Can HPE Nonstop Development keep up with the Nonstop Vendor Community?

Can HPE Nonstop Development keep up with
the Nonstop Vendor Community?

By Richard Buckle
CoFunder and Chief Storyteller
Pyalla Technologies, LLC

It was only a short time ago when I began considering whether or not the Nonstop development team could keep up with the Nonstop vendors when it came to implementing new technologies. This question came into clearer focus as the topic of AI dominated when the Nonstop community met in Munich for the E-GTUG event. Before I give this question any further consideration, let me briefly outline my own background for those who may not be familiar with it.

I joined Tandem Computers in Australia, back in 1988, in the capacity of Marketing Manager, Finance and Government Marketing. One year later, I had accepted a position with corporate Tandem in Cupertino arriving as a Development Program Manager overseeing the deep port of NET/MASTER and after its release, under the name of Nonstop NET/MASTER, I joined Product Marketing for a year or so before moving up to be Group Manager, Communications Product Management. This was not an unusual progression for many in Cupertino and it taught me a lot about development and development projects.

While this was taking place, for a brief time, Tandem contemplated being a solutions developer. In a deal with what was to become ACI, Tandem did a swap trading Nonstop systems for ACI at former telecommunications company, US West, where it was one of the seven original “Baby Bells” created during the 1984 breakup of AT&T – for some reason each of these Baby Bells though it was a good idea to buy software companies. It didn’t work out for ACI and in time, didn’t work out for Tandem. Nothing says competition quite like your hardware vendor owning one of your competitors. TSAI was launched as the vehicle that ushered in the separation.

Back to my question. Woven into the history of Tandem were the separate incidents when Tandem gave preference to the Nonstop vendors – after many delays, the general availability of Nonstop NET/MASTER came out very late and faced stiff competition from IR with Prognosis (developed out of the same Sydney offices that I first joined), and ESQ with PNA. That was just the beginning. Tandem’s SNAX/CDF lost the market to yet another Sydney development, Insession’s ICE, that brought modern SNA/APPN to market which, in turn, was overshadowed by Infrasoft’s uLinga following ACI’s purchase of Insession.

When connection to the Internet entered the conversation, it was the Insession’s WebGate product that first came to market only for Tandem to once again elect to compete with a quick port of open software in this space. WebGate’s HTTP servers and then HTTP clients paved the way for much of the connectivity that followed especially when they were leveraged by ACI in support of BASE24. If we look at Business Continuity, Tandem’s RDF really didn’t have a play when up against NTI’s DRNet, Gravic’s Shadowbase and then, perhaps the biggest disruptor of them all (at least for a short while), GoldenGate.

When viewed against this background, there’s implementations that the Nonstop developers do well – view the whole move to X86 that proved to be a brilliant and quite strategic move on the part of Nonstop development – whereas there’s some verticals where Nonstop development should really leave alone and cooperate with traditional Nonstop vendors.

History is now well established where Tandem and now Nonstop can’t be troubled to act in a timely manner when it comes to addressing product offerings in fast-moving markets. Individual Nonstop developers I know have tremendous skills and are extremely knowledgeable in their area of expertise but sometimes, within Nonstop development, oftentimes they simply cannot get out of each other’s way. With AI becoming the talk of the industry, as much as Nonstop development can tell a good story, can we expect them to respond fast enough?

More to the point, as we are all becoming fully aware, AI brings with it a very serious challenge to the biggest question of all – do we even need software developers as AI matures? Surely, the need is for story tellers and folks who can frame questions that lead to the creation of new products. We may quietly snicker but it’s happening – evident given remarks coming out of Alphabet and from Anthropic.

The latest case being Anthropic where the subject of merging LLMs came up – so many requests to merge, programming heads couldn’t keep up so they let Claude come up with a model that could be approved:

Anthropic is updating Claude Code to make its autonomous Auto Mode the default permission setting, shifting from individual action approvals to final work reviews. This change goes live on August 14, 2026, for Pro, Max, and Team.

Claude bypasses routine permission prompts and executes terminal tasks continuously unless an action is flagged as destructive, irreversible, or outside the user environment.

As an aside, nothing could possibly go wrong, now, could it?

The point is that the Nonstop community at large will not be part of the decision process in response to executives asking why their newly implemented business-specific local models cannot access Nonstop data. It will not be a case of an enterprise Nonstop team looking, with caution as we so often do (as a community), at incremental steps but rather being told, get it done. Find a way … and here’s where the question will be addressed. Not by Nonstop development but rather by a number of Nonstop vendors with the bit firmly between the teeth. Let them run, unhindered by bureaucracy and layers of middle management.

Extreme? Not really. From a number of CTOs I have reached, came the common response. This is happening now and is only accelerating – today, surprise, surprise; OpenAI CEO Sam Altman during a July 25, 2026 podcast interview declared that humanity has entered the AI singularity pointing to rapid compounding progress and recent autonomous agent tests. Many will disagree and discount an element of showmanship but it’s coming so fast and Nonstop needs to be in the right place.

With Nonstop Technology & Business Conference 2026 (Nonstop TBC 2026) coming soon, take the moment to give serious consideration to the opening question – can Nonstop development keep up given their track-record of miss-hits and questionable decision making? As for me, and yes, privately given my history with Tandem and then Nonstop, I don’t think they can.

Do you? Let’s talk at Nonstop TBC 2026.