IT’S SORT OF A GENTLEMEN’S AGREEMENT THAT IF WE’RE UP AGAINST EACH

OTHER, WE WORK IT OUT.

Arcwide, the “preferred partner”

Whether that personal touch can stay in play in future is an open question. There is talk of acquisitions in the UK, US and DACH, as part of a plan to bolster Arcwide’s reselling capabilities.

“We are not a reseller, so we don’t sell licenses. We just started doing it in France but we don’t do anywhere else, and that’s actually something we’ve always had in our business plan, to become more of a reseller from a license perspective.”

This proposition will include application managed services, taking Arcwide into “direct competition” with IFS, as Green says.

“They know that, we know that, and it’s sort of a gentlemen’s agreement that if we’re up against each other, we work it out.”

This turn in the conversation leads me to ask the obvious question about the exact arrangement between Arcwide and IFS considering its place in the partner ecosystem. As a Platinum Elite partner, IFS fills Arcwide’s funnel from a sales perspective - but there’s more to it than that.

“We absolutely have a contractual agreement with IFS as to what we can and cannot do. That’s outside the partners’ success agreement that we have with IFS. So, we have a joint venture contract which says this is where we operate, and that we are the preferred partner.

“A lot of our partners don’t like us saying it, but the contract actually does say ‘preferred partner’... Contractually we can operate in certain regions under particular circumstances. [And] we do stick to the contract, but we talk to each other, right? Half of us are ex-IFS, anyway. The French worked with IFS for goodness knows how many years…

“So that’s how it works: both contractually, and a gentlemen’s agreement.”

The COO does add though that it’s not always “as easy as that”, and indeed, IFS still places great importance as ever on its partner ecosystem. Shortly after interviewing Green, I got the chance to speak with IFS CEO Darren Roos at the IFS Connect event in Birmingham, UK. When asking Roos for a general comment on Arcwide and the ecosystem, he responded:

“A bunch of the work happening now with customers on their upgrade path is being done by partners and we support [that] with our Success Service, but by and large partners are running those programs and that’s the way it should be.

“So Arcwide are an important part of it, but they are just a part of it. While we help to incubate the business and are a shareholder in it, I’ve been very clear that frankly we would do the same thing with any other partner that wanted to do it. We don’t favor them.”

Later Roos points to Arcwide’s rapid growth as an example other partners would like to follow: “If you’re a partner in the space, you need to get focused because there’s loads of work that you can win.”

Looking at the bigger IFS picture, it could be argued that the company may see its future as more partnercentric in how it delivers its services to customers. If that’s the case, then Arcwide has already set the template for future partners IFS invests in.

In the present moment, IFS and Arcwide are, as Green puts it, working “in tandem” to deliver transformational services. He reminds me that not all IFS customers are in the cloud - 30 percent according to figures from IFS Connect - and that this customer segment is earmarked as “on the path to evergreen”.

“We’re going to take on the path to evergreen, and that’s our big business interest this year - picking up as many transformational projects as we can.”

Arcwide has certainly hit the ground running with ambition - and it’s no April Fools’, folks.