases, the ability to escalate problems, or understanding of a particular situation, or how to type questions, incident management, as I mentioned, product fixes, defects, as well as compliance in supported countries where we may have particular nationals providing that level of support to you as customers in the particular countries. And then the cloud service is all about taking that entire solution and running it in the IFS cloud, run by IFS, which really means we run the entire platform stack. We own how the database performs and commits to that, we provide all the environments, both the non production and the production environments with service level commitments wrapped around it.
• A big part of where we make a significant investment not only in the product but also in security and compliance, and over the last 12 months, I've seen a significant peak in discussions with customers, with partners, all around the security aspect of securing the service, securing the product, and we've put a tremendous amount of investment along with Microsoft in terms of shoring up the product, creating a higher level of security posture in the service that we provide.
• And then obviously monitoring, monitoring the entire service understanding from a security perspective, what potential DDoS may be happening if there's anybody probing the service, are there any risks or anybody internally within the product that may have access maybe doing something they shouldn't be doing? Optimising the product as we go, and that's quite a key one because there's two things. There's either proactively optimizing the solution or giving guidance and advice to the customer about how they could provide optimization because natively you can do a lot of these things within the application when you're on the cloud service.
• And then autonomous processes. For those that may have seen this, and you'll see in some subsequent slides, we've been investing heavily in creating a level of automation. Allowing customers the ability to automate a lot of their processes, be it automating how the product operates and what it does, or automating a number of cloud services products such as database cloning as an example, putting requests in, automating performance behind the back end, provisioning services for new services that come online, and automating all those things as well.
• So that in a nutshell focuses on that blue area and that's what we call the IFS service centre, which is natively your single port of call. It's your single pane of glass that you can enter and get all the information about the product and all the services that I've just described with customers.

