Exclusive Interview: Saurabh Saxena, Country Director, Micro Focus, India

In an exclusive Interview with DQ Channels, Saurabh Saxena, Country Director, Micro Focus, India shared insights on how in the post-pandemic world, Micro Focus is focusing on being a completely channel-driven business and continue aiding partners digital capabilities and increased revenue through their integrated global partner program especially in India and APJ region.

Give us an overview of Micro Focus’ GTM strategy in the post-pandemic world. What is your channel approach for the Indian market?

As a channel-focused enterprise, Micro Focus is working towards expanding its partner ecosystem through various initiatives and programs. As the pandemic has accelerated digital transformation, customers’ need for niche technologies has also increased exponentially. For helping businesses embrace this digital infrastructure, partners play a pivotal role in providing the right solutions and products to ensure customers’ increase in return on investment. We collaborate with our channel community to provide end to end solutions to customers relevant to their domains. Almost 90% plus engagements with end customers are done with the help of channel partners.

We believe our channel partners are the ultimate delivery arm for Micro Focus hence, we strategically invest in our partner ecosystem to drive innovation and build digital and cyber resilience capabilities for elevating their technical skills. We ensure our partners meet the business demands of customers across environments – cloud, on-premises, hybrid IT, and multi-cloud. In India and the Asia Pacific and Japan region, we have introduced a global partner program for ease of business and ensured profitability. We are providing extended services and support to our channel partner for profitability with additional revenue through our key pillars: portfolio enhancements, training, and certifications, and upselling and cross-selling opportunities.

What are the core solution offerings by Micro Focus for ensuring business agility to customers?

As organizations are adopting emerging technologies to embrace the digital era, we are helping our customers ensure a high level of IT flexibility while safeguarding the underlying framework and revenue models. With the help of our solutions focused on ‘High Tech, Low Drama’, we ensure our customers can run and transform into agile digital enterprises. ‘High Tech, Low Drama’ allows businesses to evolve digitally without causing any disruption to business operations and revenue models. We enable our customers to accelerate their digital transformation journey through our four key focus areas:

• Simplifying IT transformations: Eliminating the complexities of a hybrid IT infrastructure and becoming an agile, product-driven organization
• Accelerating Application Delivery: Scaling agile and DevOps practices across environments – mainframe to cloud to deliver innovative solutions as per business needs
• Strengthening Cyber Resilience: Strengthen cybersecurity capabilities to protect data, application, and identities in an ever-evolving threat landscape
• Predictive analytics: Achieve accurate and actionable insights with the help of analytics and AI/ML technologies

We provide a vast portfolio of security solutions depending on customer requirements to protect assets and enable early detection and rapid response to cyber threats. Our solutions include Fortify for application security testing, enabling complete automation and workflow support; ArcSight for proactive and comprehensive protection against threats through layered analytics; and Voltage SecureData Enterprise to conceal vulnerable structured data and enable protected use of data for driving business value.

Which segments have witnessed the maximum traction in the new normal?

The pandemic has increased the digital appetite of organizations across sectors. We have witnessed increased traction across the government and public sector, BFSI and IT-ITeS. We have worked with the Government of India on more than 50% of India’s Smart city projects. We are also present in large scales transformational Digital India projects such as BharatNet, State Data Centers and Statewide Area Networks to facilitate and improve citizen services under various programs. We've also seen increased traction in IT – ITeS due to the growing importance of DevSecOps and CEOs being more aware of the organisation’s digital capabilities.

With the increase of digital usage, the load on applications from e-commerce to banking portals has increased. With the help of our application load testing tools, we have been helping several FSI and public sector clients increase the number of concurrent users on their platforms. In the banking space, there has been an increase in demand for cloud adoption, enterprise DevOps, and fast application delivery. Organizations are looking at integrating automation in the application lifecycle with a focus on functional and performance testing to ensure agility and business continuity.

 How has the pandemic redefined the channel and vendor relationship and how has Micro Focus contributed as an enterprise company?

 The pandemic-induced digital transformation has emphasized the role of the channel and vendor relationship in determining customer success. As businesses are shifting from mainframe to hybrid cloud infrastructure, deploying the right solutions on the right platform at the right time is crucial to ensuring revenue. As businesses adopt the cloud environment, channel partners stand as the pillars of support for the transformation. They act as an extension of the vendor and aid in driving digitization. According to IDC, by 2024, 80% of enterprises will overhaul relationships with suppliers, providers, and partners to better execute digital strategies for ubiquitous deployment of resources and for autonomous IT operations. With a focus on safeguarding existing revenue models and achieving new business goals, we as an enterprise company, strive to deploy solutions to address every issue of our customers and deliver a highly differentiated value proposition with the help of our partner ecosystem. The pandemic has brought out the role of the partner ecosystem in maintaining the relationship with stakeholders. We have been helping our partners grow amidst the uncertainty with steady cash flow and open communication. We have conducted more online enablement sessions for our channel community than in the pre-pandemic world. This has received positive traction from our channel partners as it enables them to deliver high-quality services to the end customers.

What are a few tech trends that you are noticing in 2021 and how are you empowering your channel partners to ensure the solutions are mapped to this?

Looking at the tech trends of 2021, we realize that a digital revolution is taking place in the world. The pandemic has necessitated the acceleration of digital transformation initiatives coupled with automation, allowing organizations to remain resilient even in adversity. Innovation, agility, and market development are accelerated by enhanced technology adoption.

The key technology trends we are noticing in 2021 are:

• Shift to Cloud and Hybrid Environment: As businesses facilitate remote work solutions, it has become an impetus to move to the cloud and hybrid environments. It has allowed organizations to fuse existing organizational processes with novel cloud technologies to allow for greater flexibility during uncertain times.
• DevOps has been a major trend in software delivery for a while now. Based on surveys we have conducted across IT leaders, most of the leaders have begun to unite software security in DevOps, transforming the delivery model to ‘Dev-Sec-Ops’. The early detection of security vulnerabilities in the software development lifecycle helps overcome security threats and significantly improves efficiency and agility. Developers’ maturity is characterized by a shared sense of responsibility for security among stakeholders. Static and Dynamic security testing is a key aspect in this integrated and automated approach.
• Cyber Resiliency has become an area of core focus for all organizations. Staying ahead of cyber threats and risks to safeguard an organization’s credibility, and survivability during times of adverse conditions, crisis, and business volatility has become extremely important.
• A Micro Focus World Quality Report 2021-22 also found that organizations are eager to achieve digital transformation, and the key drivers for the intelligent industry include improved efficiency, increased quality, better agility and flexibility, and improved customer experience. Confidence in AI in Quality Assurance is high, plans are robust, and skills and toolkits are enhanced to put AI and ML techniques to good use in their quality assurance program.

As a channel-focused organization, Micro Focus strategically invests in the partner ecosystem to build the digital and cyber resilience capabilities of our channel partners. Looking at the key trends, some of the initiatives taken to ensure the solutions are mapped:

• We have introduced the Micro Focus Partner Boost Program specifically in the APJ region to make collaboration with Micro Focus easier with high profitability in India
• We ensure our partners can meet the business demands of customers across environments and provide the right solutions and products for a higher return on investment
• Our partner program includes portfolio adjustments, training, certifications, incentives, demand generation support, upselling and cross-selling opportunities for higher revenue generation and increased engagement scope with customers