A view into the world of NonStop – one HPE NonStop sales team member’s insights …

As HPE Enterprise Account Executive Steve Kubick provides us yet another video courtesy of YouTube, it’s a reminder that individuals do make a difference. Steve’s storylines are always opinionated and for a good reason. You cannot be passionate about NonStop without having a strong opinion. Furthermore, it’s encouraging to see that the “likes” he gets on LinkedIn following the promotion of each video include those from his colleagues along with his management.

It may not have occurred to all of us just yet but traditional marketing has taken a back seat in this millennium. There is still corporate marketing active in promoting key messages and initiatives a company may wish to make known to as wide an audience as possible but when it comes to product marketing, it’s no longer an item at most companies. Today, its technologist actively engaged in selling to technologists. Enterprises that demonstrate growth are skewed more towards technology than they are to anything else – products and services included. Product-Led Growth (PLG) is the focus of today’s technology companies more so than marketing.

What Steve is doing is akin to PLG. He is taking technology to those who view technology as their way to the front in business. The way to grow their revenues and of late (as have become apparent) to simply stay in business! Just ask those in retail. What we used to talk about as being an alignment with business outcomes sounds like yesterday’s mantra and indeed, is almost old-fashioned in terms of expectations. The world is now online and competing based primarily on the strength of its technology.

What Steve is addressing in his videos is the need to take a good long look at the best fit of technology for our enterprise. The best alignment of technology with business growth! In his latest video, filmed outside the former copper mines of Anaconda, Montana, Steve reminisces about the fashion trends popular in his father’s times. Referencing his Dad’s Paisley tie he is openly admitting that it was ugly and not something he would ever choose to wear. To which his Dad responded, not so fast, “it comes around every generation.” For Steve this triggered comments about today’s rush to cloud compute and services.

In his video, My Dad’s Paisley Tie and The Cloud Steve talks about his early days with IBM mainframes and of the circumstances behind his employer electing to run workloads on a mainframe that was shared among four companies. Offsite and remotely managed, when it came time to deploy a NonStop system on-prem, the costs of running workloads on the mainframe had become excessive. In time, his employer moved workloads off the mainframe and onto NonStop that was easily justified because of cost savings, improved security as well as operations – “when something went wrong you need your people to look and say, ‘this is what the problem is!’”

As we entertain more thoughts about moving workloads to clouds and of transforming our traditional IT to Hybrid IT, there are workloads that will benefit from being cloud-based just as there will be workloads that make little sense to move to the cloud. Whether it is because of cost, security or ease of operations, what we are already beginning to see are questions being asked about the longer term practicality of being cloud centric. The cloud experience is important and is teaching us to better understand how best to deploy applications but even so, for the same reason we came to the realization that some workloads were best moved from the “shared mainframe” resource to on-prem, so too there are applications better suited to run on NonStop.

If you haven’t watch any of Steve’s videos then perhaps this is a good one to start with. If the hyperlink doesn’t take you to YouTube, then cut and paste this url into your browser:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AnTsuZteg4

Marketing is going through tremendous transformation. Former once high-flying marketing executives are becoming an endangered species. Even as sales is moving from working with enterprises to commit to a solution to where it is all about working with the enterprise to consume a solution – a circumstance about to happen across the NonStop community with the shift to everything-as-a-service, we will gain our insights into the capabilities of such solutions from influencers. The new marketers include enthusiastic evangelist like Steve and if you want to see more of Steve’s videos, a simple search of YouTube will bring up many more.

And of course Steve would like you to connect with him on LinkedIn –

https://www.linkedin.com/in/steve-kubick-0463783/