By Richard Bishop
Vivit Board President

As the year draws to a close, it seems appropriate to look back on a year of change in both Vivit and Micro Focus. Throughout 2018, Micro Focus has continued to work on the merger with the former HPE software division and admitted that the merger was taking longer than anticipated. As with all mergers, there have been staff changes and Vivit has had to build relationships with new faces at Micro Focus. These relationships are now growing and we’re looking forward to working more closely with Micro Focus in 2019.

Through 2018 we have experimented with a series of SIG Talks, these represented a change from our usual hour-long webinars by giving multiple speakers a chance to share their knowledge, in 15-minute slots describing their “real world” experiences with Micro Focus software, sharing best practice advice and demonstrating best practice. If you missed the SIG Talks in 2018, recordings can be viewed on our website.

Major topics at conferences and our user meetings this year have included Application Delivery, Security, IT Ops and GDPR. In 2019 we expect to hear more about continuous integration and deployment, IoT testing and monitoring as well as increased adoption of AI in platform monitoring and testing. Mobile test automation and device monitoring appears to be of interest to our members so we’re likely to arrange sessions to cover these topics. If you have any topics that you’d like us to cover, please get in touch and let us know.

As well as hosting SIG Talks and webinars, we’ve attended numerous conferences and summits with Micro Focus. These are great opportunities for us to meet our members and other software users. Vivit leaders are regularly invited to talk at these events and in the last 12 months we’ve spoken at TEDx, Micro Focus Government Summits, ADM and ITOM events in the US and Europe as well as at Micro Focus Universe. We’re already working on plans to get involved in similar events next year. If you’re running or attending a Micro Focus event next year, please let us know so that we can share details with our other members.

Please let us know if you hear of an interesting concept for events, we’re contemplating podcasts, lightning talks as well as other ways of engaging with our membership and we’d love to hear of other ways to increase member involvement in our community.

Best wishes for the festive period and 2019 from Vivit!