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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 ...