Micro Focus Plc says it has ‘streamlined’ its structure, which of course meant job losses, 60 in all, taking the head-count to around 625. The ageing Newbury, Berkshire Coboller, which has its US base in Palo Alto, is these days concentrating on the Year 2000 problem, mainframe applications offloading and enterprise client-server systems. Last year the company decided to turn itself into a Web-based company, but that too has now been kind of honed, as Peter Katz, general manager for the Year 2000 and the offloading businesses, put it. He said it’s more of a Web-enabling effort a la Microsoft Corp, such as displaying business forms in HTML created with a Cobol compiler. But at least the company is now performing sufficiently well that pay increases have been re-introduced; they went on hold after last year’s ugly figures.
