Micro Focus announced today the acquisition of GWAVA. See the press release at:https://www.microfocus.com/about/press-room/article/2016/micro-focus-acquires-gwava-inc
Today is a very exciting day in the history of GWAVA. For 15 years our team has been building world-class software products that are critical in helping our customers run their business. We have always had a strong partnership with Micro Focus with many of GWAVA’s products designed specifically to protect, optimize, secure and ensure compliance of customers running GroupWise.
These solutions combined with our broader product portfolio are absolutely the best in the market across all collaboration platforms. By combining our efforts with a much larger company in Micro Focus we will be able to jointly offer integrated solutions that deliver a full-featured enterprise collaboration stack of products around GroupWise to the market. For our award winning Retain product line we continue to lead the market in unified archiving across all email platforms (Exchange, Office365, Gmail and GroupWise), mobile messaging and social messaging platforms. We will now have the muscle and scale of a soon to be $4.5 BILLION dollar software company to innovate even further and deliver on our market-driving vision of Archiving 2.0.
For GroupWise customers this acquisition shows that Micro Focus is serious about protecting their investment in GroupWise. It is said that proof is in actions and by Micro Focus buying their top ISV it proves their commitment to the customer by ensuring that GroupWise has a very long and prosperous future. Customers will be excited to have one place where they can go to get the best solutions available for GroupWise, Messenger, Vibe and Filr. We will continue building upon the technical collaboration agreement we entered into several years ago to more fully integrate our combined product sets technically. In due-time we will build value-add bundles enabling customers to purchase the entire solution suite. It will take time to build and price these offerings so stay tuned for more details!
This is also great news for our employees. We know and in many cases are friends with a lot of Micro Focus employees. Many of us have spent part of our careers working for Novell, which is also part of Micro Focus. In some cases this may feel like “coming home” but I can assure you that a lot has changed since the “Novell days”. Micro Focus is a very different company with a different culture. Micro Focus is committed to our business and the success of our products and each employee.
I am excited with the recent announcement that Micro Focus will buy the HP Enterprise Software business. (https://www.microfocus.com/about/press-room/article/2016/micro-focus-announces-intent-to-merge-with-hewlett-packard-enterprise-software-business-segment). Our employees and our customers will be under the care of one of the largest software companies in the world! This acquisition of GWAVA was done with the broader HP acquisition in mind. It’s a strategic move by Micro Focus to not only strengthen its existing portfolio but also add a rapidly growing and market leading product with Retain. Eventually I see a lot of opportunities to leverage the capabilities within the HP software products to further enhance all our products. I’m particularly excited at the prospect of working with the Autonomy team and seeing what we can bring to market combining the strengths of both Autonomy and Retain.
The future of GWAVA’s products, employees, customers and partners is very bright. I am excited to take on this next phase in our company’s history as part of the Micro Focus family.
Ken Muir, CEO GWAVA