In our results review in June, we reported more encouraging news from Micro Focus, the provider of enterprise application modernisation, testing and management solutions, about a return to growth and the prospect of some additional acquisitions to fill out the company’s portfolio. Today’s announcement of a new banking facility gives them a more stable platform to pursue their strategy, now that it has completed its restructuring and as enterprises adapt their applications for use in a more mobile and cloud-based environment.
The finance sector is now demanding strategic cost transformation from its CTOs and one route is through the migrating of mainframe on-line and batch applications to a Windows environment, as seen in Micro Focus’s recent contract with Irish Life.
Banks and other well-established finance sector companies have been prepared to maintain these costly mainframes due to the potential disruption and risk of a migration and also because of other priorities. Many will now be considering biting the bullet to reduce costs, increase agility and to embrace new business models. This gives opportunities to companies like Micro Focus, as well as the larger SIs and outsourcers such as Infosys (whose head of Finance Sector we met recently).