Last week, I attended the Micro Focus Open Horizon Summit in Berlin as the recently elected Vivit Board Director for Advocacy along with our Engagement Director, Stephanie Konkoy.
“Discover the new Micro Focus” is something that we have heard continuously over the last 250+ days since September 1st when they became one of the world's largest pure-play software companies, but what does that actually mean for you?
Let us start with the 300+ products (including heritage Hewlett Packard Enterprise / Mercury / Open View product families). Micro Focus is now managing with over 4,800 software engineers across 30 locations. To deal with this size and scale, they have had to align the end to end process:
- Market Opportunity
- Product Offerings
- Enablement (Go To Market)
- Implementation Capabilities
- Tracking Performance
This includes a massive Digital Transformation across the new Micro Focus, including Agile Transformation (i.e. adopting SAFe 4.5) and Digital Engineering effort to enable reference architectures and next generation DevOps + delivery platforms (built with technologies such as Vertica / Kafka / Spark to provide machine learning and predictive analytics).
After speaking with Jerome Labat, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Micro Focus, at some lengths around the next generation products they have planned to go to market, I can confidently say that there is plenty to get excited about with the new Micro Focus.
The title of my last blog post was Legacy is your Legacy, and I was equally impressed that the case study showcase was helping Sage UK rediscover the old by helping to modernize the legacy system safeguarding their investment in Micro Focus. The following three focal points will help future-proof any investments across Application, Process, or Infrastructure Modernization:
- Pre-integrated containers, unified licensing and shared cross portfolio services.
- Flexible deployment options, deploy on any infrastructure (i.e. on-premise to public cloud, including mobile and mainframe (even Cobol as a Service)).
- Zero downtime upgrades, auto-scaling, HA/DR, self-healing and most importantly secure.
After personally investing over 20 years in the heritage Hewlett Packard Enterprise / Mercury Interactive product family, I was keen to discover the new within the Application Development Management (ADM) product family, especially within the Functional and Non-Functional Testing portfolio:
- Unified Functional Testing (UFT) Enterprise
- Unified Functional Testing (LeanFT) Pro
- Business Process Testing (BPT)
Hidden Gems - LeanFT now natively supports docker containers, which support Remote Desktop (RDP) and screen capture within the results.
Hidden Gems – StormRunner Functional (SRF) supports root cause analysis to help to pinpoint failures.
- LoadRunner
- Performance Center
- StormRunner Load
Hidden Gems – StormRunner Load 3.0 supports AWS and Azure easy to import scripts from LoadRunner, JMeter or Gatling, combined with native support for Network Virtualisation Analytics along with new support for Application Performance Management platforms such as New Relic, Dynatrace, Splunk, and now App Dynamic.
Hidden Gems - Service Virtualisation community edition can now help target delays due to dependencies of micro-services or lack of systems alignment (only SAP certified solution)
Hidden Gems - Mobile Device Testing in the cloud and on premise with physical devices, free security testing provided by Fortify, synthetic monitoring by AppPulse with mobile analytics.
Hopefully this will give you just a taster of the hidden gems of what “Discover the new Micro Focus” is all about. Personally, I discovered more around the cross portfolio capacities than I have ever seen before when Hewlett Packard was behind the wheel. The synergy between product families has earned Micro Focus a seat at the table as one of the largest software players across the following four pillars:
- DevOps: enabling the rapid delivery of quality, secure applications with end-to-end visibility across a tool chain of commercial and open source offerings - leveraging the largest portfolio in the industry.
- Hybrid IT: simplifying the management of a complex mix of platforms, delivery methods and consumption models to help organizations address business needs, control costs, and ensure availability and performance at global scale.
- Security & Risk Management: Securing data, applications and access; powering security operations and governance to mitigate risk and maintain compliance; and harnessing the power of secure DevOps practices to ensure end-to-end risk management.
- Predictive Analytics: Helping customers translate siloed data into real-time proactive analytics at scale, anchored on supporting open and cloud-based stacks to create new insights across applications, operations, security and the business.
