Combined CollABorative December 2023 - Tech Talk with Raymond Jones, SVP Unified Support

IFS CollABoratives: Tech Talk Session with Raymond Jones, SVP Unified Support at IFS

Date of Meeting: 12 December 2023 10:00 AM US Eastern Time 

Raymond Jones Background:

• SVP Unified Support
• 6 years at IFS
• Predominately worked in IT industry
• Previously worked at Microsoft in various technical architectural roles in the cloud space
• Previously worked at Oracle and ran Oracle Fusion Cloud, which is their HCM equivalent in Europe for over four years

Presentation:

Slide: IFS Unified Support

• So in that six year journey, IFS was predominantly what we call a software vendor and ISV, managing customers, deploying software, predominantly on premise. And as I made that distinction, my job, my very first job here at IFS was to build out how cloud capability using all the expertise and experiences in building that capability of Microsoft and Oracle. And we started that journey, as I say, six years ago. And we have certainly built ourselves to be a capable service provider in the cloud, in respect to IFS Cloud. For those that may be on this call, you may be on an older version of our software like APPS perhaps, an older version of Field Service Management product up here, so product CE, which would natively built for on premise and what we did in our first journey, was try to clarify those products and put them in what would notoriously be called a managed cloud or a hosting type setup.
• And as we build out our capability and launched IFS Cloud, which then truly became a native SAS offering from the ground up, and that's where a lot of our investments have been. And I've had the teams managing, I guess two sides of that, the managed cloud, the hosting type offering which some customers are still on and still continue to use as they start to upgrade into the IFS Cloud and now managing a team that's building out our IFS Cloud capability.
• And in that six years, we have certainly invested and built out a global capability by spinning up Azure your data centers. A large proportion of everything that we do is very much centric around zero. And the rationale behind that is before we started this journey, we did look at Oracle, no doubt as I came from there and had expertise in Oracle and looked at Oracles PaaS offering and their Cloud, we looked at Google, we looked at AWS and obviously we looked at Microsoft. And we are all in on Azure, particularly because of the partnership framework that we have with Microsoft. The level of importance that Microsoft have put on IFS and the level of investments that they have made in IFS, current and future success, outstripped any of the other suppliers that were contesting for the business. And so we have a very, very strong relationship with Microsoft, so much so that we have strong relationships right through to the Azure product teams where we're constantly, shall we say, challenging them on their deployment methodology and in some sense, we have convinced them to amend or change their methodology on Azure to support our ambitions for our cloud services as we develop and manage our products on their platform.
• So, what we have now today is approximately 28 data centers globally and we have managed to be able to do that across the globe and that's indicated by perhaps the blue dots that you see on the screen that I'm showing in front of you. And for every data center that we deploy in Microsoft, there is obviously a secondary data center location for obviously DR (Disaster Recovery) purposes. And obviously for performance. Now for those on the call, you may go well, hold on, Microsoft has many more data centers, than what you have at the moment IFS and surely it's quite simple just to spin up a data center on Azure and provide a service. And the answer is no, it's not. It's not as easy as that, and there's a number of criteria that we work with Microsoft. Microsoft have a, shall we say, a ladder system where they have primary data centers and secondary data centers and their primary data centers is where they make all the significant investment where they bring in all the new services that they deploy and the secondary data sentences follow usually 6 to 12 months after a primary data center. What we do when we ascertain the validity of a data center is work with Microsoft to try and get some best performance benchmarks. Although we are certainly on their backbone, and we see significantly no reduction in latency from our purpose as a cloud provider, we do some due diligence to make sure that the performance that we expect from our applications is what we're going to get out of those primary data centers. And then we do some a testing to make sure that we can fail over our application to