Somehow Margo and I arrived in London exactly as the
Queen’s Jubilee was in full swing well. Road closures; major thoroughfares
subject to extensive re-routing; Police force out in numbers and yes, there
were even sightings of the Queens Household Cavalry between buildings. All in,
a complete shemozzle on the weekend we arrived. And yet, we couldn’t hide our
enthusiasm for being abroad for the first time since COVID took hold, but as we
scheduled this ourselves we could hardly hold anyone accountable.
The occasion was the BITUG BIG SIG event and we
wouldn’t have missed it for well, anything. Huge thanks go out to the folks at
NTI who made the week in London possible and as for the socializing with the
British NonStop community it is hard to ignore just how important Chapter and
RUG events truly are. In an environment where the information ebb and flow needs
to be watched carefully, being given a keynote session in the big hall was more
than welcomed.
If you haven’t been keeping up with what’s been
happening at NTI then perhaps you may want to take a second look at the
progress that has been made these past eighteen months. With a solid base of
customers relying on DRNet® to meet their business
continuity needs, NTI has turned to product packages that require no activation
of their replication for business continuity components. In so doing NTI has
developed an onboarding to NonStop data streaming platforms. By onboarding, NTI
runs all of the code on NonStop as NonStop processes. Want to replicate to
Splunk? Need to deliver to Kafka? Have a requirement to distribute to a hundred
servers with Oracle? Or MS SQL Server? Now you know – it’s all out there as
part of the NTI product package DRNet®/Unified for Business Integration.
How does the NonStop community hear about this and much
more? They attend their local Chapter and Rug events and yes, even as the pages
of the calendar are torn off with summer just around the corner, it’s only a
matter of months passing that we will all be headed to Burlingame, California,
for this year’s NonStop Technical Boot Camp 2022 (NonStopTBC22). Beginning to
look forward to attending? Have you registered yet? As for Margo and me we will
both be in attendance and will be only too happy to chat with you.
But before all that happens it’s off to Las Vegas. It was
many years ago the 1996 movie, Swingers, where the character played by Vince
Vaughn uttered the phrase most of us never quite forgot: It’s Vegas, Baby,
Vegas! I can’t recall the number of times Margo and I have made the trek out to
Las Vegas, although it would have to be as early as 2008 when we attended an
early iteration of HP Technical Forum and Exhibition (HPTF&E) where there
was still a booth promoting ITUG. This was at a time when plans begin to gel
supporting the creation of just one big user community, Connect.
A lot has happened since but just looking back at posts
to this blog from June 2008 and June 2009 it was interesting to see just how
quickly the NonStop landscape was changing. Remember NonStop on blades?
Remember too how the press seized on the moves by HP to “blade everything
(including NonStop)”? If you weren’t at
the event you missed all this buzz. From blades to x86 to virtualization, announcements
came out one on top of the other and it was all championed by HPE evangelists
at the annual big tent event that emerged in 2011. Were you there at that
event?
Today, it’s all about modernization, hybrid IT,
bringing the cloud experience to you and most of all it’s about GreenLake and
the opportunity to acquire HPE products where you pay just for what you
consume. At a presentation HPE CEO Antonio Neri gave at the recent Davos
gathering, May 2022, he said “IT is a little bit countercyclical to what we're
seeing today or maybe see in the short term — where there’s a lot of pent-up
demand to modernize your IT environment, to become hybrid and multi-cloud in
everything you do, and the fact that data continues to explode.”
Yes, perhaps nothing stands out more than the
acknowledgment that we are witnessing the emergence of the data driven
enterprise. The move to maximize the value of data even as we all know that
data is created on NonStop and is perhaps the freshest of all data created
within the enterprise as it is happening in real time where NonStop is
interacting with customers 24 x 7. As Neri said at Davos, “And I have to say
demand continues to be strong around connectivity, around the AI, machine learning,
about the fact that customers want to consume as a service. Our strategy is
very well aligned for that.”
This year, Neri will be addressing the HPE community to update all present on the results of the three year plan that he unveiled back in 2019. “I am committing today to you that in the next three years HPE will be a consumption driven company and everything we deliver to you will be available as a service,” Neri told the audience at that time. And HPE hasn’t exactly been sitting still on meeting this commitment. After three years of aggressively pursuing this goal, all across the industry HPE is being seen as delivering and in so doing, lay claim to being a world leading edge to cloud platform as a service.
Will there be a new three year plan divulged? I cannot imagine that this is the end game and that HPE executives from Neri on down will simply take the stage, sit down on cushy chairs turning to the audience to advise that well, that’s that. We did it! And now we will just focus on providing you with more! That’s not how it works. Seriously, this is Vegas, Baby. Vegas! The town that lives for the moment and the splashier the better! Yes, I am expecting fireworks and to see something new. I am expecting to hear that with the conclusion of this three year commitment it will not be just a story about more but rather a story where the next chapter is about much more. Connectivity, AI, machine learning, perhaps even Swarm and massive IoT. That’s what I am expecting and as edgy as that will sound, I cannot wait to see what role we can carve out for NonStop.
Connect will be busy throughout the show and will be
hosting a number of presentations including the introduction of the latest
Connect Tech Forum, Business Integration and Analysis. It is anticipated that
with the creation of this forum, there will be a place where collaboration
between customers, vendors and HPE can occur seamlessly. Where lively
discussions develop around best practices and over the most appropriate tools,
utilities and platforms for business integration and analysis. I am also
anticipating that the NonStop community will be joined by others from across
the Connect community and hopefully, this will include groups we associate with
High Performance Computing (HPC) where the Apollo product line resides –
NonStop creating data, Apollo performing analysis; all in real time no less!
I will be giving a presentation on this Tech Forum, Business Integration and Analysis. Look for Value your data! Move your data! Analyze your data! where I will reference NTI and DRNet®/Unified for Business Integration to frame the introduction of this Tech Forum. For those planning on attending HPE Discover 2022 as you build your agenda make sure you plan on attending my presentation:
https://content.attend.hpe.com/go/agendabuilder.sessions/?l=1049&sid=25392_10334&locale=en_US
It is always an exciting time of the year to hear directly from HPE executives. It is also a good time to network with your peers. Perhaps even more so it’s a time to look at adjacent product lines to see where possibilities to leverage technology may be working to your advantage. No matter how you view this event it is an inescapable fact that it all starts with this annual big-tent event of HPE. Yes, you do need to be there after all it truly is Vegas, Baby. Vegas!
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