How Micro Focus is addressing Hybrid IT Management, Enterprise DevOps, Security, Risk & Governance, and Predictive Analytics

Software firm, Micro Focus, focuses on helping customers adapt and succeed in the accelerated digital transformation journey. With its portfolio, backed by robust analytics intellectual property, the company delivers the insights, efficiencies, and automation necessary to succeed in today’s rapidly evolving marketplace. Micro Focus helps customers attain the four critical outcomes of digital transformation- simplify IT transformation, accelerate application delivery, strengthen cyber resilience, and analyse in time to act. Saurabh Saxena, Country Director, Micro Focus, India, talks about the charted growth of the company, future vision and more. Excerpts.

What are the industry trends that will dominate 2021?

Technology is a vital component of nearly everything we do and will play an even larger role in 2021 as companies continue to work remotely, and cybersecurity takes on an even more important role within organisations. Business operations resiliency will be critical as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to define how companies will do business this year.

Digital Transformation: The pandemic disrupted the pace of DX with study predicting that it would account for more than 50 per cent of all IT spending by 2023.  A Micro Focus primary research is indicating that organisations are prioritising new DX initiatives now, and many are accelerating investments they had already planned for 2022 and beyond, so they can help their enterprise run and transform at the same time as soon as possible.  Cultural adaptation and willingness to adopt newer technologies also challenge the DX movement.  However, our mobile centric world is already rooting for a unidirectional mandate of DX to stay and define more advanced futuristic paths for humanity.

Security: Resiliency is the next mantra of security and risk management teams – being resilient when experiencing crisis situations and continuing to function even with reduced capacity, all while containing the situation, will be the new normal. Organisations will move towards improved services and cyber-attack defense, and there will be a transition to cyber resiliency in the future. At Micro Focus, we seek to shift our clients into an atmosphere that is robust and cyber-resilient – cyber resilience and deriving insights from data have been elevated to a critical path for organisations expecting to compete in the new economy.  With advances in automation, machine learning, and analytics, the ability to detect, react and recover from breaches quickly will enable companies to continue to operate under conditions of the breach.

Application Development Management: Enterprises are shifting from large, monolithic applications to mini, micro, and even nano service defined applications. The ability to break applications down into smaller deliverables aligns closely with a shift to the smaller, incremental change delivery model preferred by Agile practicing organisations. In cutting-edge organisations, bespoke application development and dedicated software engineers are starting to be replaced by citizen developers, who no longer need to understand specific programming languages. Applications of the future will be built from discrete services connected using process flows, orchestrations, and standardised APIs.

Which of the four outcomes of digital transformation is Micro Focus best positioned to be the go-to service provider and why?

Prevailing market information underscores the increasing popularity of modernisation as an approach to IT transformation. Per a report, 80 per cent of organisations will put in a process to shift to cloud-centric infrastructure and applications twice as before the pandemic. Remote and dispersed workforce and changed operations practices will be the dominant accelerators for 80 per cent of edge driven investments and business model changes in most industries as per study. Micro Focus uniquely supports modernisation across three critical areas of applications, processes, and infrastructure. Our goal is to support our customer’s preferred modernisation route (for example mainframe-centric, cloud-first, DevOps-driven, service-oriented).

We have developed solutions that target the four areas most important to the successful success of Digital Transformation. That includes Hybrid IT Management, Enterprise DevOps, Security, Risk & Governance, and Predictive Analytics

Hybrid IT Management- In order to realise the advantages of a mixed (hybrid) infrastructure, solutions allow customers to leverage current investments in software and infrastructure while still taking advantage of the cloud.

Enterprise DevOps- Solutions that unleash DevOps’ strength through the hybrid IT environment, bringing to life creative concepts to deliver high-quality applications and services safely and faster.

Security, Risk, and Governance- Solutions to protect the most valuable assets of a company-identity, software and data-to protect an organisation from costly violations, fines, penalties, and loss of shareholder value.

Predictive Analytics-Solutions that use machine learning to turn infinite data volumes into reliable, actionable, automated insights to quickly and effectively predict and influence business performance.

How does Micro Focus help customers bridge the old and the new by maximising the ROI on existing software investments and enabling innovation in the new hybrid model for enterprise IT?

Micro Focus offers mission-critical software that keeps the digital world going to succeed in today’s rapidly evolving marketplace. By bridging existing and emerging technology, Micro Focus ensures that organisations do not have to tear down their entire setup to build it back up again. We enable in-house IT teams to easily aggregate cloud services, as well as design, deploy, manage, and govern hybrid resources. Doing so allows IT managers to orchestrate processes, workflows, and applications, delivering cost governance and operational benefits.

What are the future-focused solutions which clients will be looking to adopt for an edge in the digital economy?

Companies stand at an exciting crossroads to compete for the future, and the transformation is about becoming digitally mature to increase organisational agility and customer engagement. A recent India survey conducted by Micro Focus highlighted the key areas of technology innovation. Over 350 unique organisations provided some insightful perspective into the technology outlook for 2021.

• Investment on cloud technology and applications – 32 per cent of respondents want to raise cloud-related investments in 2021. Approximately 23 per cent mentioned that investment plans for both on-prem and cloud technology and applications would be marginally reduced. Nevertheless, 18 percent stated that for them there would be no improvement.
• Criticality of cloud for digital resilience- Work from home processes will be a primary priority area to improve, according to 23 per cent of the respondents. Over 16 per cent said they would concentrate over the next 12-18 months on re-engineering applications.
• Too many applications hinder DX – 49 per cent of respondents believe the pandemic has led to a sprawl of rapidly built infrastructure and software that would potentially hinder the rate of digital transformation.
• The AI imperative – Approximately 53 per cent of companies trust in internally cultivating data and AI skills and will continue to invest in developing internal tools for use. Nonetheless, 23 per cent said they tend to collaborate with external partners for data and AI related requirements. 25 per cent of companies emphasised that long-term priorities and not immediate target areas are Big Data and AI.

If you have an interesting article / experience / case study to share, please get in touch with us at [email protected]

Advertisement