Gartner endorses IFS Applications

Thursday, 19 July 2012 00:00 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

IFS, the global enterprise applications company has announced that IFS Applications has been positioned by Gartner, Inc. in the leaders’ quadrant of the ‘Magic Quadrant for Single-Instance ERP for Product-Centric Midmarket Companies’ report.

The focus of this Magic Quadrant is on ERP systems that support a single instance strategy for multi entity midmarket and upper midmarket companies. User-centric improvements focused on usability and deeper integration of analytical capabilities is at the core of leading systems.

Gartner has also spoken to customers running IFS Applications with more than 1,500 users on one global single instance, which shows the scalability of IFS Applications. IFS offers to build customisations with its own resources, which typically comes at a premium but increases the likelihood that these customisations are designed so that they might be included in future versions of the core product.

IFS’s development organisation has been successfully transformed to agile development methods, which are now also used in the support organisation. A tight collaboration with the development centre in Sri Lanka (which houses approximately two-thirds of all R&D resources) helps companies leverage the R&D investments.

The quality of IFS’s professional services and consultants is typically rated very high. Some larger Indian-based system integrators started to build practices around IFS, which customers should consider, if needed.

According to Gartner, IFS Applications is a proven and scalable solution that serves companies at the intersection of manufacturing, project management and SCM, mainly in asset-intensive industries like defence, energy, communications, construction and process manufacturing. The solution is available and used in multiple geographies, with approximately 60% of customers in EMEA and the rest evenly distributed between North America and Asia/Pacific.

The latest major release, v.8, of IFS Applications was released in May 2012. It includes further improvements to the Enterprise Explorer user interface (UI) and enables the integration of the acquired 360 Schedule solution for field service management. The already strong project management receives further enhancements.

“BI by Choice” offers built-in capabilities (mostly based on Microsoft BI infrastructure) and linkages to third-party BI tools for existing BI infrastructures (e.g., built on ClickBase, Cognos or Oracle). New functionality is sometimes released as product extensions. Approximately 15 of these can be used based on v.7.5 (certain minimum service packs required) before they became available in v.8.

One of IFS’s future investments will concentrate on mobile support for different scenarios, including support of the individual by task-specific mobile apps, with an uplink through an IFS-hosted cloud infrastructure to avoid direct linkage to corporate systems. This support allows companies to execute a user-centric ERP strategy.

(Extracts are from Gartner report on ‘Magic Quadrant for Single-Instance ERP for Product-Centric Midmarket Companies’ published on 27 June 2012 by Analysts: Christian Hestermann, Chris Pang and Nigel Montgomery.)