CTUG Fall Conference 2018 summary

The CTUG fall conference was another great event. It was held at the HP Enterprise head office for Canada in Mississauga, on September 26, 2018. We made a few changes this year, we moved our date up one month to make it a little easier for HPE to attend. We also were able to have a barbecue at lunch with the milder weather in September. There was an excellent turnout again with over a hundred people in attendance. The day was started off with opening remarks from Ken Goldman of HPE. Ken indicated the NonStop business in North America is having another good year with positive growth numbers.

The theme for this year’s event was “NonStops Value Today.” There are more reasons to choose NonStop today and we wanted to show how that value continues to grow. Our first presentation of the day was Justin Simonds who gave us an update on all the good work being done on the NonStop product line. From vNonStop to Blockchain integration, the future is now and continues to look good.

Our keynote presenter this year was Jeff Skinner who is now the head of worldwide mission critical Blockchain for the enterprise. There is a lot of interest and information out there on Blockchain and Jeff did a good job on explaining what Blockchain and distributed ledger technology is all about. It is a technology of the future for sure we just have to find the use cases in the NonStop market that will move it forward.

We were fortunate to a customer presentation this year from David Wiseman of Telus. He presented a modernization journey he called “COBOL to Cucumber.” David explained how Telus has changed their development direction to embrace new languages and tools. From SOAP3 to Java and REST with ccontinuous integration and deployment with Jenkins. Then it was on to Cucumber and behavior Driven Development (BDD). I am still trying to figure it out but it just shows how open and modern the NonStop can be. Many thanks to David for taking the time to share his work with the community!

We were treated to a very nice barbecue lunch which was enjoyed in the cafeteria area which backs onto a lovely green space. After lunch is the vendor tracks and we were able to fit in a few extra spots this year. We also had the use of larger meeting rooms in the HPE area. The presentations were well attended and I think vendors were pleased with the interest in their solutions. We closed off the day with a question and answer session for the HPE staff in attendance and then onto the draw prizes provided by the vendors and HPE.

We finished with a reception in the atrium area and even enjoyed some Steam Whistle pilsner beer from the keg. Keeping the beer bash going as best we can. I think a good time was had by all and we are looking forward to next year.

The CTUG board would like to thank all of our sponsors, HPE, Intel, Vendors and our CTUG members for making this event a success.

See you next year!

Dave Harper

President, CTUG