Two articles caught my attention last week. Why is it that during the holidays we find time to read as many stories as we want in between family dinners eating turkey with the trimmings or maybe shrimps on the “barbie” and watching football or cricket, depending on the hemisphere where you live. It’s not that I am trying to escape traditions, then again, perhaps I am. Nevertheless, having the time to dig through publications for the occasional editorial gem is something I like to do.
In the article I came across on December 29, 2022
within the digital NPR (National Public Radio) site, 2022 was the year crypto came
crashing down to Earth the
news looked pretty bad. “In the future, 2022 may be
regarded as a turning point for the world of virtual currencies, when they lost
their luster and were cast out as a fringe product most people approach with
skepticism and caution.” Well, that’s perhaps the biggest understatement of the
year, right?
But wait, there’s more. According to Lee
Reiners, who teaches cryptocurrency law at Duke University, the swift and total
collapse of FTX (along with the company's founder, Sam Bankman-Fried),
"the biggest event in crypto's history" - a history, he adds, that's
"replete with a lot of failures and scams and frauds and hacks."
“We won’t be fooled again,” you might say, but as one
songwriter said, “put it down to simple greed!” Or worse! The way NPR saw
things, even as “there's an expression crypto
enthusiasts use, with fingers crossed, in the hopes a particular digital currency's
value will blast off: ‘To the moon!’ Much of crypto did graze the stratosphere
at the start of 2022, when enthusiasm was astronomically high, but a few months
later it all came crashing back down to Earth.”
Leave it to Warren Buffett to see
things a little differently when back in 2018 he called bitcoin, “rat poison
squared!” And worse. “Whether it
goes up or down in the next year, or five or 10 years, I don’t know. But the
one thing I’m pretty sure of is that it doesn’t produce anything,” Buffett said
(to CNBC). “It’s got a magic to it and people have attached magic to lots of
things.”
To the moon? Magic? This
wasn’t the only article that caught my attention as closer to home for some in
IT and even for those in the NonStop community was yet one more story coming
out of CNBC.
Published the day
before, on December 28, 2022, The
fintech reckoning is upon us. Here’s what to expect next year
came the news that “Many fintech
companies — particularly those dealing directly with retail borrowers — will be
forced to shut down or sell themselves next year as startups run out of
funding, according to investors, founders and investment bankers. Others will
accept funding at steep valuation haircuts or onerous terms, which extends the
runway but comes with its own risks, they said.”
Rather frightening to
read was the reporting of how ““20% of all VC dollars
went into fintech in 2021,” said Stuart Sopp, founder and CEO of digital bank Current. “You just can’t put that much capital behind something in
such a short time without crazy stuff happening.”
Surprised to
read: “‘We overfunded fintech, no question,’ said one founder-turned-VC who
declined to be identified speaking candidly. ‘We don’t need 150 different neobanks, we don’t
need 10 different banking-as-a-service providers. And I’ve invested in both’ categories, he said.” Even
more surprising to then read: “‘We saw a company that raised $20 million that
couldn’t even get a $300,000 bridge loan because their investors told them `We
are no longer investing a dime. It was unbelievable.’”
According to
the CNBC reporter, “All along the private company life cycle, from embryonic
startups to pre-IPO companies, the market has reset lower by at least 30% to 50%, according to investors. That follows the decline in
public company shares and a few notable private examples, like the 85%
discount that Swedish fintech lender Klarna took
in a July fundraising.”
Or, to put
it more simply, according to Point72 Ventures partner Pete Casella, “What ultimately happens is you get
into a death spiral. You can’t get funded and all your best employees start
jumping ship because their equity is underwater.” It’s almost as if echoes of
“there’s gold in them thar hills!” can be heard reverberating across the ether.
It would be
easy for us to overact and perhaps it is just industries in transition after
all. On the other hand, both the rush to crypto and the enthusiasm for fintech
could benefit from a lot more discretion being exercised. This is not a call to
invest in gold or in commodities in general. There will still be winners in
both the crypto and fintech marketplaces but the prospect of them being
absorbed into traditional businesses seems to be one outcome that I wouldn’t
bet against.
For the
NonStop community where a degree of conservatism lives long and hard and where
change is more evolution than revolution, such news doesn’t come as a shock.
The presence of NonStop systems in financial institutions is a well-known
reality. With the work that NonStop development has put into ensuring NonStop
is as modern as any IT platform and fully capable of running any application
needed to meet a business need, it’s still good to know that NonStop isn’t
subject to either fashion or fads. It’s also becoming one reason why the
introduction of NonStop into HPE’s GreenLake initiative is an important step
forward.
How so? As
the availability of money to fund initiatives like crypto and yes, even
fintechs, retreats as rapidly as it has done in 2022, the growth of Cloud
Service Providers will likely stall. Maybe not in quite as dramatic a fashion
as either of the two cases above, but there will be impact. All of which is to
confirm that having a steady hand on the hybrid IT tiller makes a whole lot of
sense in 2023. Leverage your data created on NonStop and bring the cloud
experience to you? Sounds like a plan!
If it means
we can blend the best of NonStop with the opportunity to leverage cloud
services, where appropriate – access to analytics comes naturally to mind –
then this will keep many a CIO happy for some time. Moonshots are always a
scary proposition. At best, the odds do not favor perceived deliverables arriving
any time soon. To the moon? Yes, fingers crossed for sure, but in all
seriousness, none of us should be all that frightened over what might happen to
NonStop.
GreenLake
holds promise of blending diverse worlds in a manner that actually maximizes
the continued relevance of NonStop. With further work in support of
virtualization that includes running within clouds, porting applications to
NonStop is a breeze. And why would you do that? Why would this still be a
consideration? Simple. It works. More than that, it has been working
continuously for decades. You want a safe haven for your data? You got it!
The gold in
those hills is data and in case we forget, the freshest data in the enterprise
is created on NonStop so wouldn’t you want your applications to be located as
close to the data creation as possible? You don’t have to think in terms of
going to the moon to retrieve the gold, it’s all right there where it has
always been and for the NonStop community, increasingly the news is of how GreenLake
indeed has become golden!
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