By Mark Ford
Vivit Board Director/Community Chair
Last month, I attended the Micro Focus ADM Summit in Dallas as the Vivit representative at the Communities booth along with Micro Focus blog editor/community manager, Kim Lock. Vivit was featured as one of three customer community offerings for Micro Focus with Blogs/Forums and TechBeacon rounding out the trio. I spent most of my time at the Communities booth meeting and talking to fellow and new Vivit members and leaders. As a customer, I’m a big fan of the Micro Focus ADM Forums and working with Kim who manages those forums brought greater insight to me and many other Vivit members who stopped by the booth. If you haven’t checked them out lately, please do. They are a great source for timely answers to your software questions:
“Our focus is on the customer” was the message heard several times throughout the ADM Summit from Micro Focus Senior VP and General Manager, Raffi Margaliot. It was present in the CABs, highlighted in the keynotes and discussed at the Communities booth and part of the discussions I had with Micro Focus employees. All were eager to lend an ear to listen to what I as a customer was looking for with Micro Focus software. It was also great to reaffirm that Vivit is well known in many Micro Focus circles and that we are appreciated for our efforts of education, advocacy, and community. Of course there was also plenty of talk about Octane, Stormrunner, and Deployment Automation in addition to roadmaps, innovation, enterprise scalability, and accelerating application delivery. It was a jam-packed couple of days spent focusing on all things ADM (Application Delivery Management).
The pace of the ADM Summit was very different from HPE Discover conferences I’ve attended the past several years, but in a good way. On one hand, I missed the excitement and energy that came from attending a large conference but on the other hand, my targeted experience was more fruitful business wise. I was able to strike up conversations with others at breakfast and lunch on topics directly relevant to my needs. It wasn’t hard to find others using Micro Focus ALM for example.
I was also pleased to have the opportunity to speak one-on-one with Raffi. He’s an amazingly busy guy but very approachable and a fan of Vivit. He’s been around quality, testing, and application delivery software since his Mercury Interactive days so he’s a familiar face to many ADM customers. Raffi is a fan of these targeted summits, so I wouldn’t be surprised if we see this trend continue every six months or so. Dallas is a Micro Focus hub city, so we could also expect to see more of these in the Dallas area. We talked about how Vivit is well positioned to provide Micro Focus with customer stories on Octane and Stormrunner. Customers find a lot of value hearing how other customers use the software. He would like Vivit to aggregate customer feedback and share it quarterly with their head of customer success to help drive product direction. What do you think about Vivit conducting our own quarterly SIG CABs?
The ADM Summit was a great opportunity to learn more about the new Micro Focus, see ADM product directions, deep dive in a workshop, and talk to a lot of ADM customers. If you have an opportunity to attend an upcoming Micro Focus Summit, I would encourage you to do so.
