Real Time View

“You are what you read,” so read a headline of a column in Fortune magazine – but to many in the NonStop community, what we read about NonStop may not be all that appealing to us. But should we be fearful?  At this time of year you more or less have to prepare yourself for gifts family  will give you even if past experiences suggest not to be too surprised by what finds its way under the tree. However, this year, one of the more imaginative gifts I received was an apron to wear while I grill. Or pull corks from a bottle. The message was hard to miss, “Bites, Bytes & Blogs. I deliver.” Yes, I’m very much into bites, bytes and blogs. Two years ago Margo and I made the trip to Denver and we repeated the journey once again. Even stayed overnight in the same quirky hotel and took time to walk the city streets to check out the changes – none bigger than the completion of the fully refurbished Denver Union Station. While more complete observations on the transformation of...

It’s so easy to become too pragmatic and to ignore the progress that comes with the passing of a year – but this year, the journey for NonStop has taken us all down a new path. NonStop as a software offering and solutions vendors are welcoming the transformation!   This time last year I wrote of how I was kicking back and taking it a little easier and I wish I could write something similar now. There are but a few days to go and I am engaged in lively exchanges with a number of my clients as each of them looks to the New Year with a degree of renewed energy that I did not see being so high in quite a few years. But it’s hard to miss the holiday season with chorales singing outside crowded shopping malls and there’s still my own list of gifts that needs to be checked off even as the snow continues to fall along the Colorado front ranges. Even so, there’s still evenings when I can cook outside and I never miss an opportunity to fire up the grill! One of the true benefits of bein...

Following the interviews and discussions that took place during the 2015 NonStop Technical Boot Camp it was time to follow-up with those working more closely on the products featured in keynote presentations. And the storyline that develops here takes it cue from those discussions … With the arrival of winter entering our garage is tinged with a degree of sadness with wires snaking around cars as they stand connected to battery charges. Not for the icy roads of Colorado are these rear-wheel drive sports cars and while we continue to transition to more suitable vehicles for our location, I cannot help but anticipate sunny days ahead even as I save away a few pennies for new tires on our track-focused sports car. In any highly competitive car race, where there’s barely any separation between competing drivers, there’s little chance any driver will be able to hold the perfect line around the course. There’s simply too many competing for too few feet of track and every turn a circ...

As we focus on transformation of our data centers and consider hybrid computers along with clouds, once we are passed implementation then are we needed any longer? Will the prospect of driverless cars lead to unattended data centers and is this necessarily a bad thing?   The turkey has been demolished along with all the trimmings and now it’s time to set about erecting the Christmas tree – or whatever it is that anchors your celebration at this time of year. Thanksgiving, Christmas and then the celebration of the New Year are always “cause for celebration” in our household. Over the past couple of years we have elected to escape the Colorado winter landscape in preference of something a little warmer but, with a growing tribe of grandchildren, all thoughts of escaping have been tabled for this year. However, as I take the time to shake a martini, there’s still much that occupies my mind following the 2015 NonStop Technical Boot Camp even as I post to other blog sites and giv...

There’s very little need to introduce this post as the previous post signaled that this would follow – and yes, it’s all about the strategy and vision for NonStop as presented by HPE executives during the 2015 NonStop Technical Boot Camp. Last year, at the 2014 NonStop Technical Boot Camp, I wrapped up my presentation on big data and its importance to the NonStop community by quoting race car driver, Rick Mears, when he said “To finish first, you first must finish!” I followed that reference with one of my own, to leverage big data, you first must participate. In other words, before you consider the potential value proposition from what big data has to offer, you need to take a couple of baby steps forward and try integrating with big data. Now it’s a year later and this message remains as true today as it did back then. But here’s a new variation on that original remark by Rick Mears, to profit from business, the business must first profit. It’s a hard lesson the marketplace ...

How do the words of a Jimmy Buffett song, a car magazine’s report of the Viper and the message from Martin Fink, EVP and CTO, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, “Fix it, or Exit” have in common? Only at the NonStop Technical Boot Camp would you make such a connection …  Sometimes you just know that, at a time when you least expect it, your travels take a detour. Now, having said that, and with winter beginning to make its presence felt, getting hit with an icy, wintery blast shouldn’t have come as a surprise. But hit us rather hard, it did! In the opening stanzas of the song, Jamaica Mistaica, by Jimmy Buffett there’s a couple of lines that I find appropriate at this time of year: But every now and then, the dragons come to call Just when you least expect it you'll be dogin' cannon balls Having successfully traversed the Sierras and made the passage through Nevada and Utah to pull up the mountains and into Wyoming, well sure enough, we were dodging snowballs as Inters...

“We need to be frugal with how we apply both capital and engineering resources. Given the reality that we’ve got many market segments that today remain very obvious gaps in our portfolio, we need to address those,” important for the NonStop community, who of us would have guessed made this observation? There are many parallels today between IT and other industries. The novelty of IT being different from any other business has long gone as the CEOs all share similar interests – a responsibility to provide a degree of predictability along with improved returns to each stakeholder. When I first entered IT as a “cadet” – apprenticed, as it were, to a large steelworks to learn the trade of computer programming – the internal EDP department (as it was called), was separate from the rest of the company with the understanding that there was something special about those technicians overseeing data processing. But no more – as technology is in the driver’s seat for every business; just ...

Welcome to the “Idea Economy” and here’s a big idea! NonStop helps the enterprise with the transition even as the NonStop community makes the preparations for greater participation …    This week it was all about getting ready for the arrival of winter. If you live in America and you have seen the weather maps you will know that, starting Wednesday of last week, snow has been falling across the continental divide with some places, such as Wolf Creek Pass, getting more than 20” plus of snow in one 24 hours period. If you are into skiing, and I am sure many of you are, the resorts are capitalizing on the ground chilling and snow making machines are working around the clock. Just a week ago business took us to Beaver Creek where we spent the night – and there wasn’t a snowflake in sight, as the picture of Margo here highlights. But almost as if right on cue, one week later there’s the first blanket of snow clearly visible wrapping itself around the nearby peaks. Win...