Pyalla Technologies and a NonStop community that is diversifying

If we have learnt anything at all this past month it is that despite every effort to simplify life and to be available at all times for my clients, bad things do happen. Unexpected events can intrude in a way that totally disrupts plans and makes it difficult to stay focused. The old adage of putting all your eggs in one basket and then watching the basket like a hawk may play well to some crowds, but as the NonStop community knows all so well, at a minimum you need two such baskets geographically separated in order for your business to operate continuously. Pyalla Technologies has a new primary residence as well as a mobile residence serving as a backup and the bad things that did happen took both of them away from us.

But not for much longer! We should be back on the road again in our mobile command center by the time you read this and possibly, settled into our new, more permanent home. When it comes to the NonStop community in general and more to the point, to our clients, there isn’t a week that passes when the question of value from continued investment in NonStop doesn’t come up. This is not questioning the overall business value that comes with NonStop and its integrated stack or the need to have multiple development centers and multiple support networks just in case, but rather, whether their business should involve more than development of solutions and middleware for the NonStop community.

My last pursuit while serving as a VP of Application Services (just another name for infrastructure) at ACI, working directly for the CTO, was to look at other stacks that may be useful to bring into the company such that the then BASE24 could run on platforms apart from NonStop. At the time, this came down to options over the viability of LAMP – Linux, Apache, MySQL and Perl / PHP (remember these combinations?) – where the company could model NonStop after a fashion in the application itself such that equivalent levels of availability could be achieved at a much lower price point. Of course, we all know what happened here and how no, ACI didn’t embrace open source, preferring instead to pursue IBM and its mainframe and to turn too virtualization.

It’s a completely different story today more than a decade later. Playing the mainframe card is definitely not to everyone’s taste and yet, Linux continues to grab more and more mindshare of data center managers everywhere. In fact, you can argue that hybrid IT is as much about bridging traditional worlds of NonStop systems and servers of similar ilk to huge server farms running either Linux or Windows that in turn have embrace virtualization, once the realm solely of mainframes. To answer the questions coming from my clients providing solutions and middleware on NonStop looking to diversify then yes, master virtualization and look to leveraging your NonStop knowledge in both the Linux and Windows worlds.

The message coming from HPE about transforming to hybrid IT, and indeed, the updated message of late about simplifying the transformation may be resonating with enterprises looking for leadership from HPE in this area but when it comes to NonStop, which could easily find viable roles to play in both traditional and cloud environments (it definitely has the tools to do this now if you check out the product roadmaps for NonStop), it is time that the NonSotp vendor community begins to shift its focus from being a pure NonStop play to where this community offers solutions and middleware that capitalizes on what is present either side of the hybrid IT bridge. Even as the emails and discussions continued through the week it became apparent that in fact, this is now very much a part of the vision for almost all of my clients and about this, the NonStop community should be very pleased to hear.

Before closing I would also like to thank my latest client for joining the Pyalla network of vendors. Welcome aboard! Lots of familiar faces turned up and yes, this company is about more than just NonStop too, so look for additional posts about them shortly as I do like the market that they are addressing. If you missed the latest post to the NonStop community blog, Real Time View you may just want to check out the storyline behind the heading Moving forward – transformation and virtualization makes testing of the business logic even more critical

http://itug-connection.blogspot.com/2017/07/moving-forward-transformation-and.html as this post also provides additional insights into what is referenced here. And if as yet you aren’t a client of Pyalla Technologies then give us a call as we are always looking too take on new clients.

Richard Buckle
Cofounder and CEO
Pyalla Technologies, LLC