those secondary sites and what's important to note and with any cloud provider, it's not always guaranteed that all the hardware is sitting in those secondary locations to enable a full disaster recovery, be it a disaster recovery at the data center level or even at the Geo level. So, when we go through these assessments and we choose these data center locations, we have to go through quite a rigorous process with Microsoft to guarantee that the services that we're going to provide contractually to our customers, to our partners, can be guaranteed. And then we get the assurances in our back to back contracts with Microsoft that they have the ability to deliver on our needs. And so, we have quite a few data centers as I spoke about, you can see from the red dots, is where we have other locations, where we have teams, who are supporting from a unified support perspective. That's where we have application specialists, where we have cloud solution architects, DevOps engineers, site reliability engineers. And for those that have worked on being a long term customer of IFS, predominantly our workforce sits in Sri Lanka and there's a good reason for that. One is we've invested in Sri Lanka for over 25 years and we have quite a large base in Sri Lanka. But what's also most important is a lot of our R&D colleagues. All our R&D skills is also residing in Sri Lanka, so there is a level of continuity between having a large support organization sitting right close to R&D colleagues so that we can continue to enhance quality and perfect our resources. But over the years since I've been at IFS, we began to expand out our support needs into other Geo locations. So North America, we have quite a sizable team now in North America providing specific requirements for customers who may have, shall we say, security concerns. So those may be government customers, public sector customers, A&D customers, defense, those types of customers that require what we call an ITAR program, which is the international Traffic Arms Regulation. And this is where we have US nationals managing customers because of the data, the sensitivity of customers environments and those are all deployed in what is known as Azure government frameworks or is your government cages within the data center.
• And then we have a quite a quite a new service that has been launched just recently this year is what we call EURA, which is the European Union restricted access that is quite similar to the ITAR program that I just talked about, same needs as where we will deploy customers services into European only data centers and will have European staff only tasked to deliver and support those customers outside of our Sri Lanka base. And those are new services that we continue to bring online and invest. But they are very much customer driven and to be honest, the reason we've done that is because we've looked at a number of demands coming from the customer base, from the partner base that says you know what, we have subsidiaries or we have a need to meet local legislation requirements and therefore I first we really need you to start building out your capability in these areas.
• And then one of some of you may notice that we don't have a China presence. Now for those who may have subsidiaries in China, we know that that's quite a notoriously difficult place to work in, particularly because of the Chinese firewall and the legislations etcetera. We do have third party providers that provide engagement and we are capable of deploying our product, our services into what is known as the 21 Vianet, data center, which is a subsidiary owned by the Chinese Government, but is a Azure data center. We do have capability to deploy in that, but because of the Chinese firewall and as most companies and I had the same problem at Oracle and at Microsoft, there are certain conditions when we apply services out there. So, for those who may have that requirement or that need, that's the reason why we don't have a Chinese data center because the complexity, and from honest we don't have the business demand at the moment that will justify us making that level of investment.
• And then what wraps around this, and I'll talk more in detail about the workforce and how we're structured, but for all of this, there are a number of key tenants that this organization measures in success on and you will notice that for any support organization, time to resolution time since last update and customer satisfaction or key tenants to how we measure our success. Now, I'm not going to bore you in this presentation because we have far more KPIs than just those, but those are key leading indicators of how we're doing and providing a service to our customers as we provide all those services across those geographies.