Slide: Unified Support Organisation

• I wanted to expose a little bit behind the curtain and how this has operated.
• It's actually about 14 months now that we under undertook a transformation program to bring what was historically 2 organisations.
• One was a cloud organization, that was really focused on managing all the infrastructure, and all those components to managing our cloud service. And then we had natively, which was a much larger organization, which was focused about delivering application support. And as we've seen a tremendous shift from our customers taking the IFS product or their applications that they have and shifting that into the cloud, and specifically the IFS cloud service, we got to a point that customers began to feedback quite heavily that they felt like they were talking to two teams. They felt like their one team was bouncing to another team and vice versa. And it was becoming quite clear that it was 2 organizations. So what we undertook in this transformation, and this is how the organization is set up, is there we have now an infrastructure team doing natively grew experience on the infrastructure has now over the last 14 months been gaining experience on the application. One, how to support the application? How does it operate? How do we get the best performance from it sitting on the infrastructure? And then having an application specialist or an application engineer really understanding the infrastructure and how that infrastructure's put together and how it can support the application on the infrastructure. And we've transitioned to what we call in the industry site reliability engineering. So essentially these are site reliability engineers who now understand the application and how it performs on particular infrastructure. That has benefits to customers in two ways. One, it has a better, faster time to resolution for our cloud services customers because now we have trained individuals who understand how this all works, but also as a customer, you may choose to deploy the product in your own private data centre or in another cloud service ,and that could be AWS or Google or whatever the case may be. And so then having to work with an engineer who actually knows and understands the technology behind the scenes, helps you also get a faster resolution because they need to be talking about particularly the same technology behind the scenes when you're doing it on-prem or in another private cloud.
• And one of the biggest changes we made when we made this shift to site reliability engineering is every conversation that I've had with customers, or every conversation that has been happening is that we focus our attention into a particular market vertical. And we know that even if the customer buys an IFS product, it has the same features and functionalities but they also use it in a different way. And they have different language and different constructs in how that product is used. And what we felt when we did this is what you could talk to a manufacturing customer and it wouldn't be the same as you would talk to either a field service customer or somebody in construction or engineering, but is using the same product. And so what we natively then did was align the team's, not only into this site reliability engineering expertise, but also into those aligned verticals. Because that would then natively, you would feel that you're speaking to somebody in your industry that actually understood the language that you were talking about, and perhaps the impact of a particular problem that you may be having. Because let's be frank, somebody that may have a manufacturing problem. I.e. a classic example would be the ability to not print labels in a manufacturing setting, means they can't get the goods out the door. For a customer in construction, that may not be able to print labels. That's not so impactful because that they don't have the reliance on it. So how an engineer would treat a priority and understand how that would impact a customer is natively what you get when you build yourself into these verticals. And the feedback largely from our customers has been overwhelmingly positive that we've done this. Because now they're getting a good sense from us that the shift into that site, reliability engineering and the shift natively into understanding their particular marker or their industry, help them to have a better conversation and helps our engineers appreciate a particular priority of a problem and how that may be impacting your business.
• We do have what I call the mergers and acquisition team, so this is a team that we have isolated to a degree as you've seen in the news. IFS does acquire new companies to broaden its offering set, and as we natively bring those acquisitions in place, we quarantine them so to speak. We get to understand the product better, understand the ways of working, and then we tie them into our product strategy and then we will natively take them into those industry verticals as the product becomes more aligned and we start to bring those acquisitions into play.
• We also have the ITAR and European Union restricted access. So this is what I was talking about earlier. This is an offering where those customers may have security conscious requirements, may be working in defence or public sector or require national type support or may have data residency issues. We have two offerings, one for North America and one for the European Union restricted access. They are identical. They just have different names. ITAR is a program is a requirement for North America and the European Union restricted access is a European offering that encapsulates all the requirements for European customers who may require this, and these are two premium offerings. They are more costly to deliver and they obviously come with a premium price in order to deliver on those things.
• And then we have what we call these horizontal teams, global service desk, a global provisioning and support organization that provisions all the services. A transition team that helps customers transition from on-prem into the cloud and then a whole automation team that looks at every aspect of automating functions within the work, not only in a cloud service but also at a role level. Are they common things that we could focus on that could automate both within the product and feedback into the product team to automate certain functionalities within the product?
• Like I said, we have a huge security and compliance team, so we have a global SOC that sorts our own SOC heavily invested in in IFS, but we back off to the Azure SOC team sitting in Redmond. They're the ones who watch out for all the services and make sure that all the services are running, that there is no intruder detection, DDOS, et cetera. And we back off to them, in case we need to expand our ability to protect our customers. We are constantly deploying security measures in our cloud to protect customers.
• We have a customer office that focuses all on critical escalations, problem management, the service experience.
• We have an engagement advisory team. This is a team of experienced individuals that can help customers in terms of, I really don't know what to do in terms of uplifting my product into your cloud? Or, I would like a dedicated resource for four to six months to focus on specific needs, and we have an offering in that space for customers who have the specific needs.
• And then obviously have an engineering team that focus on enhancing. This is the bleeding edge latest and greatest team that focuses on our cloud service and our product technology.

Slide: Unified Support Strategy

• This is an internal slide and it's not a secret. I'm happy to share it with you all. This gives you a sense of how this team that I run is positioned to drive its engagement with customers. And you'll find that this team is geared to being completely obsessed with delivering the best service that they possibly can. I want to emphasize the obsession piece because you will notice, I hope, and we'll have this discussion, a dramatic shift in the way that we approaching how we work with customers. They're obsessed with trying to find the problems as fast as possible can they're obsessed with trying to solve customers problems. They're obsessed to improve the way that we operate, and everything we've done in that reorg and the tutoring is all around this obsession. And we relentlessly focus on proactively engaging our customers and we'll talk about some of those proactive engagements in the next couple of slides. But we also pride ourselves in acting on this new customer feedback. To be brutally honest, the organizational re-map that I talked about that whole shift was as a direct result of customer feedback, because we knew at that point in time that we weren't going to be able to scale and that customers were feeding back that the service wasn't as optimal as it could be if you weren't going to meet the requirements. And so getting that customer feedback and there are many mechanisms we have to listen to customers to help drive improvements in this space as well.
• IFS is also acquiring a large amount of very large enterprise customers as we grow and invest in the service. And so we've been focused on making sure that we have the capabilities in our tooling and expanse to drive improvements with customers. And for each one of our employees, we have a professional development plan. We constantly train them on the new technologies as they come out. We hit two release cycles every year as your old probably aware from an IFS cloud perspective, and we have to make sure that we train those individuals globally, those thousand people to make sure that they're ready to support customers as you take the latest and greatest, and that focus is all about igniting potential with those employees as well.

