Micro Focus Company Brief


Micro Focus Company Brief









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Company Brief
Micro Focus

by Karen Spring

Copyright 2019, Faulkner Information Services. All Rights Reserved.

Docid: 00014476

Publication Date: 1904

Report Type: VENDOR

Preview

Micro Focus is a software and technology company
that provides organizations with the products they need to update legacy systems to
modern platforms. A company known for its acquisitions, Micro Focus merged
with the software business unit
from Hewlett Packard Enterprise in 2017 in a deal valued at $8.8 billion.
So far, this massive transaction has proved less than stellar. This brief takes a look at
Micro Focus’ history, product offerings, and latest news.

Report Contents

Fast Facts

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Name: Micro Focus International
Headquarters
The Lawn
22-30 Old Bath Road
Newbury Berkshire 
RG14 1QN United Kingdom
Tel: +44 (0) 1635 565200

Web: https://www.microfocus.com/
Type of Vendor: Middleware and Application Development Software
Founded: 1976
Service Areas: Global

History

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Micro Focus opened for business in 1976, at first concentrating
on COBOL products. Over the years, it went through several name changes. In
the late 2000s, the company went on a buying spree and in June 2008, it
acquired NetManage, an Israeli software company, for more than $73
million. A year later, it acquired Borland Software. In September 2014,
Micro Focus announced plans to acquire the Attachmate Group in a deal
worth $1.2 billion. This buyout gave Micro Focus ownership of the Attachmate,
NetIQ, Novell, and SUSE product lines. In 2016, Micro Focus completed the
acquisitions of both Serena Software and GWAVA, an email security provider. The
biggest news in recent years was the merger between Micro Focus and HPE’s (Hewlett Packard Enterprise) software business segment in a
transaction valued at $8.8 billion. The deal, announced in September 2016,
closed in Q3 2017. Micro Focus sold SUSE to private equity firm EQT
Partners for $2.5 billion in March 2019. 

Micro Focus offers products in several key areas: analytics and big data,
application development, collaboration, information management and governance,
business continuity, IP operations management, mainframe, and security.   

Today, Micro Focus employs more than 14,000 people and boasts 40,000 customers.

Key
Executives

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Micro Focus is led by the following individuals: 

  • Executive Chairman – Kevin Loosemore
  • CEO, Micro Focus – Stephen Murdoch
  • CFO – Brian McArthur-Muscroft
  • Director of Mergers and Acquisitions – Mike Phillips
  • Chief Revenue Officer – Jon Hunter
  • Group General Counsel and Company Secretary – Jane Smithard
  • Chief Marketing Officer and General Manager, Security and
    Information Management & Governance Product Groups     –
    John Delk
  • Chief Human Resources Officer – Ian Fraser
  • Chief Operating Officer – Paul Rodgers
  • Senior VP and General Manager, Vertica Product Group – Colin
    Mahony
  • Senior VP and General Manager, Application Delivery Management
    Product Group     – Raffi Margaliot
  • Senior VP and General Manager, Application Modernization and
    Connectivity Product Group     – Chris Livesey
  • Chief Product Officer and General Manager, IT Operations Management Product
    Group     – Tom Goguen
  • Chief Technology Officer – Jerome Labat

Major
Products

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Micro Focus’
products help organizations migrate from legacy systems to more modern
software platforms. The company’s offerings are used to analyze, develop,
integrate, test, and deploy modern mainframe applications. With the acquisition of HPE’s software division, Micro Focus picked up some
well-known product families like ArcSight (security) and Vertica
(analytics) to bolster its existing product lines. 

Micro Focus’ products are detailed in Table 1.

Table 1.  Micro Focus Products
Product Type Products

Analytics and Big Data 

This suite of products helps companies to retain business customers by
gaining better understanding through analysis and data organization. 

  • Vertica
  • IDOL
  • ArcSight Investigate
  • ArcSight User Behavior Analytics
  • Operations Bridge
  • Service Management Automation 
  • ArcSight Data Platform

Application Delivery Management

 To help companies plan, create, test, and deploy applications, Micro
Focus provides the tools that give visibility into projects while
increasing the speed of testing across all applications. Solutions
include: 

  • Project and Portfolio Management
  • Application Lifecycle Management
    • ALM Octane
    • ALM Software
    • Agile Application Delivery
    • Quality Center
    • Application Lifecycle Management Services
  • Functional Testing
    • Unified Functional Testing
    • LeanFT
    • Silk Test
    • MobileCenter
    • StormRunner Functional
    • Network Virtualization
    • Silk WebDriver
    • Service Virtualization
    • DevOps Suite
  • Performance and Load Testing
    • StormRunner Load
    • Performance Center
    • LoadRunner
    • Network Virtualization
    • Silk Performer
  • Mobile Testing
  • Deployment Automation
  • Release Control
    • Orchestrated Release Management
  • Application Performance Management
    • Business Process Manager
    • Real-User Monitor
    • Diagnostics
    • Service-Level Management

Application Modernization and Connectivity

 Micro Focus enables companies to modernize their businesses and bolster
delivery of DevOps practices. Organizations can modernize their
application delivery processes with practices and tools for Agile and
DevOps; determine how to build and deploy applications; promote improved
access to mainframe applications and data; and build services for the
integration of business processes and systems. 

