Skip to main content

Another weekend and another European escapade!


Has a renewed sense of urgency taken hold inside HPE that is (positively) influencing the HPE NonStop team? Is HPE looking like a start-up, once again? Whatever you call it, a lot of positive news is coming from both of them and it's not just their new digs …



For a company with staff that doesn’t fly all that often, the Pyalla Technologies team – that’s Margo and me – will be heading to the airport late Saturday to begin our journey to Edinburgh, Scotland. Already this year we have flown back from Australia in January before escaping to Munich, Germany, in March for a couple of adult refreshments together with a couple of client meetings. Turns out this return trip to Europe in May, for the European (NonStop) Technical Boot Camp (ETBC) will be followed with a visit to HPE Discover in June. We have even managed to squeeze in one more trip to participate in N2TUG on June 27.

It also turns out that there is a significant uptick of interest in Regional User Group (RUG) events, no matter where they are being held and we want to see this one for ourselves. As for the reason, it’s not just about checking out the attendance but where else can you hear about product investments being made by HPE in NonStop? A recent conversation with a colleague of mine reminded me of one key ingredient that is making RUG events popular – yes, it’s the only place to hear the latest news about NonStop. Forget social media, he suggested much to my chagrin, you just have to make your way to the nearest RUG event to fully understand all that is taking place with the NonStop product line.

While I am expecting to be surprised, perhaps more than once, during this year’s ETBC event even as I think I have a good understanding of what priorities NonStop development has set for itself, there is bound to be something new announced. Just as we have heard much about how NonStop developers are improving the value proposition of NonStop they clearly haven’t eased up on developing new features. The probability that NonStop will attract more customers and development partners is high and quite honestly, it hasn’t been business as normal inside HPE for some time.

Ever since HPE CEO Antonio Neri ascended to the leadership role, he has brought attention to where HPE is headed and it’s mostly about providing realizable value up and down the HPE product line. With his Next initiative (to re-architect the company), Neri has been extremely vocal, stating that "At the core of this is not just cost savings. It is all about simplification, innovation and execution."

So, is HPE looking more and more like a start-up? With as much talk as there is of late about innovation, and the need to innovate “at the speed of business” is HPE becoming an entirely new company? Has the recent move to new “digs” in San Jose all part of a plan to refashion HPE to become more nimble? The essence of Neri's Next transformation, according to a May 22, 2018 update in CRN, HPE CEO Neri: Next Initiative Is The Ultimate 'Competitive Advantage' In Fast-Moving Market, “is a return to an ‘innovators at heart culture.’ HPE has acquired assets and innovated around those core competencies in a way that gives the company a deeper and wider story. It is not piece parts.”

One of the key attributes that distinguishes a start-up from more established enterprises simply pursuing business as usual is the observable sense of urgency. The need to get things done with products introduced into the marketplace quickly! According to a McKinsey & Company strategy paper published in May of 2019
How to move fast: Innovation at speed and scale, “The biggest thing that makes most start-ups move really quickly is urgency. They are running on the amount of capital and the amount of funding they have at any given moment. And if they cannot get to a next milestone, whether that is actually getting to enough sales to start self-sustaining the enterprise or get to a next milestone with a venture funder, they’re done.”

Ouch! Clearly, HPE is not quite as pressed to succeed as today’s start-ups when it comes to capital. Or, are they?

When you look at the NonStop organization today it is a lot smaller than at any other time in its history. And yet we have all seen x86, InfiniBand and RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) followed by Oracle compatibility (for NS SQL), virtualized NonStop, capacity on demand and much more – a sense of urgency? You had better believe it! HPE talks a lot about the core and the edge but how many of us have truly caught the message from HPE of late.

"The digital transformation really starts at the edge. Sixty-plus percent of the data is generated at the edge. Two years from now, we are going to have twice the amount of data we generated in human history,” HPE told CRN reporter, Steven Burke, last year. “Analytics and AI are required at the edge. The compute capacity at the edge in the form of cloud architecture is going to be a significant opportunity for us. That is why I am very bullish about the future of HPE."

You may not view HPE as being in start-up mode just as you may not be thinking of NonStop being new to the market. However, there is no denying that NonStop and indeed HPE has stepped up the pace of innovation. At one point, McKinsey and Company partner Stacey Haas notes in this month’s strategy paper how, “It’s clear the many layers that larger companies have can blur the focus and urgency around decision making, and even make accountability diffuse.” However, under Neri this doesn’t seem to be the case and to that point; let’s just take note that HPE today is “only” a $30+billion company – can we even consider HPE as being big by IT industry standards?

