“The Middle East has been an untapped market for us, but we’re going to change that.” – Rahul Misra, IFS

CNME Editor Mark Forker managed to secure an exclusive interview with Rahul Misra, SVP and Managing Director MEA, at IFS, in an effort to better understand how they are equipping businesses that operate in asset-intensive industries with the tools to succeed, their unique approach to AI, the opportunities that remain untapped for them across the Middle East marketplace – and the capabilities that makes Nexus Black uniquely different.

Rahul Misra is the SVP and Managing Director MEA, at IFS.

He is regarded by many of his industry peers as one of the best software sales leaders in the entire region.

His ability to nurture, manage, and motivate his sales teams and ultimately deliver results year-on-year unsurprisingly made him somebody that businesses in the world of technology wanted to have within their own organization.

He moved to IFS in April 2025, after a number of years at Oracle.

IFS are enjoying huge success when it comes to helping entities that operate in an asset-intensive space.

Misra kicked off our conversation by detailing their approach when it comes to AI.

“IFS is on an AI journey. We’ve adopted a three-pillar strategy for AI. We’ve got embedded AI, which is infused into the core of our offerings, and we’ve got all our assets on what we would call our unified cloud platform. All those assets are embedded with AI to create use-cases that are designed to make you much more efficient and remove mundane tasks,” said Misra.

In July 2025, IFS acquired TheLoops, to create IFS Loops.

“The concept of IFS Loops is essentially the agentic AI coming into the organization to do those jobs traditionally perceived to be mundane and repetitive and then setting the boundaries that define the role,” said Misra.

Misra then highlighted both the impact of its Nexus Black offering, and its mega partnership with global AI leader Anthropic.

“The third pillar of our strategy is our Nexus Black offering. We recognized that there were a lot of problems out there that wouldn’t be able to be solved without bringing in the expertise of those who can leverage LLMs, and that’s why we partnered with Anthropic. They are a significant player globally, and are leading the story on enterprise LLMs, and IFS obviously believes the same, and that’s why we took that partnership on,” said Misra.

It’s fair to say that a lot of companies have been guilty of sending out mixed signals when it comes to their AI strategy and the capabilities of its product portfolio.

However, that is one accusation that can’t be labelled at IFS.

IFS has been consistent in terms of its messaging to the market, and Misra talked about its cradle to the grave business model.

“What we’re trying to tell the market in very simple terms is that if you’re an asset-intensive entity, then IFS possesses the ability to visualize the ownership buying the assets, when and where, and optimizing the maintenance of that asset all the way down to the operation. This not only improves its efficiency, but it also increases its lifespan and gets the maximum value of your capital investment. It’s a cradle to grave model that we adopt. We’re the only company in the marketplace that can do it, no other competitor can match what we do. We have it all on one platform that is composable and depending on the customers’ journey and maturity, then you bring in what is required,” said Misra.

As aforementioned above, Misra’s reputation proceeds him across the technology ecosystem in the Middle East region.

Surprisingly, even though IFS is a huge global player, their market presence is not as large as one would’ve expected that.

However, with Misra at the helm and such a diverse product portfolio under his arm, that is set to change.

“Look to be honest, the Middle East is an untapped market for us. I mean we’ve been around, and we have a presence here, but we’ve not played in the space that we need to play in. However, that’s my remit, and we’re going to change that. We’re putting people on the ground and we’re bringing in global knowledge and real expertise into the region. We want to be in front of the customers, especially when they are at this point of inflexion where they need to modernize. This is why we’re stepping in to say let us understand your problems and help them get to where need to go to,” said Misra.

Misra expressed his confidence that IFS can increase their market visibility across the Middle East and Africa region – but stressed that regardless of the strength of your own IP, it’s crucial that you get the right go-to-market strategy.

“We’re very ambitious, and I think we have every right to have that confidence, especially when you consider the IP and product portfolio that we have. But at the end of the day, you need to ensure that your go-to-market strategy is on the money. When you devise that go-to-market strategy then you must consider several factors such as geography in terms of where you’re going to focus on, which industries you are going to target, and what key accounts do you want to win,” said Misra.

The Middle East and Africa marketplace is a big region, that spans 104 countries.

As Misra pointed out, IFS are going to go after the ones where they can extract maximum value.

