Dive Brief:
- IFS wants partners to turn industry expertise into reusable AI products, creating revenue opportunities that extend beyond software resale and implementation services. The software company announced plans at the annual IFS Unleashed conference in Orlando this week for an AI marketplace where partners can develop and sell industry-specific tools built on the new IFS Intelligence platform.
- The platform will give partners a skillbuilding resource and a place to create automation tools and live data views that IFS calls lenses, using industry-specific expertise in manufacturing, energy, utilities and other sectors. Partners were granted free access to IFS Intelligence through December, with onboarding and enablement scheduled to begin next month.
- IFS has not announced a marketplace launch date or disclosed commercial terms, including how partners will price their offerings or share revenue with the vendor. The vendor committed to making its broader AI portfolio available for partners to resell and implement, with further details expected by early 2027.
Dive Insight:
The marketplace initiative comes as IFS uses AI to reduce the work involved in traditional software implementations.
The company has achieved an average 84% reduction in time and effort across approximately 15 or 16 specific implementation activities, James Greaves, SVP of global industries and solutions at IFS, told partners at the Orlando conference. Those savings do not represent a comparable reduction in overall project duration, he added.
Partner services models are evolving as vendors promise AI efficiency gains. Automation could reduce revenue from repetitive configuration and implementation work, while expanding opportunities to sell reusable tools, deploy AI applications and provide ongoing optimization services.
“That’s something that you can go and then monetize,” Greaves said.
The marketplace will sit within IFS Intelligence, which gives partners access to operational data, automating workflows and controls for executing tasks across enterprise systems.
Partners will be able to build three types of capabilities: skills that repeat tasks or actions, lenses that provide continuously updated views of operational data and automations that execute defined workflows.
These could be tailored to specific industries and deployed across multiple customers, allowing partners to commercialize their intellectual property rather than developing every solution from scratch.
“This almost is the first time within IFS where IFS intelligence gives you all the ability to build your own capabilities on the platform, your own skills, your own lenses, your own automations,” Greaves said.
The company already operates a separate marketplace for ISVs offering complementary products. The proposed AI marketplace would extend opportunities to partners building capabilities directly within IFS Intelligence.
Currently, IFS has three AI offerings ready for partners to sell and implement, with the remainder of its portfolio expected to follow.
The commercial opportunity will depend partly on the marketplace’s eventual pricing, distribution and revenue-sharing arrangements, which have yet to be detailed.
