The Nonstop event calendar is highlighting another year of community gatherings

The Nonstop event calendar is highlighting
another year of community gatherings

The question I am most often asked happens to be whether Nonstop will return to growth. In other words, colleagues ask whether the future of Nonstop is one built on anticipated growth among a diverse mix of industry verticals. Will Nonstop develop a stronger presence within the verticals it supports today and will we see new verticals introduced to Nonstop. Central to this line of questioning is whether HPE is looking to Nonstop to grow, standstill marking time, or enter a period of slow decline.

My conversations of late have begun with questions about HPE Go-To-Market (GTM) plans for Nonstop and whether there’s moves to lead with Nonstop whenever new opportunities arise. The short answer to this is very simple. There are no GTM plans that lead with Nonstop. It’s just not central to the key marketing initiatives.

Does this leave Nonstop on the backfoot when it comes to growth? It doesn’t help, that’s become very clear. And yet, even within HPE there is evidence that interest in Nonstop exists among the leadership team at the highest level. News that there were two or three new Nonstop customers in the past year certainly can help the cause.

There are good reasons for a reluctance to boost sales of Nonstop. The most notable is the one we all love to read about – the supply chain. Given the current setup to build Nonstop systems, there is no way in which HPE could accommodate a doubling of shipments let alone something as ambitious as supporting programs that lead to a tenfold increase in sales of Nonstop. It is just wishful thinking on the part of the Nonstop community that this level of growth of Nonstop is in the cards HPE holds.

For the moment, there’s considerable activity on the part of HPE to ship the latest generation of Nonstop systems – the Nonstop NS5 X5 and NS9 X5. It’s predominantly a replacement business for now but even so, there’s only so many of these systems that HPE teams can build. More important still, the appearance of any potential disruption to the flow of parts will set back delivery times in a heartbeat and there’s plenty of clouds on the horizon in this regard. Global shipping is among the most vulnerable elements within any supply chain and with what’s happening in the middle east, let alone the possibilities for additional ill-winds in the Caribbean, what we see today could get even worse.

From the evidence available to the Nonstop community, as provided by Nonstop leadership, there is an actionable priority to build Nonstop systems and this past year, there was a significant uptick in the number of new systems built for the existing Nonstop customer base despite these headwinds. Maybe there is cause for a little more optimism in this regard.

However, even if we saw an uptick in interest within HPE to double shipments of Nonstop systems, there’s a considerable lag when it comes to the support side. And it’s across the board. Recruiting and then training a new cadre of sales and pre-sales teams as capable as the teams we had in place in the early days of Tandem Computers seems little more than a case of putting back on our rose-tinted glasses. Aint goin’ to happen, as I‘ve been told! More than once!

Perhaps it’s time to unleash the full potential that exists today across the Nonstop field organization. Being closest to the Nonstop customer, this organization is not only capable of providing traditional support but could readily be utilized to deliver new solutions given the revolution we see with the inroads AI is making into development and support groups.

Then there’s the issue of post sales education and in general, the necessary teams to provide hand-holding through PoCs, Pilots and Production – my own dreaded 3 Ps. It’s a tough assignment to think HPE could turn a page with the necessary speed to see a return to a global Subject Matter Expert (SME) “bench” capable of handling the most difficult, indeed “tricky” deployments on a moment’s notice. If adding to a sales presence isn’t going to happen where their expenses can be justified, filling out a bench of expensive experts is even further away from happening in these times.

And then we come to that all-important task of executive outreach. Perhaps the most popular topic in some circles within the Nonstop vendor community. Today we can see that there’s been a return to the important Key Customer Council and Key Customer Briefings that have begun to show signs of life – and congratulations to all involved for that endeavor – but to be brutally honest, with the teams that are in place to support such a program, what is being pursued today cannot scale.

Furthermore, unless I am mistaken (and that does happen more often that I care to admit), there’s no funding within HPE to support Customer Conference Centers where Nonstop team members “share strategic marketing directions and proprietary product information with its customers and encourages them to give feedback on the directions and products presented.” When product managers competed for timeslots in front of customers and prospects and the level of enthusiasm to do so was palpable, successful sales seemed to always follow.

Then again, Nonstop will never be a commodity solution appealing to mass global markets so perhaps what we bear witness to today as far as Customer-centric gatherings is all that is required to maintain the presence of Nonstop.

Perhaps, too, the only institution that is still thriving is Connect forged in the days when there were multiple HPE user communities – ITUG for Tandem Computers, DECUS for DEC, and Interex for Hewlett-Packard computing systems. The mere fact that we still have an entity that primarily supports the Nonstop community is nothing short of a godsend for the community, but even so, could it scale to accommodate serious growth? From the perspective of the Nonstop vendor community, not likely! It’s good to see Connect as active as it is but even here, they are fully stretched to meet current programs.

None of the above takes into consideration where new solutions for Nonstop will come from nor does it address the mess that has unfolded following the price-book inclusion fiasco. Removing two thirds of the Nonstop vendor community from any direct Nonstop sales support is proving to be a litmus test as to just how insular the Nonstop sales teams have become. This has been talked about to be addressed but nothing has happened. Until the full scope of vendor product and services support is articulated “enthusiastically” by all in Nonstop sales, the prospect of attracting solutions vendors seems an opportunity that is fraught with missteps after missteps. So sad …

As we enter another year of community events, it’s a sobering reality that what we have today is well, what we have today! There will be “spot wins” reported – always less than a dozen and not truly compensating for reductions of Nonstop customers from mergers or simply leaving the platform – and news of additional applications being added to existing Nonstop deployments.

And now for what continues to excite me given this. When we step back and look at the presence of Nonstop, after fifty years of critical IT presence, we do need to acknowledge that this, of itself, is a major win. Only IBM shares a similar presence in the marketplace with its venerable mainframe.

As we gathered in Munich (more to follow after publication of this issue of Nonstop Insider) and then, a little later we will in Orlando, look around at the support coming from the Nonstop vendor community and HPE, the fact that we are here still willing to champion Nonstop has to be viewed as a positive outcome. Will we see more attendees this year? Next year? My guess is this is not a metric that will be tabulated. But before you leave this column, perhaps this silver lining should never be ignored.

Under the current HPE regime, Nonstop will not be making a dramatic comeback but for the customers fully vested in Nonstop, there remains no better solution available today. Not a mainframe, not a cloud and certainly not a mashup of x86 boxes. Yes, Nonstop lives on, prospering in its own way, and for that, join me in Munich to once again, cheer on the home side as certainly, we are still scoring goals. We are still on the playing field. And yes, we still have a solid cheer-squad willing us on to even greater success with the industry’s only systems that never fail!