“OUR CURATED SOLUTIONS OF ENTERPRISE-GRADE SECURITY PLATFORM HAVE BUILT-IN SCALABILITY AND ANALYTICS TO DRIVE THE FUTURE OF CYBERSECURITY”
In an exclusive conversation with Saurabh Saxena, Country Director, Micro Focus (India)
About the corporate journey of Micro Focus and its integration with HPE integration
Micro Focus, today, is the merged entity which as we go is heritage Micro Focus and heritage HPE software. We are almost 40 years plus in the industry - an UK based organisation that started up primarily as a COBOL services way back in late 70s. Since then, we had a number of acquisitions like Novell – a software company; NetIQ - which is into security; Borland - in the area of testing; Serena - in the area of application release; Attachmate, etc.
HPE Software is almost three decades old – home grown at the HP labs – it was indigenously developed to manage networks and do backup because they were infrastructure and HPE was also a part of Cisco at that point of time. Also, a lot of acquisitions happened on the HPE Software front as well - it was typically the case in software industry. The way software industry grew was by mergers and acquisitions.
In September 2017, HPE Software merged with Micro Focus and today, we have got almost 40,000 customers globally with almost 14,000 employees count. We are present in over 43 countries and have got over 4000 partners globally with over 300 products in our portfolio. The core of Micro Focus is that we are built on stability and we are a pure play software organisation - one of the largest in the industry. Our USP lies in the fact that our operations run very well, and we believe that customer centric innovations is a must and is very important in today’s world of complex IT. This is what that drives us in terms of innovating and getting into the market products that majority of our customers would want today. Since we are a pureplay software company, we are much more agile to address customer and partner needs and hence, more flexible in terms of adapting to customer wants.
On how Micro Focus is leading the space of enterprise DevOps and how India is excelling in this area and how does India serve as a market for Micro Focus
Digitalisation of businesses demands a more agile way of operating the applications and processes to meet the constantly changing market demands. DevOps is what will give this agility and competitive advantage to organisations. DevOps is key and is continuous in everything. It’s not sequential in nature – its parallel and agile. This means we must top all things – design, coding, testing, delivery, production, feedback from the customers. DevOps is becoming extremely important – India is adopting DevOps rapidly. However, as compared to the western geographies, adoption in India is still at its nascent stage. We have seen customers looking at more agile processes than waterfall processes. The focus is always to integrate with anything they have- this may include open source like Jenkins. Our strategy is how to deliver better software faster. We have the entire application lifecycle management ecosystem, entire quality framework - functional testing, performance testing,
On Micro Focus’ growth and role in building up of smart cities and digital transformation in various sectors like Banking etc.
Digital transformation is the reality today. A recent IDC study reported that about USD 7.1 billion was digital spend in India in 2018 and is expected to grow to almost USD 9.9 billion plus – which means the digital transformation spend investments that the customers are doing is almost increased by 30% year on year. Another report from IDC mentioned that in India, almost 68.5% of the Indian customers are still at the nascent stage of digital transformation - only 33% have reached the scale of maturity of digital transformation. Almost every organisation has a digital transvirtualization, to build them back into the ecosystem. Also, in India, we have seen a lot of customers who are interested in sourcing their CoEs as a course to outsourcing, they have application development - a lot of customers who are doing that and that’s good - it gives the opportunity to break the silos internally. So, we work with them and work on the application lifecycle frameworks. formation initiative and if you ask me today, digital transformation is not an option but a reality today.
In next 4-5 years’ time, more than half of the organizations will be purely dependent upon the digital – that’s what is predicted globally. Digital is the new reality and we are seeing that in India as well across portfolios whether it is a smart home, or a smart city. Smart technology has touched every sector like Banking and Telecom, IT and ITes – the front runners in this technology - adopting IT and digital transformation journey, manufacturing, government. In fact, you see a huge push by the central government around digital initiatives, smart cities, response project etc. These are coming up and this is the reality in India today.
Today, every organisation is pretty complex in its own state of affairs of the IT ecosystem – it’s not very straight forward. Every organisation going to a digital transformation journey – it’s not a piece of cake – it’s pretty complex. Every organisation has also got projects that they deliver, and each project come with their own technology – on premise, legacy, private cloud, public cloud, virtualized ecosystem, containerized - its complex, all of them are using different technologies.
IoT is also hitting them today – this too is a reality today. We see that sensors got the ability to capture unstructured data, leverage it for business insights etc. So it’s not easy, it’s a complex ecosystem and how do you ensure that you do a smooth run in the digital transformation journey that you have and hence, what’s more important today is that how you can run what is current because you can’t disrupt and at the same time transform - which also means that you innovate faster, than your competition, with minimal risk. So, in this complex ecosystem, while the IT, digital challenges remain – this is not unique – what’s unique is which organisations can partner with these customers to help them run and transform innovate faster with lower risk, that’s what the customers would look forward to.
On hybrid IT management – its impact on day-today lives
What’s important for us is as customers of any service is the access of the service. We will not care where that application or the service resides – we don’t know, and we don’t want to know. What we as customers or consumers of technology or application services – what matters to us is the security, the performance and the fact that the application is functioning once the question function. For e.g. if you log in to banking app and enter your username and password, it should go to the home screen and not to transfer money screen. If the functionality is not proper, you would like to switch banks. But again, all that sits in a very complex hybrid IT ecosystem. You won’t know if this is being accessed through a public cloud or private cloud.
