ETI-NET caught up with its customers, prospects and HPE

Without a doubt the highlight of the past month for ETI-NET was 2017 NonStop Technical Boot Camp. Held adjacent to the San Francisco airport, in the Hyatt Regency, which made travel so much easier for the NonStop community it was very encouraging to see just how many members of the NonStop community showed up for the NonStop team’s showcase event. When HPE and Connect re-energized the NonStop community several years ago with the first Boot Camp there was an expectation that the event would grow in size and cater for a global community and that the expectation was fulfilled was evident this year with the number of participants that had flown in for the event. More surprising still? There was a group of students from San Jose State university making the rounds on the partner pavilion, which was the first time we had seen such an occurrence.

This event is important to ETI-NET because it gives us an opportunity to interact directly with our customers and with HPE field people with whom we work as well as gives us a chance to meet the key people from NonStop development. As a result we were able to have productive meetings with all the key banks, credit card issuers, and everyone in attendance that is part of the financial payments ecosystem, whether they were local or had come from overseas. Most important of all for ETI-NET was the opportunity Boot Camp provided for us to spend time with our partner from Asia where business opportunities for ETI-NET continue to grow.

Boot Camp is also an event where our technical director has a chance to meet the customers face to face and listen to them – yes, he liked it and it was quite productive for him. As ETI-NET COO, Sylvain Tétreault observed, “We take this opportunity to plan our upcoming participation at key events in 2018 with the local teams putting together the programs (e.g. GTUG, etc.); early-stage planning with our customer for some of their 2018 migrations; and yes perhaps most importantly, identifying key features that we will be introducing into our development plans.”

Of course a nice surprises was the attention being given to blockchain. Although we had heard about the NonStop team’s involvement in the port of R3: Corda to NonStop and knew that there had been demos of blockchain on NonStop at HPE Discover Las Vegas during the summer, to listen to senior members of the HPE management team evangelize the benefits of blockchain as fervently as they did was really a pleasant surprise.

Virtualization and the identification of future NonStop workloads being virtualized was not so much a surprise as it was a recognition of the changing landscape that NonStop finds itself in – virtualized NonStop expanding to include support for VMware was perhaps the best news we heard on this topic. OpenStack may have its advocates but when it comes to the commercial world where ETI-NET operates, it is decidedly a VMware marketplace. The ongoing focus by the NonStop SQL/MX team to more fully embrace Oracle compatibility is also good news for all NonStop vendors. Like many others we talked to, we are hoping to hear more about just how compatible NS SQL has become with Oracle and how easy it is to migrate from Oracle to NS SQL from our local NonStop support teams. Needless to say, this is a very important aspect of any growth plan for NonStop. Of course, ETI-NET believes that we can bring something to the table that helps with migrations to NonStop and that our vBackBox has a role to play, so perhaps by the time next year’s event rolls around, there will be more news coming from us on this topic.

The news from HPE that new logos were added to the NonStop user community and that the community has grown by as many as 15 to 20 systems is indeed very good news not just for HPE but for every stakeholder in the NonStop community. Certainly the energy behind the virtualization of NonStop suggests there will be new business opportunities being created by HPE for NonStop and in time, we can see new opportunities for virtualized NonStop workloads finding their way onto clouds, but that is something that ETI-NET believes is a little further out there even as we watch HPE go to market plans very carefully.

In summary, TBC gave ETI-NET an opportunity to hold very productive meetings with our customers and prospects from all over the world. It was a time, too, to meet with HPE developers, solutions architects as well as executives and management from the company. We are very encouraged by all that we saw and are hopeful for even bigger events in the coming year with lots of new faces turning up to hear all that the NonStop community has to convey – after all, there is a lot riding on NonStop being successful within HPE and from what we have seen with the dramatic changes of late, it looks like HPE’s attention has well and truly been gained by the NonStop team.

Said Hini
said.hini@etinet.com (514) 663-0501
http://etinet.com/