Real Time View

Attending gatherings of the NonStop community remain a priority for me and getting the opportunity to join BITUG in London proved enlightening. NonStop is definitely on a roll and the NonStop community is enjoying a return to growth! It was a quick trip to London. The BITUG Big SIG was the venue and it proved to be a popular event – congratulation’s to Kevin and the rest of the BITUG team for pulling this event together within the walls of Trinity House, a building I walked past on a daily basis back in the mid-1970s when I worked in London. Being called upon to give a 30 minute presentation and to man a vendor table, carrying as I did a collapsible promotional banner wasn’t completely unexpected and is something I do like doing. Fortunately, with London as the destination, there was more than enough upside in making the trip to compensate for the time away from my office. Even though my time in the air these days has been trimmed to the bare minimum, I have to admit, there’s no...

It’s London and it’s the BITUG Big SIG. The NonStop community is gathered to hear more of NonStop and it’s a lot happier community these days. Before it starts I thought it may be good to reflect on what NonStop has accomplished already in just two years since support for x86 was announced.  Few readers of my blog posts will have missed my many references to cars and music and walking around London for nearly a week there was plenty to remind me of both. A Rolls Royce here, a McLaren over there and yes, plenty of Aston Martins everywhere! Sometimes you simply forget how successful the English have been through the years when it comes to cars. As for a small point of fact, nearly all of the F1 teams have their headquarters around London, from Red Bull to Williams to now the first North American team in ages, Haas F1, chose to complement its North Carolina operations by setting up shop nearby in Banbury, Oxfordshire. On the other hand, when it comes to music, what needs to be ...

Who would have guessed just how much that is happening in the auto industry applies to IT. Bottom line? Don’t underestimate what hybrids can deliver and yes, I am talking about NonStop! First it was the news about an upcoming entry-level Tesla that had everyone jumping. The early revelation that some 200,000 plus orders that Tesla received was mindboggling, even to a car guy like me. The Tesla Model 3 has been long anticipated but never before in the auto industry has any company opened the order books to this extent while the deliverable is so far away – more than a year out. Just this week, according to Fortune Magazine, Elon Musk, Tesla’s CEO, confirmed that there had been no letup in interest in the Model 3 with the books now holding some 400,000 orders! Yes, staggering numbers and quite unbelievable – isn’t the economy still in dire straits? There are numerous reports coming in from colleagues in the NonStop community who have placed orders for the Model 3. In some cases, m...

Looking back at what was presented at recent Regional User Group (RUG) meetings here in America it was clear that the commitment to keeping NonStop systems attractive to the next generation of developers is materializing. And it all has to do with HPE’s commitment to open systems and industry standards … While dancing across the grass this past week with our just-turning-three granddaughter Ella, I was reminded of the fears of youngsters. It was a simple case of not wanting to attract insects and bugs for me, but for her, it was all about the possibility of running across snakes. In a suburban Boulder garden? Not likely, although there was an occasion where good friends from one of my clients joined us for an outside  barbecue  only to see one of Colorado’s rat snakes slither along the stonework of our home. So perhaps it wasn’t such an unusual concern of Ella’s, after all. Reading the latest update from the Node.js community I couldn’t help but remember this incid...

For a decade and a half, Martin Fink, EVP & CTO, HPE has been a recognized pioneer in bringing the world of open source into the commercial world. For the NonStop community this is well understood even as open source plays an important role in the growing popularity of NonStop systems today. Fair enough, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose . There’s no sense of accusing me of waxing eloquent, but this week I was compelled to dig deep for just the right exclamation. By the way, this reminds me of my father who, when I was a child, called his cars “eloquent” and every Saturday afternoon he would pull them from the garage just so that he could wax eloquent ! Nothing original in this, as I am sure families everywhere in the English speaking world can retell something similar, but what strikes me is not so much the reference to cars, but the reference to waxing and waning as in phases of the moon. The reason waves lap the beach, moving up the sand just a few inches at ...

Randy Meyer, the former senior manager overseeing all of NonStop, who is now Mission Critical Systems VP and GM, has been lobbying all and sundry within the NonStop vendor community to become bigger and M&A actions offer one way to achieve this. The news coming from ETI-NET has been hard to miss of late and now, there’s even more changes taking place … Visitors to the Las Vegas strip, whether it is to attend the HPE Discover conference or a similar event will be hard pressed to miss the condominium complex known as Veer Towers. Leaning away from each other, in a manner that suggests they will fall down, Veer represents an engineering wonder but its quirkiness also adds to the overall carnival-like atmosphere of Las Vegas where anything is possible. Its symbolism isn’t lost on me – a kind of engineered contrarianism, where, should you go left, I will most likely go right! Veering from center is something I frequently do, although less kindly souls might remind me that all too o...

Making time to check the flowers may not be a priority for business and yet, as challenging as it was to arrange, financial institutions are facing bigger challenges as they look to better serve a rapidly changing constituency.    My attendance at the recent ATMIA US Conference in New Orleans wasn’t just a time for networking and for sampling a little of what New Orleans offers but, more importantly, it was a time to hear firsthand what was happening in the world of ATMs, ATM networks and the payments solutions supporting them. For more years than I care to recount, I have been in and around payments solutions and so it would be very easy for me to become a little jaded and yet, with each conference, I run into a presentation that truly proves enlightening. Such was the case when I walked into the presentation A Blueprint for Next-Generation ATM Networks by Peter Kulik, Director, Digital ATM, Citibank. The ATM network at Citi represents the face of Citi as seen by its c...