Slide: Customer Experience

• From customer experience and the way that we make decisions here at IFS is really looking at some of the industry trends and the graph on the left hand side, the bar chart on the left hand side, is really at an industry level when customers or partners are surveyed, or any service provider or cloud SaaS provider, what that tells us is, that those are the leading indicators to customer satisfaction. Should you not be able to deliver on these indicators, you will most likely get a dissatisfied customer experience. So, we put a lot of emphasis, and on the right hand side is where we have surveyed our customers, these are not customer results, these are what customers tell at IFS in terms of our focus areas and you can clearly see that there is quite some synergy between what the industry tells us and what our IFS customers are. In fact, there's actually more weighting from our customers in some of these meeting indicators than at the industry level and what our customers tell us here at IFS is that resolution, timeliness to response and clear communication are paramount to a positive customer experience. And should you IFS get that wrong, that will lead strongly to a dissatisfied customer experience. And so a large portion of everything that we do, services, processes, our implementations, how we roll out data centers, are all hinges on making sure that we drive to these leading indicators based on what customers feedback. So, customers, partners have a direct bearing in terms of how we make investments and where we make those investments.

Slide: IFS Unified Support – Investment Areas

• Now, before I go into this slide, some of you may be longstanding customers. Some of you may be new, and the journey that I just took you in terms of that six years, when we invested in our cloud service here at IFS, it wasn't deliberate, but as a result of what we did in terms of running at standing up a cloud service which wasn't more akin to a separate team, separate organization running a Paz service, an infrastructure as a service, with not the application expertise, right, it was really just a stand up, a team that could be able to manage all those cloud instances that were deploying for customers. And then what you had was a separate organization that was typically akin to an application support team, much larger, but dealt with a lot of on premise, customer support issues, software related, packaging, deliveries, updates, etcetera. And what we realized about a year ago, that as a result of those two organizations growing at the pace that we were making investments, we were inadvertently putting a brick wall between the two, because what you typically would see is an application engineer who may not have had experience, and I hope you agree with me on this, an application engineer who predominantly supports an on premise customer is a very different skill set and mindset in terms of what they can and cannot do for a customer that's on premise, right? Asking customers for log files, asking customers for details, asking customers for access to their environments, going through different routes versus a customer who's on cloud going, you don't need to ask me any of that anymore. And so what we did is organically grew a brick wall, which began to display to customers two separate teams, as if customers or partners were talking to two separate organizations within one company. And when I took over, what was then known as cloud and support, I realized this and could see this quite evidently, and went on a plan to unify. So, the clue is in that name is I unified 2 very large organizations, to begin to break down those barriers that will most likely be an experienced by customers. And we implemented unified support in June of this year. So, it is very much in its infancy. It's a journey that we're undertaking, and we're now cross training significant amounts of people and you'll see and I'll show you in the next data slides because I'm really transparent about this and that's probably one of the differentiators at IFS compared to some of the organizations. We're quite open to our customers in terms of giving you a bit of more insight what's under the hood in terms of the journey and some of the data and the things that we're doing. We're quite open to our customers in terms of giving you a bit of more insight what's under the hood in terms of the journey and some of the data and the things that we're doing.
• So, since June, we unified 2 large teams and we're moving a large set of our people into what is commonly known as site reliability engineering skill set. Where you have an application engineer that understands how to run the application on a cloud infrastructure, and likewise you have what is predominantly was known as infrastructure engineers, who didn't have enough application expertise could begin to cross train and get the application expertise, all leading towards what we call site reliability engineering. And we've been undertaking that journey for more than six months before we made the launch. And this will continue to be an investment that we make to cross train and skill up our people to be managing more cloud services orientated customers than on premise customers.
• But in order to do that, we had to make some significant investments. So, the first thing that we did is we launched the IFS Service Center. For some of those have been around, you would have known an old application DSC or LCS as it was once known. It was a very rudimentary home grown bespoke application, very much like a service desk which allowed customers to log cases.
• We launched our IFS Service Center, which is more than just a front end service desk. The ability for customers to log cases is still there, but also there's an intuitive way for customers now to gain more detail, more information about the service that they have procured from IFS. For example, knowledge base articles. When you're logging cases, servicing up knowledge base articles that may solve the problem or the question that the customer or partner may have. And then a whole back end level of automation. So, how customers deploy updates to their cloud services, very much plugged into the IFS service center from a whole bunch of DevOps tooling, to be able to automate a lot of that manual work effort that was either done on premise for customers or in that old hosting managed relationship which behind the curtain may have been perceived as automated. The deployment of those types of updates or those service updates or a new version of the product, is very much automated, but it still requires a human to be able to initiate that. With IFS Cloud, a lot of this is now plugged into the IFS service center and is fully automated to allow customers to be able to do that on a self serve basis. So we invested heavily in that and be able to, from an auditability perspective and an ease of use. And we're going to continue to invest in that, and that's separate and outside of the IFS Community.
• The IFS Community still lives and breathe, and that's under my remit. But that IFS Community purpose is to allow customers, partners and stakeholders to be able to converse and talk about particular product functionalities or questions that customers may not normally log into the IFS service center to gain an answer. And so we'll continue to invest in the IFS commuter going forward.
• A lot of this is around the quality of the service. We needed to guarantee that we had better insight to help customers were utilizing the service so we could make improvements, and we could assure reliable outcome because we could identify how customers with utilizing the services. This is now more transparent and open to partners as well, giving partners the capability to utilize our services, to provide offerings on top of our standard capabilities. And what we did is we also moved and you'll see it in my next slide is really focused at a more industry level. And this will be pretty interesting to most of you because it was a significant change to our approach to how we support customers go forward. And I'll talk about that on our next slide.
• I talked a little bit about automation. What we have begun to do is provide more tooling optimization within the IFS service center to surface that up. It gives us a better capability to understand with customers the swarming mentality. So we can bring in R&D, we can bring in our partners much sooner into one, should I say, single pane of glass that we can share and expose how customers are utilizing the service, because they may be bespoke customizations or third party integrations that a customer may have contracted outside of IFS to buy a service and given capability to partners and customers to utilize those offerings as well, which further enhances, none of that we could have done in the old LCS or CSC platform, so a huge benefit to customers going forward.
• And then, you'll see the numbers and I hope I hope some of you go, wow, that's quite big. But the purpose of the IFS Service Centre and our approach is to allow customers to own their service to a degree. Allowing them to self-serve, to run automation scripts, to run pipelines, with the guarantee that there's a support organization behind the scenes that should something go wrong, that we can get alerted and that the organization can pick it up and understand what it is and converse with customers. So, there is this ambition to fix issues before they happen, but also give the capability for customers from a self-serve perspective in the IFS service center to manage their cloud service instances as they go forward.

