Micro Focus Group Plc’s co-founder and new chief executive Paul O’Grady, talked more about his role and the challenges facing the company on Friday. It seems that the company’s problems lie not so much in persuading its customers to move to client-server, as in persuading them to stick with Micro Focus tools. O’Grady spent his time early in the first half of the year out on the road, meeting customers. The primary thing I discovered, he says is that Micro Focus is not known as much as it should be at the higher levels of the organisation. The company has won much of its business by placing the emphasis on supplying packaged products to programmers, and as a result, says O’Grady, Micro Focus products can become ‘strategic’ to an organisation, without higher management being fully aware of its scale of usage. In normal circumstances this is no handicap at all, but it has a serious side when data processing managers begin to look at how they should move to a client-server set up. The Micro Focus sales pitch is that its tools are ideal for the job, and indeed enable existing staff to begin writing client-server applications with minimal re-training. This message is still escaping the decision-makers at its customer companies, and one of O’Grady’s first tasks is to try to remedy this. His other aim is to improve the communication between the development and the sales teams – the sales force needs to know what is going on in the labs, the labs need to know what the customers want. Obvious really, but O’Grady says he is the man to focus discussion between the two departments. He says the chief executive position is not a short-term ‘Mr Fixit’ post: he believes the move from the four-man management committee to single chief executive is likely to stay and that it is the next step in the evolution of the company.