Slide: Obsess Over Service – Impact of Transformation

• A little bit focus and giving you some data because for those who know me, I love data and I find comfort in data because it helps me make decisions from a global perspective. But I want to share it with you from a customer perspective because I want to make sure that everything we're doing, every investment that IFS is making, it's moving that dial to make improvements in everything that we do. And this is from an SLA adherence perspective, giving you a sense how we have made progress in improving the service. And how our engineers are responding to customers problems and situations as they come.
• What we have contractually and these are contractual KPIs, we have many more KPIs, but we're not going to bore you with all the detail of all those  KPI’s, but the one that really should matter to all customers because they're contractual, and they're also based around service credits, because that's the commitment that we have to customers that if we fail to do that, we pay out.
• So the next resolution or the next response SLA on P1’s and P2’s, you can see it's at the highest level of attainment that we have ever had since we brought the service and the transformation, you can see its growth pattern as it goes. And remember, this is based on an average of all our customers globally. I'm sure there are no doubt customers in this call that go probably have a different view and that's fine. We have that conversation too, but generally as a trend in terms of how we're focusing improvements.
• Our resolution scheduled is where we get a problem from a customer, we diagnose the problem and then we focus on finding that problem as quick as we possibly can in the prescribed time. And because of all the enhancements, because all the changes we've been making and training those individuals up, we've seen a dramatic increase in our people's ability to solve customers problems because they're getting to understand the technology better, understanding the products and they'll be able to respond and solve and provide resolution to customer problems at the highest attainments that we have since we started.
• So SLA adherence is at 98% across the board. And the 2.7 is the SLA time elapsed upon delivery. So what that means is if you take 98% of all our volume, it's only taking us 2.7 of the time to meet that adherence. Means we're getting a faster time to the initial response and our 96% SLA adherence that we're only taking 21% of the allotted time to get to a resolution or action plan. So think of it as a timer. We have a timer in all applications that says for the engineer who gets this problem you have X amount of time to solve this problem before we breach an SLA. We're taking 21% of the allotted time to solve that problem for our customers.
• One thing that's really important to an organization of our size is, can we give the ability for customers to navigate and find information that may solve a query that they have. And that's about enhancing our ability around knowledge base articles, having conversations with the engineer, navigating to the IFS service Centre that brings up information that a customer doesn't have to log a case, but can solve the problem as a obtaining this information as part of the maintenance contract. And we seeing that 10.2% of the entire volume of cases or problems or questions that we have is now being self-serve because of the content of information that's available to customers in the IFS Service Centre. So whether it's telling us the investments that we're making is improving the ability for customers to self-serve and get information that they need rather than having to log cases or speak to somebody to solve the problem for them.