Slide: Customer-centricity through industry alignment

• I talked about the industry level, and one of the things that we made a significant change on this last year was, we've got a lot of feedback from customers and we heard a lot of data points. Although customers buy the same product, they use it in different ways, and a manufacturing customer who might purchase IFS Cloud has different purposes and different needs, and will require support professionals, site reliability engineers to understand how customers in the manufacturing vertical or the services vertical, or communications, whatever that may be, that they are understanding that actually customers use this the software in a very different way. And so, what we've done is we've verticalized the support organization into a vertical approach.
• So not only are we training and cross skilling people to become site reliability, engineers, understand the application, how it works on a native cloud service, but also now get individuals to really understand that customers use software more uniquely depending on their vertical. This will allow, and you would have seen it on some of the previous slides, we talk about empathy. One of the biggest things is, customers, when they're talking to a support professional, in R&D or even IFS consulting, is that they need to appreciate that person that they're talking to understands the unique needs of that particular customer, in that particular vertical because there's a different approach and customers use the software differently irrespective if it's the same software. And so, what we've done is we've verticalized our teams, into these verticals so we could begin to understand uniquely how customers are utilizing that service.
• And one of the benefits was, our R&D organization, when they develop product, they develop it at a vertical level. They go out, they understand how customers use the product in a vertical, in manufacturing, in service management, in communications, in service etcetera. And they developed the product that way. So, us aligning a very big global unified support organization with the same mentality as our R&D organization will only read benefit for both parties. And so that's why we physically did that.

Slide: Unified Support - Service Operations – What do we do, and why?

