HPE Discover 2020

As everyone knows HPE Discover was completely virtual this year.  It was free and there were many sign-ups.  I heard that Antonio Neri’s keynote has been viewed over 750,000 times so far. All in all from what I see and hear Discover 2020 has been a great success.  Normally NonStop will have a booth at Discover and we may have a talk or two but, as many know, the NonStop focus is on the NonStop Technical Bootcamp which is usually held in November in San Francisco.   Discover, when it went virtual, decided to have a main week where the standard keynotes and interviews and general sessions would take place but afterwards a series of Discover ‘waves’ would be released.  In fact this week, July 6, the first wave is being released.  These are new virtual session talks focused on specific technology.  I know storage is one of the focus areas for this wave.

A few weeks out from the main Discover show NonStop was given an opportunity to participate in the online sessions.  We proposed two talks one on Payments which will be included in one of the subsequent waves of Discover.  I have not heard which one as of this writing.  The other session was on healthcare which I was volunteered to give.  I had been working with our partner Crossflo which provides healthcare and judicial data transfer capabilities.  I like to position them as the plumbing for a Health Information Exchange (HIE) which is a system where various health entities could share information with each other given proper security.  Imagine a primary care physician, a specialist, labs, pharmacy etc. all sharing information about a patient along with health history. Crossflo did an internal HPE talk and we have been active in not only the United States but Japan and the Middle East.

Something we had done with Crossflo many years ago was a pilot for syndromic surveillance.  Crossflo running on NonStop had interconnected several emergency rooms within a state to each other and to the Health and Human Services (HSS) for that state.  It was a very successful pilot but the state lost funding and sadly it never went into production.  If this sounds like something that might be needed today, given our pandemic, we thought so too.  We did present internally to the account executives within HPE that oversee federal sales and the CDC amongst other agencies.  HPE was also very interested during Discover to highlight any contributions we had concerning Covid-19.  HPE is doing some incredible work and I would point out one really interesting YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yw15-tLViAs&t=273s not associated with NonStop but some really cool stuff from our Artificial Intelligence organization.

Okay sorry for that sidebar, but this is probably why my talk B502 – Emerging Applications for the Healthcare Industry made the cut. If you missed it, then perhaps this is enough of an incentive to return to the HPE Discover site, login and then go to “Sessions” filter on “Healthcare” and it’s one of the first 15 minute talks to show up.

For this session, in my briefing, we were told they wanted them short and interesting like a TED Talk.  I believe most of the online sessions featured at Discover are under 20 minutes.  It was an interesting process since HPE had just released new templates, new approved artwork and wanted to be extremely cautious about what would be presented.  A funny story was that after my first review they did not like the term ‘syndromic surveillance’.  The feedback was that it was too “Big Brother” and HPE should not be seen as participating in that sort of thing.  I sent them the link to the term on the CDC website pointing out that I hadn’t made up the term that was what the thing was called.  So they relented, but they were being very careful about protecting the HPE image.  I believe that is a good thing but does require many reviews.  I was finally cleared.  The next step was a video/audio test to insure my gear (HP laptop) was good enough for the taping.  Fortunately I cleared that hurdle also but if not they had a whole list of stuff they would send: camera, microphone and lights.

One area that they didn’t like was my room.  It was too ‘cluttered’ but that’s where I have my docking station (and what do you mean cluttered!!!).  Anyway, I wasn’t prepared to move my docking station.  The option was take everything off my walls or they could send me a backdrop.  If you see my presentation, you’ll see I opted for the Discover 2020 backdrop.  I am happy to say we recorded it in ‘one take’ although in viewing it later I would have liked to have redone it.  I have received very positive reviews and have been asked for more information so all in all a successful talk.

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Justin Simonds
Master Technologist at HPE