Slide: Obsess Over Service – Adding Depth to Our Suite of Offerings

• So our obsession over service. What I wanted is to give an insight into what's coming from a service perspective and what we've been working on for some time. So the Today is well, we have some standard offerings. We have our gold support service that has been there forever and ever, that has some restricted ways of working, not 24 by 7. Service levels are a bit protracted. A Platinum support provides 24 by 7 support. It has a high level of service levels, backed by service credits, and then we obviously we have our cloud service which is the one you've heard me talk quite a lot about which wraps everything around it and also runs the customer's cloud service on their behalf.
• We have the ITAR and the euro offerings that I talked about. We have for most of our cloud service a standard availability, this is the 99.5% guarantee in our contracts.
• We are bringing to market a higher availability option for customers that wish to pay for that premium offering. And we'll have two. We'll have a high availability and a high availability plus. The high availability option is actually coming out in 24R2. So that's the very next release. In the next month that option will be available to customers to procure. And that will be supported by our cloud customers.
• Ownership and engagement, we have standard offerings and then one thing that we are bringing out in early next year is for those who have the IFS cloud, the product. You may have it, the remote option, which is basically the option where you deploy that particular solution on premise in your own private data center or in a hyperscaler like AWS or Google or even your own zero platform. What we've learnt from customers is managing the code, and the build place and deploying service updates and releases, customers don't want to do that. Some customers don't want to do that. They find that they don't have the technical expertise or they don't have the expertise to manage the code and also do the testing to make that successful. So we've had a large amount of customers over the last 12 to 14 months really request IFS to bring out a service that we completely manage that entire solution for that. That offering's going to be called build place services. And that's basically where we manage the whole release service updates, code, and deployment into non production and production environments on behalf of customers, and that will be a premium service for customers to create.
• And then I talked about the advisory services, the support advisory. You saw my previous slide, there was a team in the organizational chart of support advisory. And this is another team that can be procured to help and guide customers and have some dedicated resource that they can work with for a set amount of time, with a set outcome engagements as part of that service and that's coming to bear next year.
• And then we have the fully integrated M&A. So we have M&A’s that we may purchase that you may be a customer of. So for example, mobile workforce management, formerly known as Clevest, is part now of the entire solution within unified support. And as part of the cloud service and is fully integrated. Same for Astea. And then we have copperleaf, which was our major announcement a few weeks ago, about bringing them in. And we're going to be bringing them in. And that all decides on our product strategy. And once we decide on our product strategy, then that filters into unified support and our global delivery team as well, so wanted to give a sense of what's coming, what there is.
• If customers buy that availability option that I talked about. Well, there also will potentially be a new offering for customers that would be expanding on the Platinum support offering. I've coined it here for now and it's a work in progress, so don't hold us to the naming convention, but essentially that's what we call the diamond offering or mission critical. This is where customers will have a high expectation that the service runs to nearly four nines and that should aid, should a disaster happen or should there need to be a disaster recovery invoked. That we guarantee a restoration of the service within an X amount of time, and that's what we call mission critical support and that will be provided to those customers who wish to have that service. And then as I said, we're expanding our options into the Japan market because we see that as a as a market with huge opportunity but actually has a requirement for those who have ever worked in Japan, requires us to actually build our capability in Japan and have natively speaking people to be able to provide that. It's very it's a very different market to any of the other markets in play. And so we're investing in that market. So if you do have a subsidiary or that is of interest to you, then I'd like to hear about it because we are building our capability to drive and provide unified support services and cloud services into that market as well.
• And then just to close out this particular conversation, what's really interesting is it's in my interest as the person that owns this organization and runs it, but also representing the entire company, is that you may also have an engagement with a partner and you might find immense value in that partnership. What we want to make sure is that we're holding our partners to a particular account that they drive an increased value, and that if you're paying for that, that we're holding them to a particular quality bar, because what we want to make sure is as we invest in IFS to increase our capabilities, we also want our partners to do that too, and they need to do that alongside us so that we don't get ourselves into a situation where you may have a quality bar problem that you're getting two different types of services. So our ambition is to really work with partners, to help them drive and improve the quality that matches our own. But then we can also deliver a service back to customers in a unique way. That there is still a value proposition that differentiate them, but we're holding them to a high quality bar as well on behalf of you. And 20% of our customer base is supported by customers. So it's a really important base for us.