• So, to give you an insight to what we deal with today, we have approximately 6,425 customers. It seems like a very exact number, but it's an approximation. And these customers, all span between cloud, native cloud services customers, or on premise customers, or a hybrid of both, where customers are moving from on Prem to the cloud. And so we service roughly about six and a half thousand of those customers, and the teams work predominantly around 32,000 work items. And that 32,000 work items, not necessarily as cases, it could be incidents, it could be change requests, it could be problem management, it could be deployments, it could be from our observability team, from alerts, looking at performance issues with customers as they go through. And so, what we did is we've currently building that team in that architecture, and you can see in the slide I talked about the verticalization approach. And so, what we have is a core team with those core industries as I spoke about, we have what we call restricted industries, and those are the two industries that I talked about earlier in, in my in my presentation which was the ITAR North America restricted industry and as well the European Union. And those are separate verticals for obvious reasons. Separate teams completely ring fenced also from a software application access process piece as well. And then what we have is a is another vertical called for M&A. And for those that are closely keeping an eye on IFS and its progress in the industry, you'll know that we have been quite aggressive in our acquisition process. And so, we've been acquiring companies to add to our portfolio and to complement our future strategy. And so we, we my organization didn't do really good job, we did acquisitions and then we tried it fit them in shoehorn them in to those verticals that you can see in front of you. And what we've done now is we've ring fence the verticals the from the acquisition piece because we really then need to understand from a product strategy and accompany strategy how are we going to integrate those new acquisitions into our overall portfolio service offerings. And what we then will do is gradually bring those acquisitions to align with the same methodologies of deployment the infrastructure, process et cetera and work with our R&D folk to align on that methodology. Should we kind of ring fence there the M&A's and then bring them in a standard way going forward.
• I talked about the IFS Service Centre originally, and we obviously have a service desk team that is predominantly its purpose as a service desk, is to try to do first fix. Is to really understand and make sure that information being provided by you customers, by partners is accurate, that we understand what the ask is.
• And then traditionally in the service desk and I'll talk about this a little bit more now, is we're moving away from that traditional service desk. We're bringing in significant AI capability to auto route information from cases or from our observability teams, so that it gets to the right verticals, to the right subject matter experts. This is quite a complicated process for those that wish to understand it, because you have to identify your skill sets across your entire base. You have to understand well which person as this case comes in, or this observability record is raised. Who's best featured to fix that problem for the customer quickly. And so, what we're using now is AI capability to be able to route these cases quickly to the right resources in these verticals. And we're gradually switching that on as we go. It's been phased in. So, for those customers that say, well, I don't see that happening just yet, and I can understand that because you will get to see that capability as we begin to phase it out. And we are working with Microsoft and a number of other third-party vendors to help us, shall I say, perfect that process of streamlining that AI capability in identifying the resources.

Slide: Unified Support – “Resolve Faster”

• So, to resolve faster, there's a large growing content on the IFS service center and a Knowledge Base article repository for customers to use, consume to help solve cases. And there is also a lot of how to factors how customers could get the best use of unified support and how they can gain access to cloud service environments that may require approval. So, I urge customers, partners to use the IFS service center to use that and we're constantly updating the knowledge base article. I think from the last estimate that I received from my leadership, we're adding approximately nearly 60 to 70 knowledge-based articles per month. As we go forward and there is a large set of knowledge base article repositories already in there.
• We have an SLA prioritization report and that's back ended to our contractual fulfilments. These are all based on how we respond to customers in a timely manner. How quickly we should look at picking up the case to providing input, to solving the problem.
• We have a newly landed case escalation process that should customers enter a case, and the information that they've entered in is not permitting them to raise it to a higher severity level, there is an option for customers to raise the severity level of the case so that it gets a greater level of focus. And there's a case escalation process that is now enabled to allow customers to get that focus.
• And then what we have globally is what we call a guide me process, and this is an investment that we have made on a regular basis. It runs every week globally for customers. It's a 2-hour landing slot where customers, partners are invited and welcomed to attend to raise any issues, or any queries or just hey, I've got this discussion that I need to have with IFS and I just don't know who I need to talk to. That's a process, a forum that is sponsored by a number of IFS individuals, not only across my organization, but IFS consulting, sales, etcetera that attend that that guide me call to help customers navigate through IFS.
• And as I talked about the predictive routing, and this is all based on the information that supplied to us or that we gleam in terms of how customers or utilizing the service.

