Welcome to the blog space for Micro Focus World. During the next few months, I will be using this space to discuss the latest developments related to Application Modernization.

My name is Andy Sinclair, I’m a Senior Product Director in the Micro Focus Product Management team, responsible for the products that support our Application Modernization solution.

This solution area focuses on helping organizations that are running mission critical applications on mainframe or proprietary mid range systems, exploit and reuse these assets to deliver more value to the business. This is very topical as more and more organizations tighten purse strings in today’s increasingly volatile economic climate.

Over the coming weeks and months I will be reaching out to our existing and prospective customers interested in understanding how mainframe development teams can help their organizations respond to the new opportunities and challenges that face every business or government body today – that’s what we mean by the overall conference theme of Business 2.0!

Within the Application Modernization track we will look at how to modernize applications on the mainframe more efficiently and explore why more and more organizations are deriving business benefit from running discrete mainframe workload on alternative Linux, UNIX, Windows servers or zLinux partitions. We will also look at how existing mainframe applications can and should exploit Web 2.0 to support the conference sub themes of “On the Web” and “On the Move” and last, but not least, we will explore how Cloud computing is evolving and whether existing mainframe applications can be run “In the Cloud” to deliver business advantage.

We hope you will find these themes not just relevant but exciting. With this in mind, I will be soliciting your thoughts, ideas and feedback on our plans and themes for the conference to ensure that every attendee of Micro Focus World leaves armed with the information they feel can help instigate change that helps “move the dial” in a positive direction.

Hence, this blog space. It’s been set up to enable interaction, not just with myself but with other Micro Focus customers who really care about what topics should be covered to deliver the greatest possible value. Any ideas are welcome until we freeze the agenda, so let’s get blogging.