Equipped with a comprehensive portfolio, Micro Focus provides flexible pricing and trusted insight to make its customers worry-free while moving software from on-premises to the cloud
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“With solutions such as Hybrid Cloud Management X, we empower our customers to unify their multi-cloud and on-premises operations, speed up provisioning, and gain management consistency.”
Saurabh Saxena,
Country Director,
Micro Focus – India
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The Pandemic and the ensuing migration to online operations and massive adoption of work-from-home-culture and online learning gave the cloud industry a much needed shot in the arm. As the India market remains in the eye of a major digital transformation buoyed by a tech-centred Union Budget, SME Channels embarks upon recording the voices of the who’s who of the Cloud scape.
As part of our effort to make the voices of major cloud players heard by the channel community, we have brought in this for you as first of a series of Cloud Predictions by major vendors.
Here, in a special interaction with SME Channels, Saurabh Saxena, Country Director, Micro Focus – India, reveals his organization’s strategy for growing the cloud business, his predictions for the cloud industry in 2022 and his vision and plans for the channel community. Edited excerpts…
The pandemic has forced businesses to take a giant leap to go online. As a leading cloud player, how do you plan to leverage the immense market opportunity created by the pandemic?
The pandemic coupled with remote working has changed the IT dynamics making cloud adoption crucial for organizations to ensure business continuity. IDC predicted that by 2024, over 50% of enterprises would replace traditional operational models with cloud-centric models for better business outcomes. Organizations have restructured their underlying digital framework to adapt to the needs of the digitally accelerated world and leverage the potential of niche technologies like AI/ML, automation, analytics, etc. As businesses move ahead in this digital journey, the demand for cloud vendors increases, significantly creating a vast pool of opportunities. As a leading pure-play software company, we are focused on working with customers to strengthen their hybrid IT models while building their cyber resilience scores.
As a major cloud player, what market trends do you foresee in 2022?
2021 has been a transformative year with regards to accelerated cloud adoption by organizations. As we move ahead in 2022, IT teams look at deploying Cloud Native Platforms (CNPs) to strengthen their hybrid infrastructure and ensure business success. Adoption of CNPs with powerful integrations and API-oriented architecture models will help businesses make insight-based, data-driven decisions for simplifying user behaviours.
This year will also realize the need for applications to be hardened and fortified before being deployed in the cloud. DevSecOps will become more crucial as CIOs will prioritize ensuring security and eliminating risks during the application development process. To suit the demands of the evolving digital landscape, automation in DevSecOps will exude coding oversights and data breaches.
Please shed some light on your cloud offerings.
We work with the leading cloud providers. We enable organizations to re-use their core business assets (services) repurposing them for new market and new technology environments such as the Cloud. Micro Focus Cloud Solutions offer the largest toolkit of cloud solutions for businesses can thrive in the cloud. Along with our comprehensive portfolio, we provide flexible pricing and trusted insight to make sure our customers have everything when moving software from on-premises to the cloud. With solutions such as Hybrid Cloud Management X, we empower our customers to unify their multi-cloud and on-premises operations, speed up provisioning, and gain management consistency. Our SaaS solutions like SMAX, LoadRunner Cloud, etc. enable customers to run and transform through fast provisioning with the assurance of regular upgradation. The SaaS approach allows businesses to scale fast without uprooting their infrastructure or adding more IT staff to run multiple platforms. We also provide SaaS support and coordinated quarterly upgrades to ensure customer success.
What is the USP of your offerings?
At Micro Focus, our holistic portfolio of software solutions enables our customers to run and transform into agile businesses through smart digital transformation. We focus on delivering higher IT flexibility to our customers to uphold their revenue models and attain higher returns on investment. We ensure that IT teams do not need to break down their old framework but move to a hybrid setup by linking the existing and new technologies. It helps businesses in cost savings, business continuity, increased operations in processes, workflows, and applications. We are empowering our customers to accelerate their digital journey with our solutions focused on four key areas:
- Simplifying IT transformations: Ensuring run and transform capabilities at the same time without complexity across IT environments
- Accelerate Application Delivery: Accelerating application delivery with reliable DevOps practices at scale across all environments from mainframe to cloud
- Cyber Resilience: Protection against data breaches with intelligent threat detection in applications, identity, and data
- Predictive Analytics: Analyzing data in time to attain accurate predictions, actionable insights, and automated discovery
What major channel trends for the cloud would you forecast for the year 2022?
Enterprises in 2022 will feel a greater sense of urgency in accelerating their digital transformation strategies. We will witness further movement towards cloud-based initiatives among large organizations with workloads migrating to popular cloud provider platforms and paving the way for the next generation of core business application deployment and modernization. As businesses continue with the remote/hybrid mode of working, there will be no turning back from strengthening their cloud and hybrid environments. Thus, channel partners in 2022 have a greater need to play a pivotal role in helping customers bridge the digital gaps with robust cloud solutions.
What all a channel partner needs to have to adopt cloud business and what are the steps to start cloud practice?
For starting a cloud business, the first step for the channel partner is to find an entry point in the market and define their launch strategy. The pandemic-induced digital transformation has opened a pool of opportunities for partners to tap in. However, they need more than implementing a cloud product. The channel partner also needs to learn their differentiating point and leverage vendor partnerships to make an impact in the market. As more and more cloud players enter the market, it is important to define the differentiating factor and develop a larger skill set for successful business outcomes.
Would you please brief us on the kind of service support you extend to your channel partners? What sort of pre as well as post-sales support do you offer to your partners?
Micro Focus is a channel-focused company with over 40 years of experience in delivering solutions that help customers digitally accelerate their businesses by offering software and crucial tools to secure and enhance their operations. Micro Focus strategically invests in its global network of partners to build its digital capabilities and ensure the highest level of customer satisfaction. The Micro Focus Partner Boost Program specifically in the APJ region was introduced to make collaboration with Micro Focus simpler with a higher return on investments. Our partner program also includes portfolio adjustments, training, certifications, incentives, demand generation support, upselling and cross-selling opportunities for an increase in profitability and engagement with customers.
Since the cloud is a tech-intensive product, it requires proper skilling. Please detail us on the training programs offered by you to upskill your partners.
Micro Focus offers a full range of training and education solutions to its partners according to their needs and requirements. The Micro Focus training program ensures that the knowledge provided to the partners encompasses all aspects required for high customer satisfaction from how to use guides to administering Micro Focus’ leading software products and solutions. Training is offered in various ways depending on the partner’s learning style and approach: instructor-led training, digital learning, adoption readiness tool (a digital software adoption platform for creating, managing, and distributing software learning content), certifications & badging, on-demand training, and requests for direct training.
