Micro Focus introduces new cloud management platform, HCMX

Micro Focus has announced the release of Hybrid Cloud Management X (HCMX), the industry’s first cloud-native, multi-tenant cloud management platform that can run in the public cloud or on-premises.

As companies deliver on digital transformation (DX) strategies, Micro Focus HCMX provides cloud service consumption in a single view with analytics-based recommendations for discount management, enabling customers to easily achieve the benefits of speed, scale, agility and cost reduction while leveraging existing on-premises investments.

“The complexity of multiple tools and catalogues used to create a service, provision and manage its lifecycle and service costs slows down DX efforts and drives up costs,” said Tom Goguen, Micro Focus Chief Product Officer.

“With HCMX you can simplify the user experience for developers and business users so that it is entirely intuitive, while presenting one view of service consumption for single, multi-cloud, and on-premises environments.”

Key enhancements and capabilities of Micro Focus HCMX include:

A unified portal and catalogue for all services: Employees can easily find, request and consume information and enterprise services, as HCMX is now built on the same architecture as Micro Focus SMAX, sharing services such as natural language processing, smart search and virtual agents.

Smart search and AI-based conversational virtual agent: Improve each user’s experience at a lower cost with more consistency, by providing automated service and guidance to employees, as well as complementing catalogue browsing.

Reusable service designs: Simplify service catalogue maintenance with a single design that automates the fulfillment of service requests via ad-hoc selection of parameters and service options. These can be sophisticated end-to-end services, as it orchestrates across the fulfillment engines of AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, VMware and other applications and infrastructure.

Robust, out-of-the-box orchestration: Minimise the workload on IT teams by automating fulfillment processes throughout the lifecycle, based on a large library of out-of-the box workflows.

Dynamic, governance rules: Incorporate policies into a task plan that triggers a variety of automated workflows based on user input, resulting in a dynamically customised cloud service.

“Micro Focus Hybrid Cloud Management has been extended to provide end-to-end service fulfillment and governance across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, including day 2 operation actions,” said William Fellows, Research Director, 451 Research, part of S&P Global Market Intelligence. “It addresses public cloud overspending, slow internal resource delivery, the complexity of building and deploying hybrid IT, and the management of siloed tools.”

Micro Focus HCMX allows users to deploy and manage cloud resources on AWS, Azure, Google Cloud or VMware from a single, aggregated service catalogue. With its entirely codeless configuration, customizable offerings and multi-tenant managed service provider (MSP) support, HCMX provides cloud management with shorter provisioning times across private cloud, public cloud and on-premises resources, without vendor lock-in.

“A recent study by IDC META states that public cloud spending in the Middle East will increase to $2.8bn this year,” explained Gonzalo Usandizaga, vice president and general manager for Emerging and Growth Markets at Micro Focus. “As businesses in the region are offered more choice, cloud environments are becoming increasingly complex. With Micro Focus HCMX we support our customers in their transition, providing them the benefits of automation, limitless scalability, optimisation and more. Hence we aim to ensure our customers maintain resilient business continuity while saving costs.”

“With Micro Focus’ HCMX, we have a unique solution for extending enterprise service management (ESM) with cloud management and aggregated service catalogues from public cloud providers,” said Mac Bullock, the VP of Sales and Marketing at Whitlock. “Cloud overspending is an issue for many companies and HCMX gives our customers the visibility of all costs in a single view, helping them optimise their spending while better serving business demand.”

As digital transformation continues to drive strategic business change, Micro Focus HCMX is one of the ways Micro Focus helps customers leverage their existing on-premises investments and lower the total cost of ownership for IT. HCMX is available now with future updates expected to be delivered quarterly.