“We’re going to focus on the Gulf region, particularly places such as Saudi Arabia, UAE, and certain pockets in Africa, where we can drive maximum value. In terms of the industry verticals, we are going to home in on energy, utilities, renewable and manufacturing, of course there are some sub-verticals such as engineering and construction that we can go after, but those are the big ones,” said Misra.

Earlier in our conversation Misra highlighted the importance of its new strategic partnership with AI behemoth Anthropic.

However, he moved the dial of our discussion towards another key partnership, this time in the form of Microsoft, which he described as one of their biggest partnerships.

“Microsoft works closely with us because they can see the value. We help Microsoft with their Azure consumption. It is asset-intensive, the ERP doesn’t consume that, it’s the assets and the zillions of data that run across it with AI functionality. But the question is, how do you leverage the likes of PwC, Deloitte and Accenture that are sitting in boardrooms working across these industries to work with us. We want to bring those partnerships to the region, because at the end of the day you can’t do this on your own,” said Misra.

IFS has a broad and diverse portfolio of solutions and technologies, but one that seems to have captured the imagination is its Nexus Black solution.

Misra highlighted some of its unique capabilities.

“Nexus Black is all about intellect. This is not a pre-packaged application that is available to take to the market, because the use cases are going to be different. You essentially can assemble a team of 25-30 of the world’s best AI scientists who look at problem statements and work with our internal teams. They have domain expertise, so we put them in front of our customers, and they solve the problem because they understand it better. Now, what the outcome of this could be is a potential business offering for us to take, because we’ve solved a problem that’s potentially universal in nature,” said Misra.

IFS are not only expanding across different marketplaces in the Middle East, but they are also expanding into new industry verticals, and one of those is transportation.

Again, this is where Nexus Black can earn its weight in gold.

“Nexus Black creates so much efficiency within a process, and because of that we’ve added transportation as an industry. We’re going to be building a lot of use cases on railways and metros, and we’re seeing huge demand across this space, again, that is primarily based around the need for greater efficiency. Transportation is a key industry vertical for us because it is very asset intensive. So, again in summary, my storyboard easily goes across the whole asset lifecycle management, and fits into that cradle to the grave concept and model that I mentioned earlier in the conversation. Where you need more than what we’re offering, that’s when we bring in Nexus Black. Nexus Black can solve your business problem, and allow you to get on with the job,” said Misra.

Misra has said that you’d be surprised at how often the diagnosis of what the problem actual is can be a bigger issue than the challenge facing the business.

“The definition of the problem itself can be the bigger challenge at times. They tend to look at the symptoms, but not the root cause of the issue at hand, but it’s so important to solve the root cause, as you simply need to address it, even if you do it in steps then that’s fine, but you can’t ignore the root cause of a problem. IFS is like a surgeon, who knows what the problem is, and can fix it – we’ve seen this issue in the past. We can take it in small steps, but we can solve it, and then show them the results, and that gives them huge confidence in driving the project further,” said Misra.

Misra reiterated how the industry expertise and knowledge IFS has given them a huge market advantage.

“Look, I think the key thing for us is our industry know-how, and our technology know-how, and the technology itself, and if you can bring all that together then you’ve got something very powerful. If you can do it quickly then you’re moving the needle even faster and you’re creating new opportunities with SKUs because you can take that as an opportunity to the next one and so on and so forth. I mean business problems may evolve, and business models change, but it’s reusable,” said Misra.

Misra concluded a brilliant conversation by highlighting how important an event IFS Connect MEA is for the company, which takes place later this year.

Misra said IFS Connect provides him with an opportunity to tell a story.

“IFS Connect is an extremely powerful platform for us. It gives us a chance to get our message out there to a very select audience, and we can tell them what we’re planning to do, and what direction we’re headed. We can bring customers together and speak to them peer-to-peer, and talk about the journey whether it’s good, bad or ugly. The whole narrative has shifted; we’re elevating the conversation to bring a different kind of engagement to our customers. This is not just us; it reflects the commitment of our executive leadership and the strength of our global partnerships. We’ll have Microsoft, Accenture, PwC, on stage sharing the work we’ve done together globally, along with others joining us. Overall, it’s shaping up to be a high-impact event with the right voices, the right conversations, and real customer relevance,” said Misra.