April. Budapest. It has to be the Open Horizons Summit. Indeed it was another record breaking event as over 220 Micro Focus staff, partners and customers came together for the largest event in the MF calendar. People came from 28 nations around the world; including Australia, Taiwan, Saudi Arabia and for the first time Argentina. Walter Lucero, Walter Diana and Claudio Fernandez from Baynet Solutions in Buenos Aires took time from their busy work commitments to attend the Summit they have heard so much about. Budapest does not disappoint!
As usual the main OH Summit was preceded by the Partner Round Table and followed its usual three session format to provide time for ‘chalk and talk’ on Collaboration (Mike Bills), File & Networking (Ed Shropshire) and Endpoint Management (Jason Blackett),
Hot-Labs
The core of the OH Summit is of course the Hot-Labs. There were 6 tracks this year covering: Collaboration (x2), Endpoint Management, File and Networking, Linux and Security.
The most popular labs were the ones looking forward to the new GroupWise release, the Deploying and Managing Windows 10 with ZENworks 2017 Endpoint lab and the Filr Best practices and Passwords are past it labs. To illustrate that Summit attendees are also keen to learn about new technologies; the Docker lab (given by Martin Weiss) was also very well attended.
For the first time the Summit offered a complete Security track, focussing on the Identity, Access and Security product suite from Micro Focus. Many thanks to David Mount and his team for their support in getting this track off the ground.
We are also grateful to Raymond Meijll and Andreas Fuhrmann for their Revealing the Mysteries of Identity Manager Hot-lab and to Peter Coull and Heinz Berger for their introduction to Access Manager and SecureLogin. It was gratifying to see that the five labs were well attended. It indicates that the Summit is diversifying out from its core interests in collaboration.
Keynotes
The Micro Focus keynote was presented at the conference dinner (great food!) by Ken Muir. Ken is still running GWAVA but is now a key MF executive. He reviewed progress in the last year and hinted at things to come when the HPE merger is complete. Micro Focus will become a world leading software house with approaching 20,000 staff.
At Tuesday lunch David Mount spent his keynote on discussing the implications of the new EU wide General Data Protection Regulation which comes into force in late May 2018 and has worldwide reach and implications. Any organisation processing data on European citizens is bound by it. Micro Focus with their armoury of security solutions are well placed to protect organisations and keep them compliant.
Wednesday was the turn of Rob Knight to present the SUSE keynote. In a wide ranging presentation he tracked from where SUSE are now to where they are heading; MicroOS for containers, working with Kubernetes and Open Stack are all primary areas of development.
This year the business track was very well attended with standing room only in some sessions. The focus groups and partner sessions also provided a wide range of subject matter.
Another innovation at the Summit this year was the hosting of the Micro Focus Customer Advisory Board meeting led by Tarik Baki, Senior Manager for Customer Care at Micro Focus. This was another pre-conference half-day session for customers to learn about the top support issues in the area of GroupWise, ZENworks and OES. It was a great success.
In terms of feedback from the delegates – the vast majority of delegates rated the labs as excellent or good, which reflects the hard work in preparing the labs by the speakers – thanks to you all. Delegates were also impressed with the networking opportunities with speakers, sponsors and other attendees as well as the overall Summit atmosphere. Thank you everyone.
People left Budapest in good heart and looking forward to the event next year. “Still the best conference in the Micro Focus ecosystem” was one comment made. “Brilliant technical sessions and networking opportunities! I’ll be back” and “Incredibly cool event with lots of facts, friends and fun!” were others. You get the idea.
See you next year!
This article was first published in OHM Issue 37 (2017/2), p10.