Final countdown – HPE Nonstop Technology & Business Conference 2025

Final countdown – HPE Nonstop Technology & Business Conference 2025

September 16 – 18, 2025 at The Woodlands, Texas

As the calendar pages flip over and the clock counts down, it’s almost time to head to The Woodlands, Texas, for the biggest Nonstop Compute event of the year. This is our time to learn everything that is new and planned for the Nonstop Compute product family and if the past is any indication of what to expect, anticipating something refreshingly new is always an ever-present feeling. Surely, there will be a surprise or two in stall for all Nonstop Compute community attendees.

Without dwelling too long on the topic, for as long as we can remember, there has always been an annual gathering of the Nonstop community in the USA, dating back to the early 1980s. I first heard about such a community, known back then as ITUG, while working for a Nonstop partner. Staff returned from an ITUG Summit in New Orleans as excited as I can recall ever witnessing folks simply visiting yet another show.

Back in the 1970s, it was all about the National Computer Conferences (NCC) and I had the opportunity of attending NCC events in Anaheim (1984) and before that, in Houston (1982). It was in Houston where I saw IBM unveil their latest disk drives, the IBM 3380 Direct Access Storage Device. Introduced back in 1980 it wasn’t until late 1981 that shipments began and to see these massive units capable of storing 2.52 gigabytes with data transfer rates of 3 megabytes per second turned the heads of all present for the event. Wow!

Fast forward some forty plus years, and I will be back in Houston. It is not a city I have visited all that often, although I did attend an event shortly after the acquisition of Tandem Computers by Compaq. The event was held on the campus of Compaq, you can imagine the consternation of the gate security folks when a couple of lads from Dell, already deploying Nonstop systems, tried to enter the campus for the event. Just another small wrinkle in the history of Nonstop but one that reminds us of just how competitive the IT industry was and continues to be.

Competition is central to the life of the Nonstop community. Nonstop thrives on competition as it helps drive innovation. If it wasn’t for SNAX we would never have seen ICE and if it wasn’t for ICE, there may never have been any interest in uLinga. If it wasn’t for NTI and GoldenGate, there may never have been a Striim. So much of the history of Nonstop can be associated with the willingness of Nonstop customers prepared to try something new, and better. From Tandem to Compaq to HP and then HPE, Nonstop has proved innovative and for some, remarkably able in a moment to meet the most critical business needs of major enterprises worldwide.

From my perspective, if it wasn’t for the generosity of the Nonstop vendors, this annual gathering of the Nonstop community would be the poorer. It is not be accident that the Nonstop vendors see this as the best opportunity all year whereby they can address the single largest community gathering of the year. Marketing products and services is important for them and attendance is always a litmus test of just how invested are these Nonstop partners in all things Nonstop. It’s also a highly visible manner whereby Nonstop customers can see who and what is driving Nonstop business forward. And like all attendees, there’s always the interest in seeing even more solutions vendors participating in these annual events.

As for my own participation then once again, I will be presenting on behalf of my client, NTI, where you will hear me talking on a very popular topic:

AI? agentic AI? Intelligence?
Smart Nonstop customers leverage replication for integration – do you?

For the Nonstop Compute customer, not only does the journey continue but suddenly there is a new target on the horizon. And it calls for integration of fresh, clean, data created on Nonstop to be made available to processes designed for autonomous decision making. With the ability to reason it stands to reason that data resulting from mission critical transaction processing becomes available the moment it is created.

NTI is proving adapt at navigating this special iteration of Hybrid IT and with Modernization continuing to be in focus, has elected to leverage the skills of Infrasoft and their support of Kafka in DRNet®/Kafka powered by uLinga. And they have their first customers up and running. Come here for more on how best you can capitalize on replication for rapid data integration.

And much more …

Having written this, I think we all owe a huge round of thanks to the HPE Nonstop Compute team for their support, to the Connect organization for the effort that it exerts to make this event happen and to all the Nonstop vendors who so generously step up to provide financial support. Will Houston find its way into the annals of best events ever? Will it continue the strong showing for all those present in Dublin for E-BITUG 2025 witnessed? It is early days but as time passes and the day draws nearer, will you be joining me for the best Nonstop event in 2025?

See you in Houston and look for us at Monday night’s beer bust sponsored by NTI where I believe there will be a distinct Gulf Shores / Margaritaville vibe so come along and show off your favorite Jimmy Buffett tee shirt! Margo and I will be there, humorous tee shirts included!