At Micro Focus' recent customer engagement session titled, "Testing with Quality Assurance in an Agile Environment", several key senior management personnel share their thoughts on the growth strategy and prospects for Micro Focus in Asia.

David Taylor, President of Asia Pacific & Japan, is upbeat about the growth potential of Micro Focus' business in the region, shares his thoughts. "Obviously China is very, very strong and that's why we're getting great growth in China and in India as well. That's fabulous. Good solid growth." He also commented on the fighting spirit of the Japanese where Micro Focus experienced growth despite the challenges they faced as a nation with the tsunamis and earthquakes.

The proof seems to be in the numbers, with Micro Focus posting an 8.5 percent increase in six-month interim revenues as of October 31, 2011, compared to the same period in 2010.

Taylor attributes the success of Micro Focus in the region to their right entry strategy.

"The approach that we've done is - we've gone in at a (comfortable) level, we've implemented our business plans, we've got the returns that we expected to get, and on the basis of that, we're making further investments," Taylor explained. "So initially we just went into Beijing, set up a team in (there) and now… we're doing the same in Shanghai, but it's all self-funded. So it's not draining on the rest of the company."

Taylor stressed that it is important not to "pull profit out of the business" but to reinvest the profits back in to achieve sustainability

Steven Lee, regional director for Asia, shares his thoughts about the growth potential for the region. "(Our strategy) really depends on which region, (for instance), testing software with the concept of QA (Quality Assurance) has been here in Hong Kong since seven or eight years ago."

Lee further noted that the focus in Hong Kong is with helping their customers to work better in the new Agile environment, in which the testing cycle is now a lot longer and testing has to be performed more frequently.

In comparison, China's testing market is still in its early stages yet Micro Focus is already engaging enterprises that have the foresight to invest in a testing environment to ensure quality. Much of this investment seems to be driven by the Chinese government, which has been taking a more active role in ensuring that enterprises are launching quality applications.

Taylor elaborated on Lee's mention about the Chinese government's involvement and interest in Micro Focus' customer base.

"It's no secret that China is very, very aggressively trying to compete at the IT services sector with (India)," explains Taylor. "As a result of that, they got to ensure that there's quality practices in place in all facets of management of computing environments, as well as from an application development and maintenance perspective, because that's a huge business for (India)… and the government is really, really promoting that. A lot of investment in terms of education and so on that was made in the last five year plan."

Contrary to common belief that companies only explore testing environments when projects hit an obstacle, Jeffrey Findlay, senior consulting manager and solution architect notes that the customers are engaging Micro Focus at a much earlier stage.

"Customers are really coming in much earlier," Findlay explained. "They're recognizing that quality is what they're after and quality starts with good requirements. They have to get their business needs nailed down right up front."

"These enterprises, they understand the importance to link up the business requirement and the testing environment". Lee added. "So this is what we are seeing the customers are putting more investment, to insure that QA is integrated into the whole application lifecycle management."

Micro Focus' work with the financial sector was one area Mr. Taylor particularly highlighted, given the competitiveness of that market. With the focus at banks and insurance companies quickly changing from web banking to providing their customers with mobile based ways to perform financial transactions, new applications need to be written or, alternatively, existing applications need to be enhanced or modified to satisfy these new business requirements.

According to Taylor, what their solutions effectively do is automate the testing of the technology, taking away the "human intervention" and thus reducing or eliminating the room for human error along the way. Taylor, Lee, and Findlay all pride themselves on their claim that when Micro Focus gets brought on board, the end results are good, their customers get to deliver what they need on time and that the end solution does what the customer's business wanted it to do.

Micro Focus is well-prepared for the region's growth and is committed to partner their clients through the process of growing and improving their business.