The pace of change continues to accelerate, compelling organizations to protect existing operations even as they drive innovation. Showcasing Micro Focus’ unique approach to supporting your digital transformation journey, this post is the first in a series giving shape to the industry’s digital dilemma and offering real-world examples of companies that resolve them.
The IT Journey: You Are Here
The recent past has been a uniquely challenging period for IT organizations like yours.
The pace of change continues to accelerate, rendering once-familiar business factors like customer behavior, supply chains, technology strategies, resourcing questions, and work patterns nearly unrecognizable.
Amid this complexity, you face mounting budgetary pressures, new regulatory requirements, and unforeseen security vulnerabilities. Your long-term success depends on a vision of digital transformation to keep up with evolving customer expectations, capitalize on new business opportunities, and sustain growth.
As an IT leader, you face two often contradictory missions: to keep your day-to-day operations running smoothly, and to keep pace with all the changes coming at you from all directions.
The Digital Dilemma
How are other organizations managing these competing needs?
On one hand, global research conducted by Vanson Bourne reveals that 92% of respondents consider their core business applications strategic. On the other, research from Statista – which finds that 85% of organizations consider it essential to increase their digital practices to remain competitive into the future – points to new technology spending as paramount.
There’s a clear recognition across IT of the need for change, but also a realization that effective change needs to be evolutionary, not revolutionary.
The key to this strategy is protecting what works, focusing on what matters most, and moving ahead quickly. Nevertheless, this recognition doesn’t make the situation any less complex.
How do you address all these needs at once?
Five Key Strategies
At Micro Focus, we help organizations run and transform their business at the same time, to achieve the critical elements of a successful digital transformation program.
We do this by providing enterprise-scale technology that supports five key strategies for successful digital transformation:
- Accelerate Application Delivery—to employ value stream management capabilities and artificial intelligence and machine learning to deliver at high speed with low risk.
- Modernize Core Applications—to evolve and innovate trusted systems so you continue to deliver value across the portfolio, from mainframe to distributed environments and to the cloud.
- Simplify IT Transformation—to remove the complexity of running a mix of traditional and cloud services with a unified platform for your IT operations.
- Strengthen Cyber Resilience—to protect what matters most by detecting threat actors, responding to advanced threats, and recovering quickly from an attack.
- Analyze Data in Time to Act—to use AI and machine learning analytics to gain insights from your data in real time – in place or in flight across any data type – so you can make timely decisions.
Why are these 5 categories essential to running and transforming?
- Regarding accelerating application delivery, data shows that organizations have experienced a 41% increase in revenue loss due to delays in application releases since 2019
- As previously mentioned, over 90% of core business systems remain strategic to their organizations, which makes protecting critical, valuable business logic vital. This same report states that 72% prefer modernization as a business strategy for those core business systems.
- Supporting the need to simplify IT transformation, the reported average loss due to a lack of automation capabilities for managing IT performance was $46 million.
- The need to strengthen cyber resilience cannot be overstated, of course. Data collected by the United States FBI reveals that reports of cybercrime have increased 81% in the last two years.
- Finally, the ability to manage IT data is the #1 differentiator for top-performing orgs—making them 3.7x more likely to improve customer engagement and experience.
Let’s take a closer look.
Accelerate Application Delivery
Nearly every organization is coping with the pressure to deliver at higher velocity. But they also recognize that increased velocity can bring increased risks.
At Micro Focus, we help meet these requirements for speed through Agile, DevOps, and value stream management. And we can help them deliver high-quality applications at scale—from strategy to release—using AI and machine learning.
Roche Diagnostics, a global provider of critical medical systems, was determined to adopt DevOps and move to an Agile model, so it deployed Micro Focus UFT One to leverage its AI capabilities and accelerate enterprise-level application testing across desktop, web, and mobile channels. The company implemented UFT One in just one month. Since then it has reduced regression test times by 90% as a result of automation and the ability to reuse test cases.
Modernize Core Applications
The second strategy IT organizations are pursuing is to Modernize their Core Applications. You want to build on your strengths rather than risk the disruptions and costs that come with starting over from scratch. Micro Focus can we help you deliver value continuously, by modernizing your applications, processes, and infrastructure while your organization evolves.
Kmart Australia leverages Micro Focus enterprise solutions and AWS-driven modernization to form the launchpad for new growth and innovation. By creating a single source of truth and focusing on the data, Kmart is using cloud services to connect to its rehosted, rationalized database on AWS. The company is now leveraging this data to solve different business problems and to support new business models; these efforts yield savings of 4 million dollars in annual operating costs.
Simplify IT Transformation
The third strategy is Simplify IT Transformation. At Micro Focus, we help you balance agility with stability by taking what we call a Composable IT approach. In this way you’re able to become more agile by providing modular, standardized services across your cloud and on-premises environments. This provides an IT modernization path that protects services, controls costs, and keeps up with the pace of business change.
Sopra Steria, a European technology services provider that champions digital transformation to the cloud, both internally and on behalf of its clients, is using Micro Focus solutions as part of their corporate green initiative. As part of this initiative, Sopra Steria migrated to Micro Focus SMAX so it could gain the advantages of AI and machine learning. With these capabilities, Sopra Steria was able to deliver agile and cost-effective service management to its clients so it could improve their service delivery and increase its service agent productivity.
Strengthen Cyber Resilience
Of course, as the threat landscape continues to spiral, organizations like yours need to strengthen your cyber resilience. This means taking a three-pronged approach: protect against advanced threats to lower the overall risk of attack, detect threat actors in order to quickly eliminate your access to systems and data, and recover from attacks and get back to business as usual.
With Micro Focus software, you can solve each of these key challenges—and continue to improve your security posture at the speed of change—using security analytics for hybrid environments. PricewaterhouseCoopers Brazil, a top professional services company, has adopted Micro Focus’ security solutions. The turbulence of COVID-19 and the introduction of LGPD regulation (Brazil’s version of GDPR) highlighted security as a strategic initiative for many Brazilian organizations. PwC Brazil turned to its strategic alliance with Micro Focus CyberRes, adopting the ArcSight product as a key part of the PwC Brazil Security Operations Centre. Their clients benefit from a full security infrastructure that includes governance, vulnerability management, risk reporting, and forensic security investigations.
Analyze Data in Time to Act
To drive efficiencies and effective cost management, you need to make business decisions in an environment defined by chaos. It’s thus critical that you make these business decisions based on data from your systems, customers, and processes. With Micro Focus software, your organization can use artificial intelligence and machine learning to quickly and easily analyze large volumes of structured and unstructured data and get accurate, actionable predictive insights and governance.
Agoda is a digital travel company, for whom the online customer experience is crucial. Data analytics are therefore key to its competitive market strategy. Agoda uses Vertica Analytics Platform to detect and remove inefficiencies in the customer experience by analyzing billions of records in just seconds. This gives Agoda employees the freedom to analyze complex patterns of user behavior in near-real time so they can improve their customers’ experience.
Committed to Your Successful Digital Transformation
Your ability to manage increasingly complex hybrid environments and new technologies is being tested daily by mounting budgetary pressures, painful new regulatory requirements, and unforeseen security vulnerabilities.
Micro Focus is committed to – and uniquely capable of – helping IT leaders like you run and transform your business at the same time. Your successful digital transformation program is our goal.
Want to learn more? Download your free copy of our eBook, Run and Transform – At the Same Time.
