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COVER FEATURE
EMBRACING THE After 30 years of operations in the Middle East as a HPE software; Micro Focus, has for the past three years, been staking a claim for the position of the leading software company in the region The story of Micro Focus starts in 1976, when the company was formed in the UK, and half a decade later, in 1981, when the company developed a software product that would help revolutionise modern day information technology as we know it. The product was CIS COBOL, a standard-compliant COBOL implementation for microcomputers. Fast forward to present day and the company was recently celebrating the 60th anniversary of COBOL, which was created in 1959 as a U.S Department of Defense project to assist data processing, the revolutionary language was built to last through the expert design work of Grace Hopper, Jean Sammet, and others. Since starting with the development of a COBOL compiler in 1976, Micro Focus has spearheaded the evolution and innovation of the language and the contemporary technology that supports it. During an interview with CIO ONE, Mr. Gonzalo Usandizaga, VP & GM Emerging markets, Micro Focus, pointed out that it’s this continued innovation on COBOL that has enabled Micro Focus to be a leading software company that helps their customers in the digital transformation journey by helping them transform, operate and secure their IT infrastructure. “As Micro Focus we have been in this business for 40 plus years and when CIO ONE / October 2019
you work with companies for that long you get to know a lot about their legacy systems. These customers are the ones that are now embracing the digital transformation concept; which is not something as simple as switching the lights off and on, it’s a journey and customers need help. There are not many vendors in our industry today that can help with this application modernisation from mainframe to mobile phone.” explained Mr. Usandizaga. “We are COBOL founders, and we deliver solutions from COBOL down to cell phones; because the applications that you have in your phones are monitored and managed by our solutions as well. We like to call ourselves the glue between the old and the new and that’s how we drive our customers in digital transformation,” he added. For 43 years, Micro Focus has grown its footprint considerably; whereby they currently have around 15,000 employees and have more than 43,000 customers globally. The company has a broad portfolio of 300 plus products thanks to its many acquisitions over the years. However, they categorise their solutions in four main areas which include: • Enterprise DevOps- where they have leading testing solutions in the market; • Hybrid IT Management- where they
help customers to manage their own IT environments; • Security, Governance and Riskwhere they have multiple solution in this practice, from identity management to helping companies secure their applications, networks and data; • Predictive Analytics- where we have leading solutions like Vertica and IDOL, for sentiment analysis. “In this region we focus on all our solution areas, but where we see more traction is in Hybrid IT and Security, Governance and Risk. Within Security, Governance and Risk we see a lot of traction on identity management solutions, application firewall solutions and monitoring solutions as well,” said Mr. Usandizaga. He further explained, “we rely in our partners and system integrators; whereby 100 percent of our business is somehow touched by our strategic partners. So, apart from working extremely close with a significant number of partners in the region, we made the decision as a company to invest heavily in this region,” True to form, the company was in the middle of hosting their Experience Tour 2019 MEA event, which Mr. Usandizaga described as a top 3 customer and partner event Micro Focus has for the whole EMEA.