Businesses want to be insight driven

Buzzwords come and go in our industry. For as long as Striim has been in business there has been no letup in what is topical for the day and what gets relegated to the trashcan. Remember data warehouses? And what about 4GL and decision support systems? Simple workflow management schemes have likewise seen their day and if I go back even further, who among you even remember tackling IBM’s nefarious Hierarchical Input Process Output (HIPO) models? What was once considered a breakthrough technology or practice, or model can as quickly fall out of favor as it was gaining popularity and it’s all because, to paraphrase the songwriter, “Technology never sleeps!”

Enterprises aren’t really committed to technology, be it a specific vendor or a certain technology. All enterprises really want to do is to serve their constituency to the best of their abilities. Technology is simply one tool at their disposal for ensuring the right service is on hand to meet the demands of their customers and business partners. For as many years as we care to look back, it’s always been about cheaper faster and yes, good; this is important for every vendor to keep in mind. Striim is leading from the front when it comes to “technology on the move” probably more so than any other NonStop vendor.

HPE has made major announcements as it formalizes what has previously been depicted on PowerPoint slides. HPE CEO Antonio Neri announced the formation of Hybrid IT business unit and promoted former global head of sales, Phil Davis, to be the President of the Hybrid IT. This new group will bring together an end-to-end team responsible for the business units, products, supply chain & operations, services, and sales. It will represent a focus on what is widely viewed by vendors today as the big challenge – enterprises demands on vendors to throw a blanket over mixes of traditional systems, clouds, complex database and customer-facing transactional systems in a manner that allows enterprises to better serve their constituents. HPE is not alone in recognizing the need to regroup around what’s happening today but it would appear that their focus on Hybrid IT has merit.

Recently, Striim became a Global Partner of Microsoft. HPE has long partnered with Microsoft and at this year’s Microsoft Inspire 2018 Conference, also attended by Striim, HPE talked about the edge to cloud world, where “the future will belong to the fast; to accelerate the pace of innovation and time-to-value, enterprises must transform to be edge-centric, cloud-enabled and insight-driven.” Striim said something similar, but with a little more detail when they talked about “enabling continuous, real-time data movement and in-stream transformations from a wide variety of sources, including Oracle Exadata, Teradata and Amazon Redshift, into a wide variety of Azure solutions including Azure SQL Data Warehouse, Azure databases, and other Azure Analytics Services.” You can read more of what Striim addressed on its web site – check out the front page story, Striim and Microsoft Azureor cut and paste this link into your browser:https://www.striim.com/partners/striim-for-microsoft-azure/

“Accelerate the pace!” As well as, “transform to be edge-centric, cloud-enabled and insight-driven!” from Striim, “Continuous, real-time data movement and in-stream transformations!” According to Striim Cofounder and EVP, Sami Akbay, “The message here is that the world is going real time but just as importantly and something HPE is addressing, virtualization on top of commodity hardware, for instance, has made hardware and software less relevant; ultimately the customer cares about ‘the service’ today. To quote James Fitzsimmons, Professor of Service Management, University of Texas at Austin, ‘Service is a time perishable, intangible experience performed for a customer acting as a co-producer.’”

One of the buzzwords that are fast losing popularity is data warehouse appliance. Vendors like Netezza, even Teradata, Oracle with Exadata and IBM with DB2 are losing ground to data lakes that better meet enterprise demands to become insight driven. However, as Akbay point out, “For the appliance guys, the competition is data lakes and Hadoop vendors. But for companies like Cloudera, Hortonworks etc. the competition is Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. It’s not Cloudera that’s going to kill data warehousing appliances- it is AWS Redshift or Azure DW. These are servicesrather than technology stacks!” NonStop is already looking at going after Oracle with NS SQL/MX and is well positioned to take on other vendors as well, but it is the Hybrid of NonStop with Linux and Clouds that, thanks to virtualization, elevate NonStop into greater relevance front-ending than what is happing elsewhere in the data center. “Perhaps the future for NonStop is simply to become the front end that ensures fault tolerance of the clouds behind it that makes an even more compelling argument for NonStop inside the data center,” said Akbay.

Striim supports NonStop as a source and with its Change Data Capture (CDC) capabilities, is helping bring NonStop deeper into Hybrid IT and in so doing, is helping carve out potentially new business opportunities for NonStop. “The basics haven’t changed at all – you want your business to be insight driven then you better ensure that it’s always available no matter where the services come from and this is becoming more of an issue for some enterprises cherry-picking cloud offerings,” added Akbay in closing. And again, should you like to know even more about Striim and how it helps integrate NonStop with the rest of IT or if you would like to know more about the Striim data streaming integration platform, by all means contact the Striim team at any time!

Sami Akbay | EVP and Founder
d 650.241.0680 x123 | sakbay@striim.com
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