Slide: Relentless Focus on Customers – Delivering on Customer Feedback

• What are customers saying at the moment, and this is the focus on that relentless aspect of focus on customers. I'll allow you to read these things. I'm not going to read them to you. You can all see them, but you can see some of the feedback. We try to balance this out between getting good feedback and where feedback needs to improve in terms of the quality of our service. And what we've done is, we're constantly taking this feedback and this is a call out for me personally, to this audience, to our customers, is it's important and as much as a mundane process is that to provide feedback, we absolutely do value at IFS and I can guarantee you it changes the way that we focus in terms of our investment strategy. And how we orchestrate our investments in both product and our services. If there's any proof that your feedback matters, you can see from the perspective of how my organization operates. You have completely shifted how we make and deliver our investment in my area of the business because of the feedback that you provide. And I just wanted to make sure that that is understood that it sometimes is hard to give feedback, sometimes it's monotonous, but it is valuable to get it because it does help us make some changes in the way that we focus with customers.

Slide: Relentless Focus on Customers – Striving for Greater Representation

• The relentless focus on customers. So what are our customers saying?
• So you saw some of the verbatim feedback that I wanted to share openly with you both. Some of it was balance. Some of it was, hey, IFS you don't do such a great job in this space, but you do a great job in this space. How does it matter all up? And what we're seeing is that we have a consistently improving the way that customers perception is in terms of how they perceive our customer satisfaction. And today what we've launched is and I'll focus on this little pie chart on the screen, is what we have put in place at an engineer level within unified support this concept every case smiley face. Some of you may have already seen it in the IFS service portal, in the service centre, we have a case and you can immediately respond based on how that engineer interacted with you and the level of detailed information that they provided. How you feel from a sentiment perspective? Did they do a good job or not? That's incredibly important to my organization, but also the flip side, it's really important to you as a customer because actually it gives the engineer instantaneous feedback from how they engage with you. Because what we then do internally, is focus at an engineer level, how they're delivering a service back to customer. And it's not just focus on the KPI’s, it's focused on the quality of responses. It's focused on the level of communication, it's focused on was the information easily to understand and did the customer respond in a way that solved that problem? It's another way that we're trying to really enhance our capability to obsess over that service as I talked about, but also give the instant feedback to engineers. And I can tell you the engineers globally are loving this because they can then react. They may not be able to solve the problem or the satisfaction at the time when they service you, but they go off and they can take that feedback and solve another customers problem in a better way. And when you when they do pick up another case from you, you obviously will get a better service as they enhance it. So this is dramatically improving overall our customer satisfaction globally with our customer base is sitting at 80%. It's the highest satisfaction rate that we have ever received. Now I share that with you all in confidence in the senses. I ask, try and find another organization of our size and stature, because I can tell you I've worked at Microsoft, I worked at Oracle, I've worked at these big software companies. This is not a statistic that they're proud to share. Now you can kind of feel and go, why? Well, because either the results are not so good or there's a bit of massaging of the numbers. I do not know, but when I worked at those companies, it was an embargo not to share our customer satisfaction numbers, not to share this with our customer base. Here at IFS were very different, but rather share either whatever it is.
• And you can see at some months we haven't done such a great job, but this is where that obsession and that clarity comes with our engagement that customers really wanting to work with customers to improve. And so the reorganization, the investments we're making, the customer sentiment back to us is that we are improving, but there's a 20%. And of an organization of this size dealing with so many customers. Granted, we accept. We understand what our reason for existence is, that it's going to be solving customer problems. And we're not going to get these solved all the time in the right way. But if we can solve a large proportion and get good customer feedback, it means we're on the right track. It doesn't mean we sit back on our laurels and go well, that's the end of it. It just means we keep pushing. It really is good to see that customers are responding in a way that means we're doing a great job. Now, it might mean different next month, right? And that obviously depends on the nature of problems etcetera. And what I've showed you what customers are seeing now as a result of the change. But let me be transparent. There is a 20% still sitting there that is either dissatisfied or just not happy with the service and that's obviously a focus for us as we continue with that.