Key product lines are: 

  • COBOL
  • Visual COBOL
  • CORBA
  • Mainframe solutions
  • Host connectivity

Collaboration

 The Collaboration line offers functions so that people can
work together effectively. 

  • Messaging and Team Collaboration
    • Enterprise Messaging
    • GroupWise
    • GroupWise Disaster Recovery
    • Secure Messaging Gateway
    • Vibe
    • Filr
    • Open Workgroup Suite
  • Mobility
    • Filr
    • Micro Focus iPrint
    • ZENworks Mobile Workspace
    • Mobile Management
    • Access Manager
    • Advanced Authentication
    • Reflection Mobile
    • Reflection ZTE

Business Continuity

 Micro Focus promotes a proactive approach to protect data from outages
and disasters without a high degree of complexity. 

  • Adaptive Backup and Recovery Suite
  • Business Continuity Clustering
  • PlateSpin Protect

Information Management and Governance

 Assisting companies with compliance while protecting customer data and
classifying information is among the benefits offered by Micro Focus.
This suite enables companies to better control their data while meeting
regulations. 

  • Secure Content Management
    • Content Manager
    • ControlPoint
    • Structured Data Manager
  • Cloud Data Archiving
    • DigitalSafe
  • Retain Unified Archiving
  • eDiscovery
  • File Analysis Software
  • IDOL

Security

 Micro Focus provides data encryption and analytics-driven security to
protect against threats that can compromise networks. Offerings
comprise security operations, data security, application security,
identity and access management, secure messaging, and unified endpoint
management.

  • ArcSight 
    • ArcSight Data Platform
    • ArcSight Enterprise Security Manager
    • ArcSight User Behavior Analytics
    • Interset
    • ArcSight Investigate
    • ArcSight Marketplace
    • Sentinel
  • Voltage 
    • Voltage SecureData Enterprise
    • Voltage SecureData Payments
    • Voltage SecureData Sentry
    • Voltage SecureData for Hadoop and IoT
    • Voltage SecureData Mobile
    • Voltage SecureData Web
    • Voltage SecureData Cloud
    • Voltage SecureMail
  • Fortify
    • Fortify Static Code Analyzer
    • Fortify WebInspect
    • Fortify on Demand
    • Fortify Software Security Center
    • Fortify Application Defender
  • Identity Powers Security
  • Secure Messaging Gateway
  • ZENworks Suite
    • ZENworks Service Desk
    • Desktop Containers
    • ZENworks Asset Management
    • ZENworks Configuration Management
    • ZENworks Endpoint Security Management
    • ZENworks Full Disk Encryption
    • ZENworks Patch Management

IT Operations Management

 Based upon an IT systems management console, this suite consolidates
data across traditional, virtual, and cloud environments so that
companies can better monitor their workloads. 

  • Consumables Suites
    • Hybrid Cloud Management
    • Operations Bridge
    • Data Center Automation
    • Service Management Automation
    • Network Operations Management
    • Data Protector
  • IT Operations Management Platform (ITOM)
  • Analytics and ChatOps

Major Competitors

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Micro Focus mostly competes with IBM and Microsoft, but other
vendors also are vying for market share.

Recent
Activity

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In the past few years, Micro Focus has acquired a number of companies –
Serena Software in 2016 ($540 million), Attachmate in 2014 ($1.4 billion), 
Borland in 2009 ($75 million) – to name a few. 

In 2017, Micro Focus merged with HPE’s software business unit in a deal
valued at $8.8 billion that created the UK’s largest tech firm. Micro Focus
imagined HPE’s software giving it more cohesion and value to its products. However, this
deal hasn’t gone as well as hoped as integrating the two companies has been
problematic. In March 2018, the company
announced that Chris Hsu, its CEO who had come from HPE, was exiting the company
after just a few months. Micro Focus also projected lower than
expected sales for the fiscal year, resulting from issues related to the merger. These two
announcements caused the company’s stock to tank and $6.3 billion was erased
from its value. Stephen Murdoch, who
previously held the position of CEO at Micro Focus and was the COO while Hsu was
at the helm, took over as CEO once again. In July 2018, Murdoch admitted that
the integration of HPE into Micro Focus was behind schedule – by a year. He
said, "…the HPE Software integration has involved additional
complexities, largely because this was a carve-out transaction, as opposed to
the acquisition of a business that has been operating independently… There
have been significant integration issues in combining cultures as our people
adapt to this dynamic environment where execution is expected to be faster,
operations simpler and people more accountable."1 In March 2019,
Micro Focus sold off SUSE to EQT Partners, a private equity firm, in a
transaction valued at $2.5 billion. SUSE had been part of the 2014 Attachmate
acquisition. Unloading SUSE gave Micro Focus an opportunity to shave off some
debt after the fall-out from the HPE deal. It will be interesting to see how the
next 18-24 months play out for Micro Focus and whether more moves will need to
be made to cut debt. 

References

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1 Paul Kunert. "Micro Focus Belches as It Struggles to
Digest HPE Software." The Register. July 11, 2018. 

About the Author

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Karen M. Spring is a staff editor for Faulkner Information
Services, tracking high-tech industries, including network security, data
breaches and cybercriminal activity, CRM, network management, Internet security,
and software tools. She writes regularly on high-tech topics for publications in
the k-12 and higher education industry. Previously, Ms. Spring was a marketing
specialist for two computer distributors, working closely with such clients as
3Com, IBM, Okidata, Unisys, and Acer.

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