Pointnext;
Greenlake; Intelligent Edge; OneSphere; OneView; Synergy; NonStop – yes, it was
all covered at HPE Discover 2019 and cloudless has substance!
There
was time enough to think back on all that was covered at HPE Discover, 2019.
One of the side benefits in driving to big-tent marketing events like this is
that the trip back will be one that will have you thinking no matter the
distances covered. In our case, it was a matter of traversing deserts and
mountains, not forgetting the many rivers in full flood following a really snowy
winter. A winter, mind you, that continued to dump snow on us poor Coloradans
right up to the last week of May. There’s even the possibility that there will
be ski runs open for the Fourth of July festivities.
Following HPE Discover on this occasion there was little time to dwell on what was revealed as a trip to Grapevine, Texas, was required as the N2TUG Regional User Group (RUG) meeting took place a matter of just a couple of days later. No matter what you might think about HPE Discover and its place on the NonStop calendar, for those who work with NonStop as their main application platform, it really is a must see event, if for no other reason that seeing NonStop framed within the context of all of HPE’s product roadmaps.
This year, there was strong support for both the digital core and the edge. There was even stronger support for the ongoing transformation to Hybrid IT that seems to be on everyone’s to-do list as if traditional IT was simply going to have to get used to there being adjacent private clouds performing much of the traditional heavy-lifting that oftentimes overwhelmed even the biggest general-purpose computer. Interestingly enough, the concept of there being a general-purpose computer (including mainframes) rarely gets discussed any more, as though it is now a given among IT professionals that it takes an ecosystem of heterogeneous systems to run any enterprise today.
Takes you back to those bad days, doesn’t it, when we all thought running best-of-breed was the way to go. But no longer – it’s all about composition and about assigning the right workloads to the right resources and being able to remap on the fly as demands dictate. It’s about virtualization and containerization and –ization this and –ization that, Oh well … and yet, when it comes to HPE following the split and the ascension of Antonio Neri to the top job, it is starting to look more and more like they know what they are doing as they return to profitability and to real growth.
Talking of drives back home and indeed of the possibility of ski weekends yet to come, there wasn’t a single day that was completely sunny and without clouds to be seen from one horizon to the next. Which is simply a way to introduce the topic of Cloudless; when closing his keynote presentation, Neri spoke of Cloudless computing! Were we all taken aback – more than a little surprised and yes, too, more than a little skeptical thinking at the time that this was perhaps just a place holder. A teaser, if you like, for a yet unnamed product about which there wasn’t yet a consensus over what to call the product? Talk about an edgy ending that left the keynote presentation hanging!
No sooner had Neri left the stage than tweets and posts began flying around the internet. Perhaps the best comment being one from a former colleague of mine who suggested Neri perhaps was Clueless. Harsh! But there is actually some substance here and it should be noted by the NonStop community that perhaps Cloudless Computing will involve NonStop. At one point prior to the big reveal of Cloudless, Neri noted how, “Cloud is an experience, not a product” and “at next year’s HPE Discover, we will be revealing the era of Cloudless” computing … As for me, I do think Cloudless is a place-holder and not necessarily a vision or even a solution so it will be interesting to see how this pans out in the coming months.
Cloud is an experience and not a product. It was more than a year ago when on October 26, 2017, Forbes magazine published an article What Is The Customer Experience Cloud? by Blake Morgan, a self-proclaimed Customer Experience Futurist, Author and Keynote Speaker. “The big push now is the experience cloud, which brings together things like customer data, digital experience, and personalization to create an efficient, modern way to monitor and interact with customers,” said Morgan. “By pulling in customer data from multiple sources, including websites, social media, and internal data, the experience cloud creates a comprehensive profile for each customer that employees throughout the organization can access to provide a great experience no matter how they interact with the customer.”
Given how today, Morgan wrote, “Customers don’t care if the person they are talking to works in marketing, sales, or IT — they just want to have a personalized interaction with the brand to build the relationship or have their problems solved … if a company is so siloed that it distracts from the service customers are receiving, customers will take their business to a place where they feel valued and respected … the experience cloud makes omnichannel marketing possible, and it makes it easier for brands to connect with customers everywhere they already are.” So perhaps this cloud experience thing has merit – perhaps it is all about the experience with scant respect for whether it’s a cloud technology or a cloud product or a cloud service?
Following HPE Discover on this occasion there was little time to dwell on what was revealed as a trip to Grapevine, Texas, was required as the N2TUG Regional User Group (RUG) meeting took place a matter of just a couple of days later. No matter what you might think about HPE Discover and its place on the NonStop calendar, for those who work with NonStop as their main application platform, it really is a must see event, if for no other reason that seeing NonStop framed within the context of all of HPE’s product roadmaps.
This year, there was strong support for both the digital core and the edge. There was even stronger support for the ongoing transformation to Hybrid IT that seems to be on everyone’s to-do list as if traditional IT was simply going to have to get used to there being adjacent private clouds performing much of the traditional heavy-lifting that oftentimes overwhelmed even the biggest general-purpose computer. Interestingly enough, the concept of there being a general-purpose computer (including mainframes) rarely gets discussed any more, as though it is now a given among IT professionals that it takes an ecosystem of heterogeneous systems to run any enterprise today.
