Why New CEO Will Keep COBOL A Key Focus of Micro Focus

“It’s called a spin-merger because we spin the software assets, and the shareholders all get a pro rata share,” Hsu said, taking full advantage of his Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management training. “Then we merged the two companies. It just happens to be for the structure of the deal that our (HPE) shareholders own 50.1 percent.”

As of Sept. 1, there are four interrelated companies in the HP “family”: HPE, HPI, Micro Focus and DXC Enterprise Services (spun out in April 2017 as a followup to the merger with consultancy CSC).

“All four of the HP family of companies are close partners. We go to market together, we share a lot of the same customers, and we sell stuff to each and other and with each other,” Hsu said. “These are pure-play companies that have more scale.

“We’re (MF) going to be a pure play-focused software company: all we do is build, sell and support software. But we’re going to have global scale and be one of the largest software companies in the world.”

New HPE, Micro Focus Lineups

Here’s the way the software IP rosters line up, post-spin-merger:

HPE, which owns IP from more than 122 companies that it has added since its first acquisition  in 1958, now has Network Management, Fortify, OpsWare, Mercury Interactive, ArcSight, Vertica, Peregrine, Shunra, Atalla and Voltage.

Micro Focus owns some well-known software franchises, including COBOL, Serena, Borland, Attachmate, Novell, SUSE Linux, Progress and NetIQ.

COBOL is an intriguing one. COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language) was one of the earliest high-level programming languages. It was developed in 1959 at the University of Michigan by a group of computer professionals called the Conference on Data Systems Languages (CODASYL). Since 1959 it has undergone a number of modifications and improvements.

Micro Focus long has been ground zero for COBOL, the grandaddy of programming languages.

“Forty years ago, Micro Focus had COBOL, predominately mainframe COBOL, and helped in the development of COBOL applications,” Hsu said. “Today, COBOL is still one of the largest assets in the portfolio, and it’s growing.

“Mission-critical applications in COBOL still run most of the major at-scale transaction systems, such as credit-card processing, large travel logistics, and so on. What Micro Focus has done is innovate in COBOL to make it mobile-accessible, cloud deployable and deployable in a distributed model.”

Originally published on eWeek

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