When it comes to mergers and acquisitions we have all heard and read about the chaos that comes from the ones that don’t work. Remember when AOL announced that it was buying Time Warner to create the “world’s largest media company” or how about when Sprint and Nextel agreed to merge only to have Sprint shut down the Nextel network a few years later?
The interesting thing is that these days’ mergers fail more often than marriages. There are many reasons for failures – technology differences market changes and especially company cultural differences to name a few.
Not only did these mergers above fail – they brought a lot of pain and suffering to their customers. They gutted the market place with the lack of ability to make something new and better out of two different companies and cultures. They took a chance to re-think their strategies and failed to move forward with the products and services into a new age of technology and customer satisfaction.
The Micro Focus and Attachmate merger is leading to stronger and more secure host access solutions.
With this merger, there is now no other company that can better address the needs of organizations that want to fit their host systems into a modern and secure IT environment.
With our combined portfolios our customers can:
- Deliver best-of-class terminal emulation solutions across the range of devices required by their business users
- Harden their endpoints to help secure the sensitive data and protect the host systems accessed by end users…without impacting user productivity
- Simplify the interaction with non-intuitive mainframe apps for today’s “Facebook generation” users not familiar with green screens
- Non-invasively extend the business logic embedded in mainframe apps to developers as web services
- Work with a single partner that is focused on helping companies get the most out of their long-term IT investments
Whatever mainframe or host system you have – we have experts with years of experience with these technologies. When it comes to understanding how to secure and manage access to mainframe and host systems – there simply is no vendor that has a more complete set of solutions to protect your critical data-in-motion or at rest. When it comes to enabling mainframe-based applications to new users in new ways – no other vendor is as passionate about bringing new solutions to our customers. There is no company out there that has the depth and breadth of technology and product expertise that Micro Focus brings to the table.
So how will this merger be different than other technology mergers?
It’s easy to say, “Oh, but this merger is different”. But what really matters is how have our companies fared with mergers in the past and how is this merger benefiting customers for the future. Both Attachmate and Micro Focus have a history of mergers and acquisitions where we have taken the opportunity to bring products and services into our portfolio to provide more value for our customers.
Since this merger was completed in November of 2014 we’ve been working hard on the nuts and bolts that make a company work. Bringing together people, systems and processes to make it easy to do business the combined Micro Focus company. We’ve also been busy working through our product portfolios and determining how we can best enable this combined product set to help customers secure and manage their host systems. We’ve been cross-pollinating our products with the best of breed technologies so that our customers can take advantage of these solutions without having to swap applications.
Here are just a few examples of how we are bringing these technologies together:
- Reflection Desktop and InfoConnect Desktop now offer the User Interface Modernization capabilities that originated with Rumba+
- Delivered Host Access Management and Security Server to market which will allow our customers to centrally manage and authenticate access to mainframe systems from our terminal emulation clients.
It’s been a challenge – but we’ve stayed focused on driving new releases and updates for the products that our customers rely on. Take a closer look what we’ve been up to:
- Rumba+ 9.4 – the latest release of our UI modernization-focused solution
- Reflection Desktop & Reflection Desktop Pro – the latest iteration of the Reflection product line
- Reflection Desktop Plus Add-On – a new add-on to enable simple and efficient UI modernization
- InfoConnect Desktop Pro for Unisys and Airlines – Our next-generation Unisys product
- Host Access Management and Security Server (MSS) – Learn how to lockdown access to all of your host systems
- Reflection ZFE – Java-free, browser based emulation with new end-user capabilities and automations
As these products move forward we will continue to invest in and enable the best technologies and solutions across the portfolio. No longer will customers have to choose between different products for the solutions they need.
When you look at your mainframe and host systems, ask yourself – are you getting the most out of these investments as possible? If it was simple and less risky to your business to re-think how you are using these systems– what would you do differently?
Just like with anything – change is hard and can be daunting but now you have a combined company in your corner to help you re-think your business and make each step of the way a safe one.
Keep your eyes on Micro Focus over the coming months as we continue to drive innovation that solve modern customer challenges with host systems. Take a look at how our customers that have taken the steps to make change to their systems and processes and how they have benefited. This could be your business.
