Johannesburg, 20 Sep 2022
Best practice was front of mind at this year’s Micro Focus Realize event, held in Johannesburg on 15 September. Participants in an executive panel discussion, led by Micro Focus South Africa CEO Emile Burger, gave their ‘best practice’ advice for helping customers to solve their digital dilemma, which was the overarching theme of Realize 2022.
Starting out by identifying the burning issues and key trends impacting South African organisations in the current landscape, Kevin Leslie, Global ITOM Sales Leader at Micro Focus, says as businesses transform, they face the dilemma of dealing with the legacy systems that they have. “How do you digitally transform at the same time that you’re managing what you’ve got, and trying to leverage your investment? How do businesses carve out the time and resources to move forward, while deploying all of the elements of digital transformation not separately, but in unison, without forgetting to focus on the core business?”
Carlos Gutiérrez, EMEA and Latam ADM Product Group Leader at Micro Focus, says the deployment of new tools and solutions isn’t always enough, these need to be optimised to ensure faster delivery of digital value streams. He talks about the standardisation and modernisation of DevOps efforts to help CIOs answer questions from business. “Everything that Micro Focus does helps optimise the way that our customers use their software. We’ve gone a step further through combining the efforts of different solutions teams to provide a more holistic approach to optimisation, with a clear focus on SaaS solutions.
“Customers want an outcome, they aren’t interested in how it happens in the back end. They just want everything to happen faster and we enable that through our cloud technology and flexible contractual models, because all too often traditional contractual models don’t meet customers’ needs.”
Leslie says Micro Focus’ main purpose is to help its customers transform. “We work with our customers to move from where they are to where they need to be. We don’t just transform what they do with our cloud portfolio, we also support customers’ move from rest of their estate into the cloud.
“Most of our customers are transitioning from having data centres to the hybrid cloud – and they’re not going with one cloud, but multiple clouds. We enable them to manage both on premises and cloud; the services we provide will often have elements sitting both on premises and in the cloud.”
Luis De Carvalho, the Professional Services Lead at Micro Focus, says South Africa faces the dilemma created by a skills shortage balanced against customer expectations of things happening immediately. “Enablement is a two-way street. Enabling people doesn’t mean just providing access to education, perhaps through an online course, it means enabling the person with experience as well. Knowledge transfer and on-the-job experience are key aspects. There’s a big focus on the channel to provide training and enablement. The channel provides the knowledge transfer by offering access to training, but then the onus is on the customer to provide the person with an opportunity to gain workplace experience.”
Mark Fernandes, the Global Technology Officer for Cyber Security at Micro Focus, says best practice comes down to three things: simplify, measure and communicate.
“Business leaders need to know what the investment in new technology will do for the business. You need to be able to measure the business value and take that message to the board and directors to show them how technology is playing a role in modernising the business.”
Leslie concludes: “The most effective best practice learnings come from our customers. You need to learn from your peers and other customers. This is where customer case studies come into their own; regardless of the vertical or sector, valuable lessons can be learnt and deployed going forward.”
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