Slide: IFS Unified Support – Driving better outcomes for Customers

• The one thing that is very different that I've experienced here at IFS, and this information is not widely known, and you're more than welcome to checkpoint to me on this. If you were to ask any of your other providers publicly, like Microsoft, like Oracle, or any of our IFS competitors, it’s very difficult to get an answer or insight to their sets of results, and there's an obvious reason for this that those suppliers don't provide this information quite easily unless you stronger arm them into it.
• At IFS we are more open and transparent about sharing this information, and I think that's a large differentiator for us because one is, we want to make sure that customers understand how we're operating and the work that we're doing in the progress that we're making is one of the reasons for this call. So, you can see and I'm sharing a little bit more open in transparently to this group, is that these are our sets of results for our key performance indicators. And you can see that at a large proportion of how we respond to those 32,000 work items that I talked about in terms of our success to dealing with customers cases by initially responding to them and also even scheduling a resolution when customers are logging cases. Now I know we are recording this, but I'm quite more blunt and bolshy about this. I know, because I have contacts and all my other companies that I worked with trying to get this level of information from them is very hard and we are more, as I said, more transparent about this. And so, you can see from an industry perspective, and again I'm saying this from a recording perspective, this is my own personal opinion experience. We are performing at a much higher level in these KPI’s than some of our competitors. Now, I appreciate that some customers may be sitting on the calls and partners go, that's not my experience and I understand that, and that's why we're having this conversation and openly have that when we get to Q&A. But from an industry level perspective, IFS is 100% committed to driving this to be the highest industry and it's why we want to share it because we actually want to force a change in the industry. We want to make sure that other partners provide us are supplying this level of information so we can do comparisons about how everybody's performing.
• From my production availability perspective, contractually, we're at 99.5, but from an overall service perspective, you can see that we actually are achieving a much higher attainability for our cloud service. So, this is in excess of the three nines capability. And for those on the call that might say, well, can I have a contract then with IFS that gives us a higher contractual availability. And the answer is yes, but. And the but is that we are about to launch in our next cloud release, I believe it's 24R1 an offering for customers that can take a premium cloud service that will give them the high availability and the faster DR capability than what we provide as standard. It does come at a premium cost, because I think people can appreciate that that's that is quite an investment to be made, but that will be an option for customers going forward to get to that three nine capability if that's what they need for their companies.
• And then, and not to be controversial, but just to make sure that we all are on the same page, these are our terms and conditions in terms of how we react to customers on the different Support frameworks, platinum and gold, we have two offerings, one is platinum, one is gold. Platinum obviously from a next update perspective on P ones is typically 8 hours and resolution scheduled within 24 hours of that case being logged and you can see the differentiator on the cloud.
• So, there's a lot that I've talked about and a lot that I've gone through in terms of the journey that we've undertaken and the investments we continue to make. That's really the end of my slides and I will just want to give people a good grounding of where we are and what we're doing and how we're making those investments.

Questions / Answers / Feedback / Responses:

• Q: Thanks a lot for this presentation. It is interesting to have a view behind the scenes. You mention in your presentation that the Chinese issues or Chinese great firewall and that you are not operating an operation center in China, but accessible from China to an external one is possible or your experience as not so good idea to choose this or is there just limitations and so on and so on?
• A: I think the challenge for any service provider is the consistency of access to those instances sitting in China. There are ways around it. There are things that can be done, but from a service provider trying to ascertain a guarantee contractually between you and I, that's very difficult because we have no, shall I say, ownership of the connectivity between the instance that may sit in China versus where you may have another instance. And that's the biggest challenge. Now we do have some customers who have their parent subsidiary sitting in Europe and they have a child subsidiary sitting in China. And what we have done is really try to work with customers on ways to try and shore up that connectivity between those two instances. But they will never be shall I say a guarantee between IFS and that parent company that says, we guarantee that that connectivity will stay up because what I have seen, with some of our customers and in my previous life at Microsoft and even Oracle is that latency becomes a very big part. Not only the connectivity becomes unstable, but latency due to all the changes that the Chinese government continue to make within China becomes a very big problem. And when you're working with products like Field Service Management, PSO, even some aspects of our IFS cloud portfolio, latencies are really important aspect of delivering a service, right? The speed of use, UI integration, all that, packet dropouts, third party integrations, these all become very big concerns for us as a service provider. So, it's possible. It's a long way me saying it's possible, but when we can help, but we will probably never put any guarantees around the service.
• F: OK. Yeah. We have this issue on a daily basis due to our subsidiary in China and data exchange and we have a solution in place that we have a let's call it a tunnel for this great firewall and we haven't an European IP address and we have an Chinese IP address and so we can use from China also Chinese idea that is terminated to Europe and from Europe or from the rest of the world to access with your IP address. There are ways around, absolutely correct, but I guess it is not easy to guarantee 99 or something else, or 24/7 that is absolute logic.
• R: It's ironic. It was so much easier for us in Apps 10, Apps 9, as an example, because what we did is, for these types of companies we put reverse proxies in place that allowed us to be able to try and shore up the connectivity. But when we move to IFS Cloud, that's a native web application and it's very difficult unless you start putting third party providers in there to try and help you balance the connectivity, which is a further investment that can be made. Sure. But then I'd ask customers or companies to just weigh up the concern and can you can you deal with perhaps the latency issue or the drop in connectivity, that's not something that I can agree to, but I can certainly help the team can certainly give you advice for sure.