Slide: Unified Support – Forward Looking Focus Areas

• In terms of forward-looking statements, we are bringing, as every organization is a level of AI capability and automation to everything that we do. And that's also about not only through the quality aspects of the product and how that product operates, but also in the underlying infrastructure. I can tell you now, I'm working quite heavily with a third party provider to help enhance bringing a lot of AI capability to how we manage cases here at IFS and trying to find and connect all the information that's in with cases that either provides knowledge base articles, because let me give you an insight to this, I've got 1000 engineers and they're talented individuals and they come to work every day to solve customer problems and they're learning every day. But everything's up here. And sometimes not everything gets down on paper, and you rely very heavily on their experience. What do we what I need to do and what we're doing is getting our AI initiative to really get a lot what's up there on to paper. So that engineers can then share amongst themselves so that when they have like for like problems in another vertical that may solve the problem that a customer's experiencing that they're dealing with, they can revert and have a look at that issue, they could speed up that problem and go how was that problem solved for that customer? And does it match the problem that I'm solving with my customer today? And we're doing a lot of that data scraping at the moment to bring in AI initiatives to surface up this level of information to our engineers, so they can better provide services to customers, and that's an initiative that we are currently underway.
• Quality and case handling, obviously the vertical approach that I talked about and streamlining that and we need to figure out in this process as the engineering team that I run may have to interface with what we call our product teams, our R&D organization, and is there specific issues that we need to enhance either in the product because there's a problem with the product, that's why it's going to R&D or is there a particular training gap in my organisation that can prevent issues having to go to the product team so they can focus on the quality of the product and or issue and fix problems to release to customers. So we focus very much on the quality of handling.
• Customer communications is actually key for us. This one has always been a problem for me in my career. I've been a customer. I've been on your side of the aisle, and I've been pretty much predominantly providing services as communication is very key, but you can be overwhelmed with the amount of communication and what's available to you. What we've currently set out our stall is about how we communicate to customers from a services perspective. From a unified support perspective. And our main option is for customers to be notified of communication. Very sweet, very short succinct, but for them to come into the IFS service centre to gain the in depth understanding of what their communication is, rather than bombarding customers. We know from the communication aspect that if you e-mail or you bombard customers, customers don't read it. It's too much coming up their way. However, if you allow customers to come into the IFS service centre and see their notifications and that they self-serve and read, it's far more tangible and they act on it better than actually being bombarded with an e-mail that comes into the inbox. And so that's our communication strategy going forward and that would include all our maintenance schedules, what our enhancements or our product releases as well.
• And then, the IFS India Centre of Excellence is standing up that team to currently support our expansion needs and provide those additional services.

Slide: Staying Current

• Staying current, and I wanted to have this conversation quite briefly, is staying current is a very topical conversation with all my customers. Particularly here in IFS, what we want to do is provide the best and greatest service for the customers, but also not to release what we call out of band fixes or single patches, but where we also need is to help customer stay as current as we can so that they can get and achieve the latest and greatest technology and we've currently, and I'm just making this known to all this audience, is that we have a number of products coming up to an end of life cycle that is going to require customers to make a decision. This slide is purely just to ensure that customers have nowhere to go to get more information about the policies, about the security documentation that's all available on ifs.com/legal. If there's anything around how our policies are, what the support services, all our security piece of what we do to help customers provide, but also wanted to make it more visible to customers in terms of a road map exercise that things they need to start thinking about in terms of getting on the latest and greatest so that we can better help and support customers going forward as well. We've also launched an extended waiver for those customers on Apps 10.
• Apps 10 comes out of mainstream support on the 27th of March next year, but appreciate the customers need time to upgrade. So should a customer not wish to spend, and here's the difference. Customers have to procure an extended support arrangement with IFS which costs more money. And that's as a result, because we'll be managing a product that is now come out of its mainstream support. It costs us money to continue to develop and manage it, so it comes as a premium service. This is a not new in the industry. It happens. This is what all software companies do. IFS has waived the extended support, on one condition. Is that customers commit to upgrade because what we don't want you to do is to be sitting on a product that is ageing. It doesn't have the right technology or is completely outdated. That is 10 years old. That is going to cause security problems, but realize and understand that should customers need to upgrade, we'd rather than spend that money in the upgrade, then spend that money in an extended support, which will maintain that old technology. So again, just giving a sense from how IFS approaches these things is really saying, look, customers would rather get you off the old aging technology and get you into the latest and greatest. We'd rather you not spend that money in this way. We'd rather you spend that money this way. So I just want to make that more visible to you all.

