Our Commitment to Standards

Like any other asset, business applications must be cost-efficient. IFS believes this is achieved by fitting into customers’ IT environments, rather than dictating what it should look like.

IFS is committed to standards. Using standard technologies and well-known products has many advantages:

• By introducing standards in between architecture tiers and platform components, IFS is able to replace and update technologies in isolated areas without causing ripple effects across the applications.
• Using standards allows existing and widely available competence to be used, cutting start-up time and training costs for system integrators, developers, and technicians.
• Finally, adhering to standards and avoiding proprietary extension protects against vendor lock-in.  

Freedom of Choice

IFS’ goal is to offer customers a choice of platforms on which to run IFS Applications – be it hardware, operating systems, application servers, or integration technology. 

To meet these goals, IFS is careful not to rely on vendor-specific functionality that could cause a lock-in effect. The company’s extensive use of encapsulation and frameworks allows different technology implementations without requiring changes to core applications.

IFS also believes that customers should be able to decide whether or not they want to use commercial software or open source. Unlike most vendors, IFS supports both commercial products from IBM, Oracle, Sun, BEA, Microsoft and others, but also open source infrastructure products such as Linux, Apache, TomCat, and JBoss.