Micro Focus
More info
- Released
- 1976–2023
- Type
- Software company
- Successor
- OpenText
British company that started by putting COBOL on microcomputers and ended up as a retirement home for other people's software.
Founded in 1976, Micro Focus made its name with COBOL compilers for personal computers, letting programmers develop mainframe code at their desks. That became the core of the business: tools to run, maintain and migrate COBOL systems that nobody dared rewrite.
From the 2010s it grew mostly by buying mature software companies. In 2014 it acquired the Attachmate Group, and with it Novell and SUSE; SUSE was sold on to EQT in 2019. In 2017 it merged with HPE's software business, a deal followed by years of shrinking revenue. Canada's OpenText bought what was left in 2023. Critics called the strategy a nursing home for legacy software, which was not entirely unfair.