Questions / Answers / Feedback / Responses:

• F: First of all, thank you for this presentation and valuable information. I mean this is very useful for us. I'm not sure if you guys are interested to hear the good thing or bad thing first about the feedback of the support from the R&D services. I'm talking about cases. I mean, we have submitted a lot of cases to IFS and to be more specific R&D. This is the only thing I know R&D, ok.  We had some cases raised to IFS regarding the application and I'm talking about core application, about standard functionality in IFS. So, I'm not talking about the customization side of our IFS. Sometimes when we raise a case, we had to do a call with R&D team like three times. We repeat the same call with different people about the same case three times, sometimes four times. Yeah. So sometimes we have to do this and repeat it for 3-4 times. I mean it's 100% correct that it's 3 or 4 times for the same case and we have these records, we can go back if you want. I can provide more information about the case details on this. Some of these items it's related to IFS standard functionalities and I don't want to go to the details, but I don't know if you guys would like to hear some specific cases?
• R: I would love to get through some of these details because then what we can do, we've got a customer office. That's the organization that I talked about, they report into me that looks at customer specific situations that says what is going on with how their issues are being dealt with and is there a consistent theme of things happening that they need to tackle and work with, you and the rest of the teams to prevent these things from happening again.

• Q: Is Monitoring, alerts open and accessible to customers?
• A: The answer is no and yes. No, as a cloud service, it's not a glass box. It's a black box. We are responsible for delivering on the service, so we have all our monitoring and solution tools. However, what you do get to see is that when there is a proactive, we call this observability. So, when there's an issue that has been identified and our alerting tools will alert that observability team, if it is deemed that that alert needs to be actionable, a case gets created for the customer. So, this is a proactive case that gets created that details hey, Mr. customer, just to let you know, we've seen this problem and we're actioning the problem. So, there's a proactive side. You don't get to see the bowels of everything else because obviously it's a cloud service. And we're continually enhancing and providing that visibility. I can tell you that in later releases of the IFS cloud, the product which will also expand to the service, what we call the life Cycle Experience Portal, you will get to see a large portion of new enhancements coming about how the service is running. So, if you're looking for performance metrics or you're looking for indicators about how the cloud service is running, we're bringing a number of new dashboards available to customers in the lifecycle experience portal that will provide that capability to you and give you that far greater insight to that.

• Q: When we face challenges/issues with the level of support provided by IFS, could you please outline the escalation procedures we can utilize to address these issues more effectively?
• A: Further details and information regarding to raise the severity level of an issue and or use the prescribed escalation process can be found on the www.support.ifs.com Service centre under "Find answers" 

• Q: I am wondering if the support team are «Experts» when you are reporting cases towards i.e process asset management. Is this assigned to support that know this module, or is it random who will try to solve the issue?
• A: Depending on the information provided, and the complexity of the problem cases are routed to SME's in a particular industry vertical. While IFS continues to invest in its employees it may require multiple SME's to collaborate to solve a particular problem. What's important is that as much information and detail is provided at the very beginning so that a SME can asses and determine who and how best to solve a problem.  

• F: On many calls that require IFS support to access our systems, one of the first asks is "What's the connection/VPN details?" That information should be on our customer record inside of IFS support. It often leads to days added to our case. If this part was streamlined, your KPI's on case open times would be drastically reduced, at least from our point of view.
• R: IFS is looking into options to store these details within a customer record. This information is highly confidential, and will require access and approvals from customers should it be required. I do however don't believe the lack of storing this information causes "days of delays", IFS has response goals and times associated to each case priority and will be treated in accordance with those priorities.

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