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Among IT professionals, when discussions turn to hybrids, it’s not just hybrid clouds being talked about but hybrid systems and for the NonStop community, this includes hybrids featuring the latest NonStop X systems … I recently passed a car with a bumper sticker: “Yes, it’s a hybrid, it burns both gas & rubber!” One’s perspective on the environment may differ from others’, and sometimes quite radically, but even so, there’s a sense that whatever interests us and wherever our pursuits take us, if we can leave the environment better off, then that is to the benefit of us all. Saying anything more on this matter however, as the majority of the U.S. shivers under the impact of a severe and lengthy winter deep freeze, may prove controversial (and it has nothing to do with the rest of this post), but even so, the cold has many of us wondering where global warming has gone. Living on Colorado I have become a big fan of natural gas – a sentiment I shared with others when I lived...

A trip to Las Vegas is a reminder than not all big projects succeed and the story of failed big projects isn’t limited to construction as experienced IT professionals will quickly point out – but the issue today is whether small has become the new big! This week has me back in Las Vegas for another event, the ATM Industry Association (ATMIA) US Conference, 2015. Under the overall banner of enhancing the consumer’s self-service experience, it has attracted the usual crowd of ATM vendors, payments solutions providers as well as all the service providers on the periphery of the ATM ecosystem. Among the sponsors are some familiar names, and it’s good to see a healthy representation from the NonStop community, and conversations started as soon as I left the registration desk. However, it was the familiar sites of the Las Vegas skyline that really caught my attention this week. If you recall the last post to this blog, that of February 6, 2015 , Of hubs and spokes; of niches, clouds...

The topic of NonStop being deployed as a hub has been a consideration for decades with several initiatives kicked off during that time. But with the arrival of NonStop, will an intelligent price-competitive hub featuring NonStop X make a difference and prove valuable to users? In the post of February 3, 2015, to Buckle-Up-Travel (my social blog), In truth, we are but travelers … , I comment on how I have become a traveler in the sense that what’s immediately beyond the horizon is important to me. Not the destination, nor the road itself, but rather the act of moving, of travelling, as I said, that really motivates me and keeps me well-grounded in what’s happening in the world outside my office. I don’t always make the right decisions about the form of transportation I use, but so long as it gets me pointed in the general direction I want to go, it’s all good! This reminds me of the quote from 1951 Alice in Wonderland animated movie when Alice said: “I give myself very good advic...