Agility is Stability

Agility is Stability

By Keith Moore
Distinguished Technologist at HPE

As I leverage AI, mostly for rudimentary research and software development, I have learned many things beyond the scope of a brief article or even a long white paper! However, there is one big take-away from the improvements to systems developers and operations. What was once considered “agile” in both the software lifecycle sense and in the literal business agility, is now aggressively less stable. Stability is a fundamental characteristic of Nonstop. Good or bad, this stability has allowed the platform to survive generations of IT change from monolithic execution to microservices. The newer approaches to development and security exposure and operational flexibility have shown that the Nonstop is in a good place with the stable legacy perspective. On the other hand, these new capabilities also greatly improve Nonstop agility – something Nonstop is not known for.

I hope and expect the Nonstop user community and HPE to leverage this new set of tools and resources to do more to make Nonstop safe, secure, but also agile.

1. Support a quick generational user base shift
2. Move toward open standards for exposure of Nonstop capabilities (open APIs, Open Source libraries, improved operational interfaces and tools)
3. Leverage AI in several ways:
a. Education, documentation, and discovery (see #1)
b. Bridge existing stability of Nonstop into new areas for user executing (containers, serverless, etc.)
c. Improve security and stability of existing Nonstop software. Both user software and system software.
d. Cross-domain interoperability. Using AI help Nonstop understand networks and APIs better (e.g. Juniper and enhanced networking using AI).
e. Speed-to-test, speed-to-deploy, speed-to-secure, speed-to-change: (Basic agility)

Not everything is AI, but the AI revolution will influence IT behavior more than anything else for the next several years. Fortunately, or unfortunately, the Nonstop has stayed rigid for most of its lifetime. The horizon provides a new way to think of the Nonstop as part of the agile IT world. It is AI that is driving this change. It is not something each user needs to consider each day, but it is incumbent on all of us to embrace the change, enforce the stability, and gain the new advantages of being the unique, reliable execute platform in a wild, agile new IT enterprise.

AI is about speed. Speed to educate others, Speed to learn, Speed to change, Speed to improve, Speed to break things. The best “speed” value for Nonstop is the speed to modernize and leverage the stability of the platform. If that sounds counterintuitive, it is. However, as with most things regarding the AI hype today, the true generic value of AI to IT enterprise is indeed speed to change. Nonstop needs this capability badly. Nonstop will use this capability to make us all more agile and at the same time more stable. This is the key to the future of Nonstop. Agile + Stable is unique. Nonstop is unique.

HPE Discover event was just held. If you went and stopped by the booth you saw our wonderful demonstration integrating AI to payment services. This is an example of what new things can leverage Nonstop for stability. Do not be afraid of “AI”. Use AI for things like this when they are made available to you. If you use these tools, you will quickly discover the incredible potential to offer a new Nonstop perspective to the entire industry. We cannot easily do this without this seismic IT shift. Embrace the tools of AI that provide agility to Nonstop. In return you get better stability and more value from Nonstop than ever before.