India is a growth market for Micro Focus: Stephen McNulty, President, Asia Pacific And Japan, Micro Focus

A global software company with 40 years of experience in delivering and supporting enterprise software solutions, Micro Focus is betting big on the huge potential of the Indian market. In an interview with EC, Stephen McNulty, President, Asia Pacific And Japan, Micro Focus, shares how Micro Focus is planning to expand in India

Some edited excerpts:

How is Micro Focus planning to strengthen its operations in India?’
In addition to our go-to-market team in India, which comprises sales, marketing, pre-and-post sales, finance, human resource, we also have an India Development Centre, providing global development support to Micro Focus. We will continue to expand our partner ecosystem in India, enabling the partners and equipping them with a partner framework for them to easily engage with Micro Focus and deliver value to the customers.

Which are the sectors that the company is targeting in India?
India is a growth market for the company. We see enormous potential with recent government initiatives in the banking industry on the cybersecurity framework. Given the amount of development work that happens in India, we also see the MF Devops approach in bridging development and business as a major boon, especially after our acquisition of Serena Software.

Which are some of the major product offerings?
Our product portfolio can be divided into five sub-portfolios. With Identity Access & Security, we offer a broad set of proven solutions for Identity Governance and Administration, Access Management and Authentication, and Security Management. Customers use our Identity & Access Management solutions to apply integrated policies across local, mobile, and cloud environments to govern access to information, administer and manage the identity and access lifecycle of users, and demonstrate compliance with regulations or mandates.

With Development & IT Operations Management Tools, the Application Delivery and Testing products offer a range of DevOps solutions which span an organization’s software supply chain – from definition (requirements capture) through to delivery (testing and change management). In addition, we have our Data Center Management solutions, COBOL Development & Mainframe Solutions (“CDMS”) and The Host Connectivity solution set.

Can you give us an overview on the recent innovations at Micro Focus?
This is characterized by our new model business growth where our focus is on identifying new innovation in the marketplace that is applicable to our core and growth driver propositions. This is the case where new innovation is needed to connect or leverage existing IT or application assets to deliver returns or open new opportunities. An example of this is ‘Silk Performer Cloudburst’, a cloud based implementation of our highly successful on premise Silk Performer product. This combination enables customers to execute a hybrid on premise/ cloud solution ensuring day-to-day operations are handled effectively on premise but offering broadly unlimited additional capacity as and when needed to support business operational peaks, underpinned by the flexibility and ease of use of a common solution in both cases.

Please tell us a little about Micro Focus’ security solutions?

Implementing security solutions can be complex. Within security, we can touch on identity access, governance, security management and much more. As a global enterprise software company, we have proven expertise backed by best practices that allow customers to implement solutions while minimizing overall risks.

Our most significant differentiator is our identity foundation. For our IAS portfolio, an identity-centric approach drives all that we do. Our IGA solution is unmatched in the industry as it has succeeded in establishing and maintaining a highly scalable, reliable solution.

Can you please tell us in a few sentences the key milestones that Micro Focus has achieved over its 40 year journey?
The underlying premise behind Micro Focus’ business strategy is that the company should consistently and over the long-term deliver shareholder returns of at least 15% to 20% per annum. We believe the fastest way to get results from new technology is to build on what you have. Our past acquisitions have included Novell, Borland, NetIQ, Serena Software just to name a few.

How is the integration with HPE Software progressing?
The transaction with HPE is expected to complete in the third quarter of the 2017 calendar year. This will create one of the largest pure-play software companies in the world. This is an exciting and is a significant milestone for Micro Focus as it is consistent with our long-term business strategy to be the most disciplined global provider of infrastructure software. The combination of Micro Focus with HPE Software will give customers in India, and around the globe, more choice as they seek to maximize the value of existing IT assets along with next-generation technologies to innovate in new ways with the lowest possible risk.

What is Unified Archiving and how is Micro Focus expanding in this space?
Retain provides unified archiving of all business communication including email, social media, and mobile communication data for case assessment, search, and eDiscovery. It can be deployed on-premise or in the cloud. The Retain archive is accessible by end users and administrators directly through Retain’s Web Access Archive Viewer. This enables your organization to quickly access, search, and audit archived communication data. An enterprise can easily place litigation holds, print, forward, save, redact, and export your message data. Retain reduces cost, mitigates risk, and manages complexity on prem or in the cloud. It’s an area where we don’t have too many competitors and we expect this to have the one of the fastest growth potential for our organization.