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ETBC, Edinburgh – as successful as we expected it to be!


Well done, BITUG committee! Edinburgh, Scotland didn’t disappoint and the level of participation was tremendous with all keynote sessions very well attended …




We left for Edinburgh, Scotland, as planned. We had dinner at the airport, caught a flight to London where we enjoyed lunch at Euston Station before taking the train to Edinburgh. All rather straight forward with the only hitch being that we should have caught the train from Kings Cross as our Virgin “express” stopped almost everywhere on its swing through the west of England and we arrived at our hotel some six hours later. Saw plenty of green hills and lots of sheep, mind you, and the weather was way warmer than we had anticipated. Yes, last Wednesday Scotland enjoyed warmer days than residents in Spain and even LA experienced.

There will be much more coverage of the social side of the event and the experiences we enjoyed in the company of other attendees will be covered in an upcoming post to our social blog, Buckle-Up, but suffice to say, Margo and I enjoyed the time in Edinburgh. As an aside our first trip to Edinburgh and to this same Sheraton Hotel was back in the spring of 1999. It was the time when there was a Spring European ITUG event each year and waiting for a lift to take Margo and me down to the exhibit hall, we met Robin Gilchrist and Tony Bond – Robin was then ITUG Chair and Tony was the Vice Chair. Little did I know that this brief encounter would be life changing after a fashion, as subsequent conversations with Tony led me to run for a director’s position on the 2000 ITUG board!  

I mention this in passing not only because of the impact it had on many decisions I made in the years that followed but as I took to the stage for my own presentation, I looked out at Yogesh Teli and Margo Holen who both joined the ITUG board at different times and the thought I had was that well, we almost had a quorum so what should we be discussing this time around? I have always enjoyed the company of Yogesh and we travelled the world together for a time catching up with each other in South Africa, Singapore, Australia and yes, the U.S. Yogesh immediately preceded me as the ITUG Chairman (in 2003) and it was being his Vice Chair where I learnt so much about what to expect as an ITUG Chair. So Edinburgh holds fond memories for me and seeing Yogesh and Margo seated in the front made me feel quite at home as I began my presentation.

Last year I thought the turn out for the GTUG hosted pan-European event in Leipzig was outstanding but seeing 230 plus folks make the journey to Edinburgh impressed me just as much! To the BITUG committee, I tip my hat as they did a wonderful job in making this event work the way it did – from a traditional beer bust to kick off the event Monday night to the gala evening out at the Hub alongside Edinburgh’s famous castle to where a program was created that easily blended the news from HPE and the NonStop team with numerous customer and vendor presentations there were plenty of informative sessions to choose from. After polling just a handful of the exhibits, the vendors I spoke to were somewhat exuberant when it came to relating the much-improved traffic flow to their stations than previously experienced.

As Tim Dunne of NTI said, “We had major financial institutions stopping almost constantly by and asking us about how we can address their business needs. It was hard not to be impressed with just how many customers had turned up for this event.” OmniPayments’ Craig Lawrance added, “I have had better conversations this year than in any other year that are already leading to more opportunities than ever before!” With the BITUG Chair being TCM’s Collin Yates, the TCM table was always busy as was that of ETI where I had a tough time getting the attention of ETI COO, Sylvain Tétreault. Once again and somewhat predictably, put the coffee and then the lunchtime food in the middle of the vendors’ stands and everyone is happy!

I guess by now everyone has heard the news that the end of sales of Itanium systems will now be coming forward for everyone in EMEA – rather than ending July, 2020 they will end in January 2020. The reason for the change was pretty obvious, according to NonStop Enterprise Division boss, Neil Davis, “It’s ServerNet and the lack of availability of ServerNet related hardware,” that has influenced this decision. And perhaps, after talking to NonStop customer and vendors, this is a moot point as migrations to NonStop X have really begun in earnest of late and that is a very encouraging sign for the NonStop community as a whole. Initially there had been some pushback by the NonStop solutions vendors but HPE has done a terrific job in getting resolutions to NonStop customers’ potential issues to do with migrations.

As for the question of whether or not one vendor or the other was going to migrate or even an issue about the NonStop team supporting mission-critical middleware many NonStop users depended upon, today we know BASE24 will work as will Lusis, even as we have seen Oracle support for GoldenGate extended to include NonStop X. Issues surrounding support of IBM’s MQ are being addressed and as for the NonStop SNA and X.25 products, resolution has arrived. If you depend on SNA or X25 and have relied upon a SNAX or X25AM product, then going forward NonStop has elected to add the Infrasoft’s uLinga product to the HPE NonStop price book.

In a deal worked out with comforte, the sales partner of Infrasoft responsible for sales and support of uLinga, the NonStop team has made a somewhat momentous decision. Both Margo and I were heavily involved in SNAX and then later ICE that has seen us today committed to the success of uLinga and while it took almost a decade to achieve, we always knew there were better solutions available today than the legacy SNAX and ICE products. With uLinga you will be getting a lot more than just a replacement for either SNA or X.25 product offerings but access to features that better integrate NonStop TS/MP applications with both CICS and IMS where there isn’t anything in between but pure IP!

However, these updates were really only a starting point for the event in Edinburgh. ETBC was full of announcements as one after the other vendors talked up their plans for virtualized NonStop, consumption-based pricing and for many, their support of NSaaS – yes, NonStop-as-a-Service.  There are many product offerings from the NonStop community that lend themselves to being accessed out of a cloud, whether it’s a public cloud or more likely than not, a vendor supported private cloud (and there are a number of NonStop vendors well advanced in rolling out their own global clouds all based on NonStop – again, OmniPayments and NTI being two that come to mind immediately), so be prepared to find a number of new and exciting ways to consume your favorite product.

Key candidates? It you are after monitoring of you system and application then I suspect there will be cloud offerings. If your need is for real time analytics to be performed on select data then that too will likely be supported out of a cloud. And what of data replication, file movement and distribution, and yes, products that ease your transformation to hybrid IT? For many of the products I can think of there is almost an equal number of ways accessing them so running these from out of a cloud could easily apply. When you consider that today, NonStop has become a collection of VMs (versus real hardware machines), then the possibilities will be endless and it’s really all confirmation that NonStop is modern and more than an appropriate choice for any business looking at the bigger picture of digital transformation.

If events like ETBC tell us anything at all then it is that HPE continues to invest in NonStop and that NonStop is increasingly turning to its partners. Indeed, as IT comes to terms with Digital Transformation and the world of Hybrid IT – it’s becoming less about partnerships and more about ecosystems. Winning vendors are building out ecosystems that include many vendors who in turn are cooperating with other vendors. Point is bigger vendors will be unfolding umbrellas under which you will find numerous vendors all working towards the same goal – to provide better customer experiences, whether those customers are end users, operators, data scientists and more.

The signs are already there telling us that vendors are talking to vendors even as HPE NonStop is providing a helping hand all of which is to say – success with the core NonStop business as in evidence with the data provided by HPE’s Neil Davis is proving more than enough incentive for vendors to begin partnering-up to create their own ecosystems beneficial to us all!  

This year’s ETBC was a success even as NonStop is beginning to enjoy success in its own right. There will be a lot more events held in the coming months none bigger perhaps than HPE Discover where there is always something said about NonStop but for now, it’s good to be able to reflect on all that we heard in Edinburgh. As for next year all the signs are pointing to a big event again, but this time in Berlin, Germany. Until then, all we can add is our congratulation and thanks to the BITUG committee for putting on one heck of a show! Well done, team!

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