POWERING DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

ANAS JWAIED, VICE PRESIDENT AND GENERAL MANAGER FOR EMERGING MARKETS AT MICRO FOCUS, EXPLAINS HOW HIS COMPANY CAN HELP YOU WIN AT DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION WITH A RICH PORTFOLIO OF SOLUTIONS.

Which are some of the top trends shaping digital transformation in 2021?

As the world continues to pace towards the new normal, some of the digital transformation priorities we see in the marketplace have been reshaped for 2021 to cope with the new “life and business style.” These include automation and AI initiatives for both IT (ITPA) and business (RPA) processes to enable innovations and raise productivity. In today’s world, making IT resilient to disruption with business continuity plans and securing perimeter is a must, and organisations are investing in data analytics to gain more business insights to meet evolving customer expectations and outrun the competition.

We also see the adoption of cloud-based and remote work solutions to ensure users are using technology with ease and in a way that meets business needs from anywhere anytime. Another trend is taking mobility to the next level. As contactless becomes increasingly needed in 2021, the value of intuitive and personalised communications will allow companies to stay engaged with their customers in a meaningful way.

Should CIOs take a business-focused view of digital transformation?

Definitely, they should. In fact, most companies’ board of directors have given CIOs a clear mandate: Use technology to speed the enterprise faster to its business goals. Regardless of where organisations are in their digital transformation journey, CIOs must seize this opportunity to take stock of their progress and re-align these priorities for the year ahead. Despite the challenges, a significant great opportunity exists to transform business operations and models from the ground up, enabling the business to respond to future disruption quickly and strategically.

Furthermore, IT leaders expect an average 2% increase in IT spending in 2021, which contrasts with the overall economic downturn. CIOs hold a huge responsibility in ensuring that these commitments ladder up to their businesses’ overall digital transformation efforts.

Do you think boosting business resiliency should also be part of digital transformation?

I would say that digital transformation is key to business resilience both now and in the future. As a company or business, being responsive requires embracing digitisation for how companies manage and trust their information, enable their workforce, automate where possible, and improve their productivity. First, it starts with how firms manage information. Constant change and disruption put greater pressure to ensure all stakeholders work with and make decisions using trusted, governed information.

Furthermore, with the pandemic nowadays, successful business continuity

means truly extending the office. The organisation’s value streams virtually and remotely, which requires looking at the organisation, its people, processes, information, and technology holistically. As I said earlier, all this is harder to deliver by organisations that have not embraced digital transformation.

How do you help your clients navigate the digital transformation journey and avoid the common pitfalls?

At Micro Focus, we help customers run and transform their business so they can succeed in the digital economy. With a broad software portfolio, underpinned by a deep inventory of advanced analytics, we help customers bridge existing and emerging technologies to achieve long-term success. That’s Smart Digital Transformation.

Our methodology and transformation roadmap focuses on four key objectives CIOs typically look for as they digitally transform their enterprises. First, simplifying IT transformation by cutting complexity, building with agility, and driving services. With the Micro Focus Service Management platform, you can deliver smarter service management to IT and business users with intuitive self-service powered by AI. You’ll address issues, deliver new services, and extend support to business teams with greater speed and agility while reducing service impacts with hybrid IT asset discovery, proactive impact analysis, and service dependency mapping in your CMDB. Our Service Fulfillment and infrastructure modernisation platform allows you to design, deploy, and govern your in-cloud and on-premises resources from an automated portal. DevOps, infrastructure, and IT teams can choose from a unified set of offerings for enterprise-wide, flexible service fulfillment across cloud and on-premises environments. Not to forget the ability to deploy workloads to the latest platforms while leveraging trusted business logic and data. In addition, Micro Focus Service Assurance platform will help you to adapt to change with full-stack AIOps for automated discovery, monitoring, and remediation. You’ll regain full IT observability, repair problems faster, and redirect savings to digital innovation. Our AIOps solutions build on what works to deliver the speed you need.

We also help organisations to take a proactive, consistent approach to patch compliance, backups, and budget control across heterogeneous servers, databases, middleware, networks, and cloud services with our Service Governance platform.

The second is accelerating application delivery, which allows you to reliably scale Agile and DevOps across all your environments, from mainframe to cloud. With Micro Focus quality and test management you will gain real-time insights, including the health and risks associated with every application release. As a result, your team can now deliver software up to 40 percent faster and improve developer efficiency by 25% and reduce application testing time by 40% in highly regulated environments. When it comes to DevOps and managing CI/CD, Micro Focus solutions will enable you to prioritise and measure value of the delivery pipeline with ALM Octane as well as to improve project visibility, efficiency, and fast decisionmaking to support major business transformations.

Another key focus for organisations in the wake of Covid-19 is implementing 360 degree of Cyber resilience. Micro Focus will help you achieve this in seven stage capabilities: · Strategise your Cyber governance, structure, and sensing capability to anticipate and address adverse business or cyber events. · Withstand in an adaptive way your mission-preserving cyber defense framework that can withstand threats to the business. · Defend against disruptive cyber events based on a robust, self-healing digital immunity and active cyber defense. · Inspect in real-time cyber threats through machine-added detection, automated hunting, and advanced situational awareness. · Observe by reliance on automation, machine learning, and adaptive cyberthreat detection to address future threats to the business. · Recover rapidly and restore your digital platforms, adapt, and recover mission-critical systems to avoid business interruption. · Adapt by continuously self-assessing and measuring the state of cyber performance and continuous improvement to support the business.

Finally, the urgent need for monetising and analysing data in time to act. Micro Focus enables data-driven organisations to manage and analyse massive volumes of disparate sources of customer data at exabyte scale and extreme speed to gain an in-depth, actionable 360-degree view of customer interactions.

Powered by artificial intelligence, we provide cognitive search to deliver contextually aware information that is highly relevant to the user’s information quest. It understands the user’s intent, and the patterns and relationships that exist within the data, regardless of the format.

What is your advice for CIOs looking to future-proof their IT investments?

The first advice to CIOs is to nurture a culture of “digital adoption” following the digital transformation to ensure that customers and employees make use of the new digital tools in place and protect the related investment. For that CIOs have to ensure they put in place tools like Micro Focus solutions to measure the user experience and satisfaction on the digital services, as well to give them visibility and insights to measure this usage and quality such as business value dashboards to make sure the usage and adoption are also optimised.

To guarantee the best ROI, companies and CIOs have to trust and use enterprise IT management tools from leading vendors such as our Micro Focus to guarantee any desired ROI, where we have proven professional services that can successfully deliver on any customer requirements, whether out of the box or specially tailored to fit for a particular organisation. Last but not least, customers can leverage our world-class professional support and commitment to our product roadmap and lifecycle for continuous improvement.