Merant Plc, the London, UK and Mountain View, California-based organization is now reaching beyond its origins as a Cobol tools company. With its eye on the vast market for companies seeking to e-enable their business, it is now parceling a batch of middleware packages, including those from third party suppliers, to ensure that data is available in a consistent form across the enterprise.
The company’s search for a new focus is not surprising. Following its formation through the 1998 merger between Micro Focus Group Plc and Intersolv Inc, it has struggled to produce figures that suggest it is going places. Indeed, a dangerous chasm has opened up with the new market for legacy to web applications failing to compensate for inevitably plunging revenue from Y2K work (CI No 3,732).
What Merant has going for it is a huge customer base and research which shows that, while even in the US only 13% of medium and large companies are conducting business over the web, by 2002 virtually every sizable company will be forced into e-commerce.
Legacy to web applications is but one component in the drive for e-business and Merant is aware that there are a host of companies offering point solutions. So it is now pushing its Egility range of products which are designed as a framework to enable organizations to turn their IT infrastructure into the basis for e-business.
Merant is now becoming a full IT services group focused on e-business, ready to analyze a company’s needs and implement what it sees as the appropriate solutions. As such, it has moved beyond competition with the broad range of companies offering legacy to web connectivity, and will find itself pitching against heavy hitters such as IBM and Oracle who have also identified opportunities in the same market.
It has bolstered its own software offering with partnerships with companies such as Microsoft, Iona, Borland and Gemstone Systems. Merant completed the end-to-end basis of its offerings earlier this year when it acquired internet professional services company the Marathon Group, so it could offering everything from web page design to links to mainframe databases. With Egility, it says it now aims to offer everything in between.
