Software upgrades are a leading economic indicator for a coming economic recovery

IFS, the global enterprise applications company, announced today that more than 25 percent of its North American customer base is currently in an upgrade process, in the formal planning process necessary to ensure a quality upgrade, or have upgraded within the last year.

Executives at IFS and its partner organizations – as well as customers engaged in upgrades – suggest that healthy upgrade activity among IFS’ industrial customer base is driven by the expectation of a robust economic recovery in coming months.

Among these customers is EBARA International Corp., a manufacturer of cryogenic pumps based in Sparks, Nev., which is preparing to upgrade to IFS Applications 7.5, service pack 4.

“Our business serves the liquefied natural gas industry,” EBARA Director of Information Services Frank Lowery said. “Even in the best economic times, we see some fluctuations in demand driven by project cycles for large natural gas processing plants, receiving terminals and ships. So we know to take advantage of slower times to invest in our business processes, which ultimately makes us more competitive and efficient when demand once again peaks.

“This upgrade, for instance, will allow us to use the new IFS Enterprise Explorer user interface, which will make IFS Applications simpler to access for our employees in our remote office in the U.K. and users on the road. The interface should also deliver enhanced simplicity and usability and extend the applications even further into our enterprise.”

IFS North America’s services partners are also seeing a market trend towards investing in organizational infrastructure ahead of the coming economic recovery.

“Among our customer base, there is an awareness that when staff has less work to do, they have more time to work on projects like software upgrades that drive business process improvements,” Michael Pauley, General Manager of the IFS Business Unit at technology consultancy Corning Data Services of Corning, N.Y., said. “This suggests to us that as the economy improves, productive capacity and efficiency of these North American companies will in fact have increased.”

“We want our customers to be ready for the rebounding economy, and with the IFS Enterprise Explorer interface, they will be,” IFS North America President and CEO Cindy Jaudon said. “Early users of this interface found they could perform various tasks faster in the new interface than the old one. An embedded Enterprise Application Search function allows users to find information more quickly – a real advantage in a broad and deep software suite like IFS Applications. The interface is available to our customers free of charge, but they do need to be on the current version of the software. So in this case, increased productivity can result from a simple upgrade process, even if a customer does not implement any additional functionality.”