BITUG SIG Report

We were trying a new location in London for the Little SIG this year. It was called OSIT (Office space in Town). Think it worked quite well – coffees/teas /lunch was all very pleasant. We had some issues with latency of some of the speakers installed so at back of room was an echo but on whole worked quite well. Not a Trinity House atmosphere but worked all same.

We had quite a full agenda and the overall theme was as has been case at all events this year – ransomware and what companies/HPE are doing or should do to prevent this happening to them. Lots of quite horrifying stats around and the thought that ransomware costs worldwide 30 billion this year and expected to increase 10 x fold by 2030!!

Let me start with my take on what this meant for TCM. To buck that trend with the focus on ransomware, Shiva, from TCM, gave his presentation around modernization and gave a brief overview of what open source tools that exist today that run perfectly well on NonStop to help organizations begin their modernization journeys – and that although the thought of replacing an old trustworthy Cobol based app with a more modern language driven solution is a daunting task it does not have to be. And more importantly you don’t need to ‘flatten it and rebuild from the ground up’ just starting small by using perhaps Git for version control and some tools like ansible etc. to automate some procedures like testing or getting the new version of software into production are all small steps that can make a huge impact both in terms of cost savings but also reduction in human error. All really cool stuff and TCM are happy to help any organization begin their journey if they don’t know where to start.

Tim gave an update of DRNET offering and how with the AIB project they can now say that DRNET is Base24 ready. So a compelling story for those still using Golden Gate (and Tim made it clear NTI are targeting all GG users)

Neil Davis gave his State of Nation address on how sales have been in EMEA region this year and announced he is now also responsible for Latin America that we have known for a while.

It was nice that a number of vendors – HPE, Gravic, NTI – all mentioned TCM in their presentations so we are getting good publicity from a TCM stand point.

We followed the SIG by the traditional beer bust at the local BrewDog that was packed to the rafters! Maybe not best location on a Thursday evening! (Apparently most Londoners now only work in office Tues-Thurs so Thursday evening is the new Friday evening where everyone goes for a drink before going home!)

One final note? We will also look at holding Little SIG in November rather than December so we don’t compete perhaps with the December Christmas shoppers /parties – and increased hotel prices!!