Micro Focus expects more customers in India

MUMBAI, INDIA: Despite the fact that India has a fairly small mainframe market, Micro Focus is highly confident of potential customers and business opportunities here.

"Mainframe market in India is fairly small, but there are many organizations across verticals such as banking, insurance, finance and others that run on COBOL systems and applications," says David Taylor, Micro Focus’s president — Asia Pacific and Japan.

The company expects that the demand of software products to modernize COBOL applications would increase, as enterprises and organizations are looking to migrate on to the cloud. And without COBOL applications, the cloud migration can be riskier to core business of enterprises and organizations.

According to Taylor, organizations are moving on to cloud, but are not shifting core business applications. "But they want to modernize their legacy systems at reduced cost and risks. Henceforth, they need the latest version of COBOL-based systems and applications."

Interestingly, COBOL applications and products contribute around two-third to a company's global business, while the rest comes from software testing and lifecycle management solutions.

In Asia, however, this business ratio is equal, while in India the software testing business is high at 60 percent. The London Stock Exchange (LSE) listed firm, besides the banking and finance sector, is eyeing more customers in the testing space.

"India has a huge base of system integrators and independent software vendors that are involved in application and product developments. For them, testing remains very critical for software development and lifecycle management," says Taylor.

He adds that the company will provide technology capabilities for software application management, along with productivity tools, that help save time and remove bugs from codes.

"It offers a great opportunity to gain more customers. Also, it helps enterprises and organizations to migrate on to cloud through modernized COBOL applications," says Nitin Dang, Micro Focus India — country manager.

According to Dang, some of the Indian customers using COBOL-based systems include Bank of India, Corporation Bank, Central Bank of India, Reserve Bank of India, among others.

"There are many users that are using mission critical applications, but are unaware that these core applications are built-on or running on COBOL," Dang points out.

He adds, "People are adopting newer version of MF COBOL, such as visual COBOL and it's a clear indication that COBOL is not a dead language and is still the language of business applications."