With operations in more than 50 countries and serving more than 40,000 customers, Micro Focus has been delivering tangible business impact for customers, rightly being called the Big Daddy of Software solutions for its core areas. India has witnessed an interesting growth in terms of users in areas such as smart cities and big data analytics.

Analytics India Magazine interacted with Saurabh Saxena who is the country director for Micro Focus, India and has been driving revenue success, alignment to region business strategy, and delivering valuable business outcomes through bridging the gap between existing and emerging technologies. In this detailed interaction, Saxena talks about Micro Focus’ growth and role in building up of smart cities and digital transformation in various sectors such as banking, while using advanced technologies like AI and ML in disrupting their offerings.

Analytics India Magazine: What is Micro Focus doing in the space of predictive analytics? Would you like to highlight some use cases?

Saurabh Saxena: Analytics, from descriptive to predictive, is key to customer retention and business growth. We offer the information management tools you need to leverage your most valuable business asset—your data—so you can find customer insight, protect your organisation and drive new revenue opportunities. Micro Focus helps leverage machine learning to transform unlimited volumes of data into accurate, actionable, automated insights at the speed of business. We provide the following solutions in the field of Customer Behavior Analytics, Cognitive Search and Knowledge Discovery, IoT Analytics and Security Analytics to make it possible:

• Vertica – It provides a powerful analytics platform based on columnar storage. At its base, Vertica is a SQL database that was purpose-built for advanced analytics against big data.
• IDOL – It helps capitalise on virtually any unstructured data asset with unified search and analytics for uncovering trends, patterns and relationships across video, image, audio and text

AIM: Please highlight how Micro Focus is leading the space of enterprise DevOps. How is India excelling in this area? How does India serve as a market for Micro Focus?

SS: With its gaining popularity, DevOps is paving the way to improve business agility. Businesses in India are scrambling to invest more heavily in DevOps talent to keep pace with rising customer demand. Today, a majority of the cloud development projects are applying DevOps to their production to reap better benefits to enable faster, more successful application production rollouts, as often and as rapidly as the business requires.

Micro Focus helps unleash the power of DevOps across hybrid IT—quickly bringing innovative ideas to life at the pace the business demands. We provide solutions such as ALM Octane, which is a comprehensive lifecycle management platform for high-quality application delivery. Our solution helps corporates to centrally track and share application requirements, capture and communicate customer requirements, keep test teams in sync with requirements and quickly assess project impact when requirements change.

AIM: How has been the journey of Micro Focus in Indian big data analytics space?

SS: We at Micro Focus follow five stages of big data adoption — nascent, pre-adoption, early adoption, corporate adoption and maturity. As we move through the five stages, one will gain more value from investments in big data analytics. Every data that is collected from different sources are brought to a central machine learning platform and then the data is computed upon. There are concerns about piping data in and out of the systems. However, the future is different. The inline ML will be deployed directly at the source of data and will be capable enough to provide real-time decision support models. The future of big data lies in taking a database, breaking the compute from storage and turning it into a service-based architecture, that is what we are aiming for India.

AIM: Please tell us how the innovation is driving out of Micro Focus R&D centre in Bengaluru. What are some of the key focus areas of this innovation centre? How many people are currently employed here?

SS: The R&D ramp-up in India started in 1995 with the aim of locating a development centre with top talent available that has deep experience in global delivery. Today, our R&D team consists of around 1,500 employees in product groups and services. India is the largest development centre for our company worldwide, with about 30% of this overall team based in India.

We have significant product development work being done in India for Security, Information Management and Governance, IT Operations Management. Also, we focus on bridging the old world of on-premise infrastructure, applications, networks and storage and the new world of Containerised Micro Services, Big Data Analytics, Modern UX/ UI and Visual Analytics, Application and Infrastructure Performance Management, Multi-cloud management, Network Virtualisation. We also have a large Professional services team in Bangalore doing global delivery.

AIM: Are you planning to open more innovation centres in India apart from Bengaluru? What is your growth strategy for the year 2019?

SS: India has a large pool of talent and R&D in science and technology is at the core of economic growth. It allows scientists, technologists and researchers to develop new methods, techniques and knowledge point to enhance the quantity and quality of output with the same resources. As of now, we have no plans regarding India centre expansion.

AIM: Are you also focusing on the growth and building of smart cities? How is the progress in that area?

SS: While major cities focus on different aspects of building a smart city, the consolidation of these efforts might become a competitive advantage for any country. Finding ways to consolidate areas, from connected societies to open-data sharing, will drive cooperation and the utilisation of multiple smart solutions.

In India, we are working on Government initiatives like Digital India or Smart Cities. Some of the mission-critical applications from Government of India and Railways leverage our solutions. Also, 70% of Indian cities nominated for the Smart City Projects use Micro Focus to ensure service availability, performance and security.

Our focus on digital transformation plays well with what takes to make a very complex environment in a smart city, infrastructure. Every region defines the smart agenda slightly differently and focuses its efforts on varying aspects, from Internet connectivity to transportation.

AIM: What is the role of technologies such as AI and ML in disrupting various offerings in Hybrid IT management space? How is Micro Focus leveraging it?

SS: Corporates nowadays are all working on blueprinting adoption of AI/ ML in their internal processes. As the adoption increases, there will also be a steady increase in IT teams embracing a more pragmatic and thoughtful approach to industrial-scale IT delivery. Across a complex hybrid IT world and against a backdrop of continuous demand for customer services, IT leaders will gravitate to an approach that will help them meet the needs of IT modernisation i.e. digitisation and IT change. With our solutions, they can leverage ML to transform big data into accurate, actionable and automated insights. This will help make predictions and influence business outcomes easily.

AIM: Tell us about your recent acquisition of Interset. How does it help improve your analytics and cybersecurity portfolio?

SS: Interset comes with a strong reputation in the market with software that has been proven in key verticals – high-tech, energy, aerospace, critical infrastructure, defence and government – where threat detection is at a premium. The acquisition will supplement Micro Focus Vertica – Big Data analytics software and add additional value to Micro Focus ArcSight – world’s leading real-time correlation engine to help deliver a highly differentiated cyber-security solution.

Interset aims to unlock the power of user and entity behavioural analytics (UEBA) and ML and provides the most-advanced technique for executing swift and accurate threat-detection analysis. This technology will catalyse Micro Focus’ delivery of a more-robust UEBA offering and help drive deeper data insights across security and operations that are essential to execute on the company’s SecOps Analytics vision.