Bridging the Gap between Traditional and Modern Infra: Micro Focus

When CIOs and CTOs create a digital transformation plan the largest question that demands an answer is – Do we continue to build off our current infrastructure or start anew? Micro Focus is somewhat of a legend when it comes to helping enterprises solve the big technology challenges they face every day. We discussed with Maria Anhalt, Vice President, Research and Development, IT Operations Management, Micro Focus and Saurabh Saxena, Country Director, Micro Focus India about the key challenges in India and how they help their customers.

The company operates with the goal of empowering businesses to extract the maximum value from their existing infrastructure by providing low-cost solutions, such as virtualization and cloud migration, to maximize efficiencies and positively impact bottom lines. According to Saurabh, “Moving towards digital transformation doesn’t mean leaving traditional infrastructure behind.” He explained that many customers, CIOs and CTOs do not realize that while they may want to go from the traditional to the new, in some cases they should not leave the traditional, because many applications are core applications to the business. It can get difficult and expensive to migrate from traditional applications platform to a new platform.

For instance, many financial institutions are still running on mainframe solutions. In order to move from a mainframe solution to a contemporary solution could be painstakingly expensive and risky. However, the concern they carry is that if they don't rip and replace, their existing technology could be obsolete. By leveraging the significant investments of legacy systems and modernizing them with Micro Focus’s products, businesses are able to respond to the evolving demands of customers and partners. And, with a forward-facing approach to product development and a dedication to providing guidance and stability to the organizations it serves, Micro Focus is sure to continue its tradition of producing cutting-edge solutions for at least another 40 years.

Saurabh Saxena, Country Director, Micro Focus India

Micro Focus supports COBOL

Saurabh Saxena motioned that “we continue to support Micro Focus COBOL customers who have been with COBOL for decades.” Micro Focus offers them flexibility to remain with COBOL or move to the Visual COBOL at their convenience. We give the business flexibility to move according to its speed of business -, increasing the longevity and improving ROI. At the same time, we offer our customers new innovations that can seamlessly merge with traditional infrastructure.

Protecting the business core

The transformation doesn’t mean exiting the core or the legacy systems, we actually protect the legacy systems for our customers and give them the flexibility of either remaining or moving to newer technologies.

For example let’s go back to the same example of the financial institutions, where they may still have the legacy systems, then may want to provide an Omni-channel experience to their customers and may provide a mobile interface. We then help them adapt to these newer innovations in the area of mobile banking to give them a seamless experience we also focus on areas of mobile testing, be it in the areas of application performance management, end to end testing including network virtualization.

The scalability that supports customers’ requirements

Saurabh talks about the scalability which is another key challenge. Both central government and state government customers, if the government is launching citizen facing or citizen supportive applications or services, it needs to scale up. Initially, it will be in tier 1 urban cities or the tier 2 cities. Finally, the ultimate objective is to reach the last rural areas there. So the application may actually scale like this depending upon the rollout method that they have chosen. , we believe in building and selling high quality best-in-class enterprise grade software products with analytics built in, which enables enterprises and government organization to deploy these newer technologies today by keeping their customers at the center of innovation.

Maria Anhalt, Vice President, Research and Development, IT Operations Management, Micro Focus

Freedom: Customer has right to choose

Saurabh also added - The customer has the right to use what they want to. If the customer is using Open Source, we realize that our solutions need to integrate with those Open Source solutions. We offer flexibility to adopt the Micro Focus solutions which you can seamlessly integrate today with the Open Source solutions.

For example, for source code management, many of the software developers use Jenkins. So we don’t go back and say you use this specific solution, our solutions can integrate seamlessly with many Open Source solutions and give them an end to end platform. Our intention is not to snap out what’s there. We realize the imperatives of Open Source, But what’s also important is that we also educate the customer in terms of the entire application lifecycle and how we can look together with Open Source and how stable and consistent that is, but we actually work in that environment and we integrate seamlessly with Open Source.

Maria Anhalt, Vice President, Research and Development, IT Operations Management, Micro Focus added more light on the open source adoption. She said, “The Open Source is widely spread and not only are we supporting integrations with Open Source, but we also use Open Source ourselves.” She further explained her role in the research & development team, “I work in R&D and we work on Open-Source on containers and Dockers heavily.