Your daily event report:
Day 1. Today Micro Focus kicked off Virtual Universe and must be commended for managing to switch from a live event to virtual in the space of just two weeks. Back then I was expecting to travel to The Hague for the three day event which includes technical sessions, demos, the DT Zone and of course meeting up with lots of people. Instead this morning I opened my laptop went to the Virtual Universe home page, retrieved my conference number and settled down for today’s content, which was limited to the General Keynote delivered by CEO Stephen Murdoch and CMO Genefa Murphy. This was then followed by the track keynote, and the one I followed was on the SRG portfolio, that was led off by General Manager, John Delk.
The point of this article is not to summarise what was presented in the Keynotes today – you can log into BrightTalk and watch for yourself. I do want to report on two persistent themes however.
In the main keynote Tim Crawford was in discussion with CTO Jerome Labat and Tom Goguen. On the question of what Digital Transformation is about they were agreed that the ‘digital bit’ was the simpler part of the challenge. DT is much more about transforming approach and processes – if you like ‘business transformation’. Of course Micro Focus is there to help!
Later in the SRG keynote the same issue was addressed, but more starkly as why DT projects fail. (see the figure below). Moving your business to the cloud for example is highly complex with more pitfalls than you may expect on the grounds of cost, agility, complexity, effectiveness and security.
The SRG presentation team used a good analogy to discuss digital transformation. DT was compared to moving home. At your old house you know where everything is, the oddities of the property and more often than not life is comfortable. However for one reason or another you decide to move house. There’s a lot of looking at alternatives, raising the finance, signing lots of contracts, packing up possessions to move to an empty new home where nothing is familiar. Security is of the utmost importance so that your real estate is not compromised. Well there’s a lot similar going on when you run a DT project to move from on-premise operation to a cloud provider (or more). Again, Micro Focus have the solutions to help.
Virtual Universe is available at https://www.microfocus.com/en-us/events/virtual-universe-2020/welcome.
A Virtual Success.
As mentioned earlier Micro Focus have done a great job in switching. The chosen platform, BrightTalk, is mature and reliable. However if you strip away all the face to face interactions then the amount of content available on day 1 was disappointing. No real criticism of MF here as it was all supposed to be so so different. Day 2 will be different.
It would be great to see more interactivity in the sessions – use a polling app or similar is just one idea. It can be lonely at home just watching online….