Against the odds, NTI thrives as it transforms to meet the resilience needs of NonStop customers

NTI’s Jose Luis Ortega presenting in Santiago, Chile

When it comes to the major endurance races for modern sports cars, including prototype sports cars, the program starts early in the year. Historically, the first race held in January each year takes place in Daytona, Florida, with the Rolex 24. It is a trial of reliability as is the case with all endurance racing, but this year we heard commentators say, “in an endurance race, you encounter changes (almost continuously); with driver changes, each stint is different as the car, the track and the environment change. As a driver you have to adapt.”

For the better part of the past year, the topic of resilience has dominated conversations across the HPE NonStop community. Driven by concerns over security and the potential consequences of breaches of security carried out by bad actors. Be they individuals, or state-sponsored the concerns the NonStop user community have are legitimate. The NonStop operating system does a good job protecting itself and the solutions it supports, but nevertheless it would be a serious case of negligence should an outside entity compromise the operation of a NonStop system.

However, resilience carries with it a clarion call for further diligence in the ever-changing world of IT and the NonStop community members know all too well that the commitment their enterprises make to NonStop is reminiscent of an endurance race more so than it is of a sprint. When you consider that the lifespan of NonStop in the average enterprise can be measured in decades and the operations team can talk about how a Himalaya K Series performed or how exciting it had been when the Cyclone was installed – yes, NonStop systems were big back in their day. Big in terms of spread across the IT world as well as their sheer physical size.

Resilience today is defined as being able to absorb, adapt and transform to meet these challenges arising from the ever-changing world of IT. For NTI this has been particularly relevant when it comes to the way NTI interacts with its global community of customers. Like many NonStop vendors, absorbing the rapid transition of NonStop from being a hardware-focused solution to where it has become primarily a software offering capable of running virtually, called for changes to business practices. Take the hardware element out of the equation and where does the true value of NonStop lie? As that reality is being absorbed, how best to value your own contribution as a software vendor?

Adding another toss of the die has been the decision by the NonStop team to include only a small number of NonStop vendors in the price book that by any way you look at the decision, brings a divisiveness unknown to the community for fifty years. Absorbing the challenges this is presenting continues to call for creative and innovative responses from the NonStop vendors. For NTI it led to a major rethink of its product portfolio that led to the introduction of DRNet®/Unified and a number of packaged offerings under this overarching umbrella brand. For NTI, absorption has been a major pursuit as has been the all-out effort to ensure resilience continues.

With DRNet®/Unified, NTI has proven its ability to adapt. The major product package from NTI of DRNet®/Unified for HPE Customers has led to new business opportunities arising even as it has led to significant wins in the marketplace over a very dedicated and hotly contentious opposition from the NonStop sales teams. Never anticipated, given NTI’s experience through the years, all the same it further highlighted that against the odds the value of a vendor’s product can win by virtue of its capabilities. In doing so, it has emboldened NTI to strengthen its product portfolio to better leverage its recent win in EMEA to better support further opportunities as they arise in 2024.

The recently announced availability of DRNet®/Unified for GoldenGate Conversion is perhaps the best example to date of a vendor absorbing change and then embracing adaptation in a way beneficial to those NonStop customers looking to migrate away from legacy infrastructure. “Combining newly gained expertise with legendary replication prowess,” said Tim Dunne, NTI’s Global Director Worldwide Sales, “it follows the successful migration to the DRNet®/Unified Product suite by a former GoldenGate user. Productizing our offering that is all-encompassing and requiring no additional products and most important of all, any complex integration processes, DRNet®/Unified for GoldenGate Conversion has become the premier DR migration solution the NonStop user community has been looking for ever since GoldenGate came into the Oracle fold.”

To better communicate the value proposition of DRNet®/Unified and to draw as much attention as possible to the new product packaging in support of DRNet®/Unified for GoldenGate Conversion, the NTI sales team took the wraps of this adaptation of DRNet® during last year’s BITUG Little Sig. It further set the scene during the presentation given recently in Santiago to the Chilean NonStop user community. “We have many more NonStop community user events planned for 2024, including the upcoming participation in OzTUG in March as well as the pan-European eGTUG event in April where you will be able to hear a lot more about the progress we have made following early promotion of DRNet®/Unified for GoldenGate Conversion” said Tim Dunne. “And yes, expect to hear even more by the time the annual NonStop TBC Conference takes place in September in Monterey, California.”

Resilience today is being regularly qualified in terms of Business Resilience, Digital Resilience, Cyber Resilience, Operational Resilience and much more. The concern of many within IT is with these many qualifications, the meaning of resilience is being diluted, even normalized to where it can be appended to almost any initiative. Some of the recent promotion by the NonStop sale teams suggests that this dilution will continue for some time but that is their prerogative and yet one more element to absorb. For NTI, having weathered the continuous rate of change taking place everywhere you look across the IT landscape, absorbing and adapting to everything positive that has happened with NonStop is a priority. The move to industry-standard hardware, to embracing open development tools and support for virtual machines and cloud computing are all part of what can be viewed as a positive response to industry changes.

However, it is the third component of resilience that many touting their own version of resilience tend to gloss over and that is transformation. Pursuing true resilience has been transformational and for NTI this has had the effect of transforming the company to be sales and marketing based on the recognition that strategically, it is the NonStop customer who possesses strategy and it is the clear role of vendors, including NTI, to provide the roadmaps that allow the NonStop customer to choose wisely. Roadmaps that are visibly consistent with the strategic direction set by the NonStop customer allow the decision making to be so much easier.

“What we have seen this past year is how the NTI’s business transformation supported by product roadmaps help support the NonStop customers’ strategy,” said Tim Dunne, “have played a key role in the success we have enjoyed of late. While we rarely consider NTI as driving strategy – this is naïve and rather petty, from our observation – the ability we have shown to absorb, adapt and transform are what has contributed to NTI’s understanding of the direction in which NonStop customers are headed. And going in to 2024, we have the product set best suited to the needs of NonStop customers across the globe.”

Perhaps the most important aspect of transformation is NTI’s recognition that it is always the responsibility of the NonStop vendor to address transformation and in doing so, minimize the impact on the NonStop customer. What makes little sense for the NonStop customer is the expectation that they transform in some manner to better accommodate solutions promising resilience. With the approach taken by NTI with DRNet®/Unified for GoldenGate Conversion NTI has made sure no such demands to transform have been placed on the NonStop customer.

Should you have missed our presentations in London or Santiago and are putting your plans together for regional NonStop events elsewhere in the world, be assured you will more than likely find our participation as a sponsor and a presenter. If you are not able to attend or simply miss hearing our presentation or stopping by our booth or table, and you like to know more about how DRNet®/Unified for GoldenGate meets your DR Migration needs, simply call the number below or email us at any time at:

Sales@network-tech.com

Network Technologies International, Inc.
635 Park Meadow Road, Suite 209
Westerville, Ohio 43081-2877

Phone: +1 (614) 794-6000

N.T.I. Limited
Ard Mhuire
Camp Street
Oughterard
Co. Galway
H91 K5PE
Ireland