• Q: Detailed question I know, but if I heard you correct, you talked about different ITAR zones US and Europe. Do you know if it's possible to set up an environment in Europe/Sweden cloud that Support NIST 800-207?
• A: So the answer is yes, but. And the reason is, depending on NIST and it's criteria. Firstly, the first instance that I would say is, is this an access issue or is this a data residency problem that we have to overcome? Because yes, we do have Swedish base data centers and we have some Nordics data centers
• R: Both
• A: So yes, we can build the capability with the European Union restricted access team. We can provide the instances and the data sitting and residing in European data centers as long as we have one. We do have a Swedish based data center. We do have a Finnish based data center. So, one data residency does not become an access problem from a residency perspective. Then we need to talk about access. Now is the requirement to have access from a Swedish native or in European individual? What we have capability is we have a European team that meets all the criteria for the European Union. So, we can do something there, but if your request is hey, I only want Swedish nationals being able to access and support that, the answer is no, we don't have that capability and we won't see that as an investment from IFS because the investment to overcome. So yeah, we don't have natively a Swedish support team to manage a Swedish deployment. That's beyond our remit, but we do have European nations and that's quite a large team now. I think that team is up to about 28 people approximately, and the reason it's that is one we have to do a 24 by 7 capability, so we need to ensure that we can contractually provide 24 by 7 capability depending on the product portfolio. So, if it's IFS Cloud, obviously when you have the expertise to manage not only the underlying infrastructure, but all the different product portfolios within IFS Cloud, HCM, HR, finance, etc. And then if it's PSO and FSM, do remember that those are natively different also architectures, so you have to have skilled people with that architecture. So it's very difficult for us as a service provider to provide it all in one individual and then span that 24 by 7. And that's why the investment is so high. Should we get more customers demanding that, then it becomes a more, shall we say, balanced investment approach for us. But yes, we can we can deploy in the location, we just don't have Swedish national spin able to provide the support services.