Takes you back to those bad days, doesn’t it, when we all thought running best-of-breed was the way to go. But no longer – it’s all about composition and about assigning the right workloads to the right resources and being able to remap on the fly as demands dictate. It’s about virtualization and containerization and –ization this and –ization that, Oh well … and yet, when it comes to HPE following the split and the ascension of Antonio Neri to the top job, it is starting to look more and more like they know what they are doing as they return to profitability and to real growth.
Talking of drives back home and indeed of the possibility of ski weekends yet to come, there wasn’t a single day that was completely sunny and without clouds to be seen from one horizon to the next. Which is simply a way to introduce the topic of Cloudless; when closing his keynote presentation, Neri spoke of Cloudless computing! Were we all taken aback – more than a little surprised and yes, too, more than a little skeptical thinking at the time that this was perhaps just a place holder. A teaser, if you like, for a yet unnamed product about which there wasn’t yet a consensus over what to call the product? Talk about an edgy ending that left the keynote presentation hanging!
No sooner had Neri left the stage than tweets and posts began flying around the internet. Perhaps the best comment being one from a former colleague of mine who suggested Neri perhaps was Clueless. Harsh! But there is actually some substance here and it should be noted by the NonStop community that perhaps Cloudless Computing will involve NonStop. At one point prior to the big reveal of Cloudless, Neri noted how, “Cloud is an experience, not a product” and “at next year’s HPE Discover, we will be revealing the era of Cloudless” computing … As for me, I do think Cloudless is a place-holder and not necessarily a vision or even a solution so it will be interesting to see how this pans out in the coming months.
Cloud is an experience and not a product. It was more than a year ago when on October 26, 2017, Forbes magazine published an article What Is The Customer Experience Cloud? by Blake Morgan, a self-proclaimed Customer Experience Futurist, Author and Keynote Speaker. “The big push now is the experience cloud, which brings together things like customer data, digital experience, and personalization to create an efficient, modern way to monitor and interact with customers,” said Morgan. “By pulling in customer data from multiple sources, including websites, social media, and internal data, the experience cloud creates a comprehensive profile for each customer that employees throughout the organization can access to provide a great experience no matter how they interact with the customer.”
Given how today, Morgan wrote, “Customers don’t care if the person they are talking to works in marketing, sales, or IT — they just want to have a personalized interaction with the brand to build the relationship or have their problems solved … if a company is so siloed that it distracts from the service customers are receiving, customers will take their business to a place where they feel valued and respected … the experience cloud makes omnichannel marketing possible, and it makes it easier for brands to connect with customers everywhere they already are.” So perhaps this cloud experience thing has merit – perhaps it is all about the experience with scant respect for whether it’s a cloud technology or a cloud product or a cloud service?
According to Kimball who was present for Neri’s keynote presentation, “IT has to be able to manage this very complex environment simply, via point-and-click deployment and movement of workloads and applications based on data locality. Furthermore, it requires security from the point of data origination to the transformation into actionable intelligence. Lastly, it requires a brokering engine that enables IT to quickly determine where data and apps reside based on any number of factors including cost, governance and sovereignty, regulatory requirements, and more.” and with yet another reference to our siloed world, Kimball closes with “HPE’s strategy is to deliver the tools that enable IT to break down the siloes that exist between clouds.” Cloudless, so it would seem, is not about there being no cloud but rather, a sky empty of everything but yes, you guessed it, the sky. Cloudless!
It is into this brave new world that I predict we will see a new approach to NonStop – the need for fault tolerance isn’t lessened in any way when you realize that data, applications, workloads, compute, and storage will likely reside everywhere. Some of it will continue to be mission critical and need to run 24 x 7 – if you are to have it integrated and managed via “point-and-click deployment” then virtualized NonStop comes to mind very quickly and the prospect of there being a broker directing mission critical workloads to resources that run NonStop well, it’s not too big a stretch at all. NonStop would just as easily accommodate this world as it has easily adjusted to the new world of virtualization.
HPE Discover 2020 should prove interesting to say the least. Perhaps the prediction that Cloudless would be supported by the introduction of new products suggests that the main thrust of HPE’s energy will be around software and with OneSphere continuing to dominate conversations on the exhibition floor this year, I wouldn’t discount at all seeing a raft of new offerings coming from this group. Greenlake, where you will turn to for support of everything-as-a-Service, will play a big part in making sure whatever is developed can be consumed as a service maintaining HPE’s belief in the pay-as-you-go consumption models.
All of which is to say that on our drive home in the company command center, the conversation was lively. But here’s the thing – NonStop is very much in the conversation and having recently proved capable of running on HPE Synergy as well as on the Edgeline EL4000 (neither of which are products, just yet), there’s no limit to where NonStop will show up next. Excited? Again? You just have to be very pleased with how this is all playing out for the NonStop community and if you hadn’t thought about attending HPE Discover 2020 you may very well want to think again about staying away and missing perhaps one of the biggest HPE reveals of all time!
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