In other words, this appearance of HPE as being in start-up mode and indeed, as is the NonStop group, is clearly a reflection of a rush to innovate together with a rush to get to the next milestone. And the milestones just keep on coming. And where is the NonStop community getting to hear about all of this? The “inside skinny” is one of the true benefits from attending RUG events and with the European event in Edinburgh – the ETBC, hosted by BITUG – about to take place, there is an expectation that we haven’t heard about all the plans for NonStop. There is more news coming so I am led to believe.

“The compute capacity at the edge in the form of cloud architecture,” intrigues me as it is generating renewed interest within many of the NonStop vendors with whom I work. From my perspective, when it comes to the enterprise this is a reference to private clouds more so than public clouds. It’s where transactions take place and it will be where “analytics and AI are required.” Sounds a lot like shortly we will see virtualized NonStop (vNS) being put to good use. Perhaps there will even be members of the NonStop vendor community stepping up with utilities and tools to help make this happen.

The NonStop team has a lot of projects that they categorize as being “under investigation.” Take vNS on HPE Synergy, for instance, as this is something that continues to intrigue me as well even as I have evangelized for some time that this looks to be taking a step in the right direction. Then there is all the effort being made to bring even more open source to NonStop which is a meaningful way to reinforce the overall open message of NonStop.

On the subject of open and just to reinforce the importance of RUG events, if you haven’t seen the promotion for the upcoming June RUG event, N2TUG then you may have missed reading about the keynote presentation by HPE’s Meg Watson of the ATC, who will be sharing how “industry-standard cross-platform tools, such as Jenkins, Git, Eclipse, and Ansible can be leveraged by your organization to help you meet the quickening demands of your business without missing a beat!”

Once again this, and much more, for most of us will only ever be explained in detail at a RUG event – getting the picture now? If you follow LinkedIn or Twitter you may get a glimpse of the urgency evident in HPE’s programs even if you don’t see specific references to NonStop. However, to hear more about the specifics you just have to make it to your local RUG events – and I cannot stress too much the importance of doing so!

HPE is moving fast and is innovating at the speed of business but you will likely miss hearing about any of this if you aren’t attending pivotal events and even if it means catching a plane, being present for any RUG event is certainly going to help you to better understand where NonStop is headed.

NonStop, whether traditional systems, virtualized systems on HPE hardware or on your own hardware or within your own private cloud – you now have options. And whether you see the future of NonStop remaining in the core or gravitating to the edge, the most important thing to remember is no matter the decisions you may make, the big news is that yes, the news about the future of NonStop is simply that for NonStop, there is a future!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

If it’s June then it’s time for HPE Discover 2021.

  For the NonStop community there has always been an annual event that proved hard to resist; with changing times these events are virtual – but can we anticipate change down the road? Just recently Margo and I chose to return home via US Highway 129. It may not ring any bells, but for those who prefer to call it the Tail of the Dragon – 318 curves in 11 miles – it represents the epitome of mountain excitement. For Margo and me, having now driven the tail in both directions, driving hard through all these turns never gets old. Business took us to Florida for an extended week of meetings that were mostly conversations. Not everything went to plan and we didn’t get to see some folks, but just to have an opportunity to hit the road and meet in person certainly made the 4,500 miles excursion worthwhile. The mere fact that we made touring in a roadster work for us and we were comfortable in doing so, well, that was a real trick with a car better suited to day trips. This is all just a p

Three more wishes coming soon – the path ahead for NonStop.

So, another three years have passed by and I find myself writing a preview of what I will likely focus on in eighteen months’ time – my next three wishes for NonStop! It wouldn’t be fair on my family if I said 2019 had been a routine year for Pyalla Technologies. It started with the return flight from Sydney, Australia, and continued with three separate trips to Europe plus a lengthy road trip to Las Vegas for HPE Discover 2019 combined with stops in southern California and participation in N2TUG back in Texas. The miles have added up but all the while even as the adventurous life continued to unfold, there was so much news coming out of HPE that scarcely a day passed without a discussion or two over what it all means. Margo and I have our roots firmly anchored in NonStop, dating back to Tandem Computers where Margo had risen through the development organization all the way to the COO role under the stewardship of Bill Heil when Bill headed the NonStop Software BU. As for me

ACI Strategy - it's all about choice!

I have just returned from spending a few days in Omaha attending the annual ACE Focus meeting. These two day meetings provide more in-depth technical coverage than is usually found at the regular ACI user events, and ACI customers have been coming for more than a decade to hear the messages directly from company executives. The picture I have included here is of the venue of the Wednesday night social event – a reception held at a local sports bar called the ICEHOUSE. And I found this extremely ironic as my own involvement with ACI came through my association with the ICE product. For most of the ‘90s, ACI had been the global distributor for ICE and then, as we began the new millennium, ACI purchased Insession, creating a separate business unit that it named Insession Technologies. For nearly six years, as part of ACI it enjoyed a successful partnership with the NonStop community and had provided a number of solutions in communications, web services, and security. But the decision in l