You go to any E- commerce site, you may get authenticated through Google or Facebook – that may actually go to somewhere that is public, it might also go to private – you never know. But what’s important for the organization, who is the provider – they need to manage this complex Hybrid IT. It can be public, on-premise, private cloud – how do you seamlessly move from one to the other if required. For e.g. seasonality, for E- commerce sites, it would see a peak during Diwali or any other festive season. Too many gifts would be exchanged, and they may realise that if they are hosting it through on-premise, they will not be able to take the load which means probably they will move some of the loads to Cloud. So how do you move from on-premise to Cloud and vice-versa if not a peak season? So, if you look at the backend, foundationally Hybrid IT becomes extremely important for these customers in the organisations. You may also need for e.g. migrate workload – if customers are in the journey of digital transformation, they may have legacy applications running on legacy infrastructure, and they need to migrate with the latest infra.
We have solutions for the challenges customers are facing in Hybrid IT. It basically simplifies IT and ensures that you are able to focus on things that matters most. So, Hybrid IT management is very critical today – wherever it is being hosted, it needs to be managed.
How important is COBOL today? How did you bring it back from the dead?
COBOL was never dead. We still have a lot of customers having their core applications running on COBOL on either legacy mainframes – banking, insurance, manufacturing customers are still running on COBOL and the reason being why they can’t move from that ecosystem is a lot of application for e.g. some ISPs who develop the core banking runs on COBOL or large service providers develop their applications in COBOL. Many customers use to work on it – infact, it’s a growing business for us. Our MFCOBOL is running from 20-30 years and the customers who now want to move from legacy infrastructure to latest, we also help them migrate and even use visual COBOL. For us, the most important thing is protecting the investments of customers and working and supporting them on their old investments and act as a catalyst of change. Many of the customers would not want to move from COBOL to something else, because they believe it’s just too disruptive or too expensive to move. It is too risky to move so they would want to stay with whatever they have, so we be with them, we run what’s there - if they want to transform, we can do that. So, that’s basically giving an illustration of what we do.
On the role of advanced technologies like AI & ML in disrupting various offerings
In a swift-paced time, advent of technologies such
In India, almost 68.5% of the Indian customers are still at the nascent stage of digital transformation - only 33% have reached the scale of maturity of digital transformation. Almost every organisation has a digital transformation initiative and if you ask me today, digital transformation is not an option but a reality today.
as Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning has become really accessible, thereby making our lives easier, smoother and faster. Corporates nowadays are looking forward to adoption of AL/ML in their internal processes. Artificial Intelligence in combination with IoT will play shifting roles in digitisation journey depending upon the digital maturity and innovation quotient of an enterprise. With our solutions, corporates can leverage ML to transform big data into accurate, actionable and automated insights. We use AI as well in AIOps so, it’s extremely critical today. This leads to predictive analytics and I think customers are looking for it and we have a huge play there.
On key tech predictions for the Indian market in 2019
A majority of organizations are into the digital transformation journey. We could argue that less than 5% have still not started and various analysts would say less than 5% in India. But the majority of them have started. However, in the Indian context, as I said almost 68.5 % as per the IDC report, the study we did, are still at the nascent stage. Now you cannot transform in all of these parallelly/ simultaneously. You got to pick your battles and that’s what many customers are doing. Depending upon the industries they are in different maturity of digital transformation and you would see the BFSI, telecom, IT/ITes being ahead of the curve, manufacturing would actually argue and say they actually did this transformation 20-30 years back with ERP, which was the first wave of automation in supply chain management.
Micro Focus market strategy
Micro Focus has got business go-to-market perspective with direct sales, pre-sales consulting team, professional services, support organizations and much more. We work with partners at both, local and global scale and at present we have over 4000 global partners. Micro Focus believes in partnerships and hence we make sure that we work with the correct team for better deliverables. We have a direct presence in 43+ countries across the globe and have worked with various segments like banking, telecom service providers, IT/ITes, manufacturing, retail/ecommerce and government public sectors.
Our curated solutions of enterprise- grade security platform has built-in scalability and analytics to drive the future of cybersecurity. Micro Focus’ latest innovations include the first distributed correlation solution for Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), enabling Security Operations Centres (SOCs) to become agile, expand their cyber security footprint, and respond quickly to threats that are evolving at a massive scale – since companies are transforming themselves into a digital platform. We recently acquired Interset, a security analytics software provider which helps with intelligent and accurate cyberthreat protection. One of our core focus areas lies in predictive analytics that helps add depth to Micro Focus’ Security, Risk & Governance portfolio.
We are determined to build a strategy for our customers to provide them with customised solutions for a better experience. We serve some of the largest companies in the world, with a broad and deep portfolio of software products targeted at helping customers run and transform their business seamlessly. We make sure that our customers are delighted thereby helping them in a predictable and positive business outcome. Driving large-scale transformations is the driving core of Micro Focus’s strategy of customer- centred innovation that underpins long term, sustainable success.