IFS, the global enterprise applications company is today announcing the availability of IFS Applications on Microsoft Azure. The new offering reduces the need for hardware infrastructure to provide customers with a highly cost effective, rapid and secure way to benefit from IFS Applications.
In addition to avoiding many of the high upfront costs normally associated with on-premise solutions, the cloud-based offer from IFS and Microsoft enables customers to easily increase the breadth of their deployment as well as scale the number of user-seats in line with business growth. Azure is a proven cloud environment that delivers advance data protection as well as business continuity features that a typical on-premise installation would not include.
The full suite of IFS Applications, including all enterprise resource planning (ERP), enterprise asset management (EAM) and enterprise service management (ESM) modules, can run on Azure. Customers wanting to use IFS Applications in the cloud can leverage Azure either as an Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas) and self-manage their IFS Applications, or to have their IFS Applications hosted and managed as a service (SaaS). The IaaS offering is available now and the SaaS offering including both technical and application managed services, will be rolled out over the next six months.
Mark Boulton, Chief Marketing Officer at IFS, said: “Collaborating with Microsoft to offer IFS on Azure was a natural fit because Azure is so well aligned to our customers’ needs.” Boulton continued: “Our customers want a trusted cloud platform that enables them to quickly set-up and benefit from IFS Applications in line with their business needs. IFS is synonymous with agility, so empowering customers with the power to quickly deploy new capabilities, or extend the usage of IFS Applications into new markets with ease, is very attractive.”
Mike Schutz, GM of Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure said: “Cloud computing is becoming more popular with companies who want to save money and increase speed and efficiencies but they need a solution that is enterprise grade and available at global scale. The work IFS is doing with Azure allows organizations to leverage the power of the cloud and utilize IFS Applications on a highly scalable platform.”
To validate the real-world application of the offering, IFS has been working with beta customer Ebara, a precision instruments manufacturing company. Commenting on Ebara’s deployment of IFS Applications on Microsoft Azure, Frank Lowery, Director of IS, said: “Ebara has made a company-wide decision to put key IT systems into the cloud, so as a long-standing customer of IFS it was music to our ears to hear of this new initiative on Microsoft Azure. We were more than impressed with the ease and speed of creating our first IFS working environment on Azure, which is a cloud environment the company is comfortable with having recently moved to Office 365”.
In light of this, Dan Matthews, Chief Technology Officer at IFS added: “There is very little work involved in running IFS Applications in Microsoft Azure as the performance has proven to be equal to deploying our software on-premise.”
IFS Applications are now available in Microsoft Azure for customers to leverage. For more information go to: www.ifsworld.com/IFS-on-Azure
