Re: MF having issues?


[Sorry for not replying earlier. I was in Newbury last week for a
series of meetings - unrelated to the recent announcements, just dev
meetings that we'd planned back at the beginning of the year - and
didn't have a chance to check Usenet.]

In article <RJMLf.67898$H%4.24314@pd7tw2no>, "James J. Gavan" <jgavandeletethis@xxxxxxx> writes:
Michael Wojcik wrote:
In article <1140796116.074700.17110@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, cblkid@xxxxxxxxx writes:

Micro Focus remains profitable....

I'm sure what you write is true. It's a while back that I looked at the
Financial Statement and it sure looked healthy to me.

Well, analysts at OVUM and Forrester have been encouraging. Gary
Barnett at OVUM calls our market "a huge opportunity", and sees our
success as a matter of "the right sales execution".[1] Phil Murphy
at Forrester published a report titled "Micro Focus Glitch is No
Cause for Panic", which I don't believe is available for free (at
least not yet), but as the title suggests he thinks Micro Focus will
come through "relatively unscathed", though he too is disappointed
by Tony Hill's departure.

That being said,
and even with the 7% you mention - what doesn't jive to me is why Tony
Hill left.

To be honest, I don't know much more about that than what's in the
official announcement, and it wouldn't be proper for me to speculate
based on anything I do know that hasn't been announced.

Tony was well-liked in Development and something of a hero to many of
us for orchestrating the rescue from MERANT. I'm hopeful, though,
that the board will find a replacement who will be good for MF.

Just like Ryan McFarland - the company, (Micro Focus) was started by
Messrs. A & B - one I think was Irish and the other English.

I believe you're thinking of Brian Reynolds and Paul O'Grady.

It's a sad
thing in IT but the innovators somehow just don't stay the course - the
one big exception being Bill Gates.

Well, it's often said in the business world that managing a small,
rapidly-growing company is a very different task from managing a
large, stable one, and that few entrepreneurs are really suited to
continue running the companies they've founded once they become
really successful.

Then a while later M/F started talking a merger with 'X' (forget the
name).

That would be INTERSOLV, who were formed in a similar fashion from
mergers with Polytron - the original makers of PVCS - and other
firms.

MF had a lot of cash on its balance *** at the time and was looking
to grow through acquisition, as was the fashion at the time. We'd
been through a turbulent period due to Marcelo Gumucio's unexpected
and premature departure from the top spot (for health reasons), and
frankly from my perspective it appeared there was a bit of flailing
about as people at the top tried to demonstrate their "vision".

This was the big Merant ***-up. Like all mergers there is a
junior partner and this time it was M/F.

Yes, it was a very clever maneuver. We got INTERSOLV to buy us with
our own money.

Merant did a set of photographs
of the Board Members, a rogues' gallery of who is who. Only one M/F
employee was on the board - a female who had negotiated the merger on
behalf of M/F.

To be fair, the board waited a few months before completing the
INTERSOLV coup. The merger negotiator who kept her position was Buff
Jones, who for her efforts in this regard earned herself a nickname
patterned after a certain TV character's, among some of the staff.

Merant had at least two CEOs, perhaps a third.

Started with Martin Waters, who was at the helm when the merger took
place; he was replaced in short order by Gary Greenfield, who was
still there when MF bought back its freedom, if memory serves.

For whatever reasons, the Merant concept just didn't work.

Greenfield telling customers in his keynote at the MF User Conference
that "COBOL is dead" didn't help, that's for sure.

By negotiation, the M/F 'Division' was sold off and became a private
offshore company (in the Bahamas ?). Head office wise, the emphasis is
in California, (which is where I think Michael is based).

Prior to the floatation, I think the company headquarters was in the
Virgin Islands, actually, but since May 2005 it's officially been
Newbury (UK). The US headquarters is actually in Rockville, MD,
where it was in the MERANT days, though we do still have a large
office in Sunnyvale, CA.

I actually work out of an undisclosed location in the Midwest. :-)

To my surprise I saw that M/F (the private company), went public - not
sure but I think Tony Hill was the first CEO. If you check his CV, Tony
wasn't a newcomer - he was an M/F employee prior to the Merant merger.

Yes, Tony was the first CEO of the new MF, and he had been in charge
of MERANT's ACT division, which was more or less the old MF within
MERANT, prior to arranging the spin-off.

Concentrating on Net Express I'm not at all clear exactly what other
products M/F produces, although there are mainframe compilers and of
course Server Express and Mainframe Express.

Currently there's Net Express (COBOL development for Windows), Server
Express (COBOL development for Unix), Mainframe Express (mainframe
emulation for Windows), Application Server (COBOL runtime for Windows
and Unix), Enterprise Server (App Server plus Web Services and J2EE
production environment), ES with Mainframe Transaction Option (which
adds mainframe emulation in the production environment for lift-and-
shift of CICS apps, etc), and Revolve (COBOL analysis). Then there
are the other product lines, APS, AppMaster Builder, and Enterprise
Link. And probably I'm forgetting something.

Fortunately, we're about to release MF Studio, which contains and
replaces everything that's in NX, SX, MFE, ES/MTO, and Revolve (for
development); and MF Server, which does the same for AS and ES (for
production). So what are now a bunch of separate products become
options under Studio and Server, which simplifies the product lineup
quite a bit. (More details are available on the MF website.)

Now how that
divvies up in terms of income I have no idea, and you don't get a clear
picture from the financials. As to numbers involved, no clear picture
and the following only represents a series of queries, not people
(summarized from the Forum Boards) :-

194 - Application Server
1 - Application Builder
3 - APS for MVS
19 - Enterprise Server
5 - Enterprise Link
290 - Mainframe Express
5,473 - Net Express
307 - Object COBOL Development Suite
411 - Other Micro Focus Products (generalised queries)
54 - Revolve and Revolve Enterprise Edition
703 - Server Express

You can see where the emphasis is - not that there are necessarily more
people using Net Express - but perhaps we are the dimwits who have more
questions to post regarding GUIs and the Dialog System.

I think most questions come from the people actually developing
applications, and most of those seem to use NX as their primary
development platform and then port to SX if they use Unix as well.
There are some Unix-only customers, but it's become so common to put
UIs on Windows that NX is where most people seem to try out new
features first. So it's no surprise the questions come in mostly
from that group.

Thanks for your comments, Jimmy.

--
Michael Wojcik michael.wojcik@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
.

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