• Q: Hi Raymond, thanks for your time today. It's been very informative. One of the things that and maybe this is my pain point with IFS has always been support and I and I know I'm not alone in there and I know you've heard that many times, I'm sure. So as I see the screen right here for example, you've got the P1 KPIs, right? And being a poor pleb with just gold support level, because we're not made of money, like many customers are not, the majority of our tickets aren't P1, right? I mean to get a P1 ticket you have to cut both arms and legs off and do terrible things. So, when I have a system impacting issue, whether it's, you would apply an update and there's some kind of bug with uncovered, whatever it is that's impacting the business. I think about the best I ever get is about a three and I can escalate that and maybe turn that into a 2, but it's all slow process. So, what I find is that that resolution time for those kind of activities are just, I mean, they're beyond long because it's the impact during that time, right as well. So it could be weeks and weeks and that includes large periods of apparent nothing. And I wanted to ask you the question of as you've grown out the offering, this unified support platform, you've grown it around the services, I understand that the need to support cloud, for example and the infrastructure behind that. Is there a target or an intent to bring down the KPIs or the SLA's for standard tickets across the board. Is there any direction around that? Because on a day to day basis, I'm sure that's what most of us deal with here, right? It's the bread and butter tickets and they are painful sometimes. Sometimes we're not in a hurry, right? It’s just a question or whatever it is, and it doesn't matter, but sometimes it's really impactful and even if we try to escalate, it can still take weeks and weeks to get anything. And very often these days it's a case of, sure that's fixed in a future release. So, you can take that in two months when it's released and of course it's released in two months and then we have to go through the process. So, we don't get a fix for say six months into the system and that's really debilitating in some cases.
• A: I'm really glad you stepped up and asked me that because I'm not going to be naive and sit here in front of you guys and say, look, it's all rosy because I know it's not. The fact is, we are heavily focused in my organization not on just on the P1’s. P1’s we obviously understand their business critical. There is downtime. But I also respect that there could be P2’s and P3’s in there. They are degrading a level of service or product capability. And what the team are and I'm I haven't got it here, maybe Sarah, maybe a future event that I come back and give people an update on how we're progressing. We are actively focusing on the P2’s and P3’s to bring them down significantly and I have made a significant investment in people to shore up our ability to bring that down. What I won't commit to you, and I think you probably appreciate understand this is, well I contractually chain those SLA's to make them shorter, I want to be able to do that if I'm capable and know that I can meet it, because that's just going to end badly for both of us. So, I do see P2’s and I do see P3’s coming down. Not as healthy as I'd like them. That's not going to solve your issue here, but what I can offer is if you drop me a line and give me your examples, I'll have my customer office just take a look and go. What's going on here and is there anything? Is it part of our program to improve or is it something that's unique or significantly different to your area that we need to go and do something about?
• R: Thank you for speaking up. Obviously, I warned Raymond before the session that we've had different support issues come up throughout the year and he's well aware of that. And so, I don't want anyone to sit here with those thoughts or questions and not say them out loud. That's why we're all here. I do think there's a couple layers to what you're saying, which is, how do we maybe better flag within the levels, the severity to you. So, they are categorized in a certain way, but to your point, you're saying some P2 or P3 issues for us aren't a big deal. Some are a big deal, right? How do we make sure that IFS knows for you while it's categorized the same way for us, what does it mean. And then the other thing I heard you say is the visibility or the communication while you're waiting, and how do we make sure that there's just an awareness of where things stand. So, I think that's good feedback and appreciate that.

• Q: I have MWO cases open since last Sept. I've met other customers in the same position. Is MWO a particular problem for Support?
• A: Interesting question. We certainly have seen an uptick in volume relating to mobile work order and those are twofold. One is I have an active, shall I say, war team at the moment, working directly with R&D on mobile work order and they stem from two things. They stem from product quality problems with mobile work order and they also stem from our ability to be able to diagnose from an observability perspective the uniqueness of mobile work order issues. That's where our biggest challenge is. And so I would love for you to send me what you have given that you've told me you've been having one since last September. Because actually, there is a weekly review call that I get sent to me on the progress that my organization is making along with our R&D organization, specifically related to mobile work order. And so I'm surprised that you have been waiting since last September because there has been significant progress made in this space. And I'll say this to you now, and I'll check it because I don't want to be misquoted and this is most likely the power that you guys have from the open forum that I have. The last update that I received. We have in the mobile work order queue, only 95 cases open from a height of over 300. So, I just wanted to say that give you a sense of where actively getting on top of the mobile work order issues and there is has been a number of iterations of product releases to fix these issues. So, if you're sitting in the 95, that's really unfortunate. I want to find out what those are, send them to me and I will add it to this teams update and go please tell me why. And whether or not it's a product release that is waiting on a product release, but that should not be something that you should know about. It should be in the case notes but send me what you've got and I'll have the team take a look.

If you are an IFS Customer and would like to watch the recording, please email jessica.foon@ifs.com

A copy of the slides can be found in the attachments section below.

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