Enjoying
lunch in our new community, the lifestyle afforded by being in Florida and
living alongside the Emerald Coast’s intracoastal waterway certainly has its
upside. Having only recently taken up full time residence – yes, Margo and I
are now in possession of our Florida driver’s licenses – we are beginning to
come to terms with a lifestyle balanced equally between a vacation-like
atmosphere and the quieter side of a planned retreat.
It seemed only fitting that our first true guests joining us for a luncheon at the Jimmy Buffett styled Chill and Grill, was none other than my former partner in tech, Brian Fitzgibbon with his wife Nancy. They happened to be working while vacationing nearby and it proved a time of reflection. Not so much being right next to the water, mind you, but rather times spent living and working in Sydney during the last years of the 1970s.
Few may
remember the Melbourne group, the Skyhooks, which provided the anthem for all
of us starting out in the new field of tech. Having started my apprenticeship
in Wollongong on my nineteenth birthday, barely out of high school, I had no
idea what lay ahead but already by the time my beard was taking shape, I had
taken a step up from the apprenticeship with first move to London where after a
short stay, I migrated to Canada before leaving for Texas, as one tended to do
back then.
Returning
to Sydney, I filled the role of software engineer specializing in database. All
good but the company I joined specialized in IBM operating systems. An OS that
was sold to IBM mainframe customers, EDOS, at a time when the IBM OS was
provided free-of-charge. My role as tech lead lasted all of three months before
I became Managing Director of EDOS Australia and for a short time, its sole
employee. In no time at all, EDOS’s parent company in Richmond, Virginia, with
the excellent name of The Computer Software Company (TCSC), and I kid you not,
sent me Brian on a one-year assignment to keep me in line.
Enough
said. We formed a lifetime friendship even as Brian did a wonderful job in
recruiting the nucleus of our team. By the time Nixdorf Computers bought TCSC
and launched their own Plug-Compatible Mainframes, the 8890, the team had grown
to a half dozen system programmers specializing in all things IBM OS. Having
achieved the role of being the youngest local Managing Director of an overseas
software vendor, looking back to those time with Brian, I have always wondered
whether my career had truly peaked well before my thirtieth birthday.
For anyone
in the NonStop community that charts their progress in tech, an I have to
believe I am not the only one to do so, we can all reflect on the what ifs and
the could ‘aves, should ‘aves and more. I was reminded of this only a few days
ago when I read of the decision by Partner One to purchase XYPRO. With this
purchase, XYPRO joins ETI-NET and Insider Technology in the growing list of
NonStop-centric vendors acquired by Partner One through the years. And I
suspect it is a trend that will continue as more NonStop vendors look to what
the future might hold for them.
NonStop
vendors ecosystems have been a popular topic for quite some time. Just look at
the partner page on many of our NonStop vendors websites. For some, it’s all
about relationships and cover the many different degrees to which partnerships
cooperate. A name on a webpage created out of friendships between respective
management teams. Or, perhaps, a recognition of potential reciprocal leverage
among adjacent products. There is even instances now where joint development
projects are being undertaken with interfaces and APIs created and provided
solely for the benefit of each participant.
When Brian
was with me all those years ago, the premise of EDOS was to provide an OS with
the capabilities of the latest iterations of IBM mainframes to those IBM
customers running a generation earlier mainframe. Suddenly, the benefits IBM
provided their customers with System 370s deployed could now be enjoyed by
those preferring to get extra mileage out of the System 360s. At a global
level, a big market and back in Virginia, TCSC cut deals with the big mainframe
leasing companies like Greyhound Leasing.
In
Australia, we’ve had a very large third-party leasing company called Computer
Resources. It wasn’t long before we struck a deal to partner with them on
future leases of System 360s of which the company was collecting at a good clip
with 360s being returned (or bought outright) with the introduction of 370s.
The market intelligence we gained was immeasurable and while the results gained
by either partner wasn’t earthshattering, it proved to be a great learning
curve that helped our Australian endeavor once the Nixdorf deal finalized. We
just knew where all the bodies lay; well, kind of!
Today,
among the NonStop vendor community, the degree to which partnerships deliver on
the marketing hype has always been questionable but among those that did pursue
building such partner ecosystems, a few do stand out. In preparation for
E-BITUG in Dublin, I have been talking about this topic with a number of
NonStop vendors. What stands out is that when development plans are shared and
when products align with market requirements, positive outcomes can be
achieved.
“We have
reached partnerships with a number of NonStop vendors in both product and
services areas,” said Tim Dunne, NTI’s Global Director, Worldwide Sales. “Take
for instance our partnership with TANDsoft where it’s FS Compare and Repair
offering to meet the needs of very demanding NonStop customers looking to
ensure both source and target files are in synch. Not for them is a casual,
‘it’ll be alright’ but rather it’s more a case of trust, but verify. And we
have seen the results. TANDsoft have an implementation that is not just
extremely fast but is better than any alternative we have looked at.”
More
recently, the fruits from the partnership with Infrasoft are at hand. First
their Kafka products were a perfect fit for NTI and the growing demand for a
comprehensive Kafka solution and now, with Gateway, NTI and Infrasoft have an
awesome solution to the world of mixed protocols, formats and APIs. “The latest
addition to the DRNet® product suite is DRNet®/Gateway that, in
similar fashion (to what we experienced with TANDsoft), provides a core
capability together with many connectivity and security options,” said Time
Dunne. Perhaps more to the point, “Today, DRNet®/Gateway is available to
replace several legacy competitor’s products that are more than twenty plus
years old, where enhancements and indeed maintenance have ceased to be
addressed.”
Relationships
count and can prove to be productive based on mutual respect. These
relationships can span decades when productive and are seen to be delivering
solutions that are needed. But caution is still required as not all that
appears on slideware is for real. For Brian and me, simply catching up over
lunch felt real like we had been simply out of the room for a brief period as
conversations seemed to pick up from where they left off, decades ago. NonStop
vendors are adjusting to the rapidly changing worlds of Modernization projects,
Hybrid IT engagement, open and secure as-a-Service deliveries along with the
need for Zero Trust. No single vendor can achieve a positive result with
support for any of these initiatives without the participation of partners.
I am not
sure when next Brian, his wife Nancy and Margo and me catch up, but be assured
the conversations that will then begin will have their roots in exchanges that began
fifty plus years ago. If living in the seventies had us feeling a little on edge
and perhaps a little weird, what we may have suspected as being fake back then
little prepared us for what we encounter today. Fortunately, as I have
encouraged my clients to promote, pursue due diligence and perhaps what may
manifest itself before you isn’t the reality you expected.
See you
all in Dublin; safe travels; and yes, plan on catching up with Margo and me at
our Monday night reception in the hotel’s hospitality suite.
Comments