HPE NonStop Corner – one partner’s perspective

It is great to see that again HPE gets it right and this week, we saw one of the results from all the effort HPE is putting into its own transformation. In case you missed reading about it, it’s been a sizable transformation from one of the biggest vendors in tech. Today, HPE prizes value over volume and its bottom line is beginning to reflect this transformation in a positive way. There is definitely a short term impact on the top line but this is completely understandable as HPE pivots away from hardware box sales to the more important software solutions sales.

For the NonStop community this pivot is recognizable in a number of ways, most importantly though is the huge transformation under way in support of NonStop as a software offering. This pivot is also recognizable with HPE’s IT move to deploy NonStop at the very heart of its operations and to make NonStop SQL central to its plans to reduce the number of databases the company had relied on in the past. The HPE’s move to NonStop as a software offering and NonStop at the heart of HPE’s IT shouldn’t be overlooked by any member of the NonStop community nor should the community keep quiet about this – every CIO should be made aware of these developments at HPE.

Looking back through CIO magazine for articles published in 2019 I came across the interview with HPE CEO Antonio Neri. The interview was conducted by Eric Knorr and appeared May 13, 2019, as HPE CEO Antonio Neri rearchitects for the future –

“Obviously, we believe the most exciting part today is going to be extracting outcomes from the data. I mean, when I started, all the microprocessors, low-level technologies were important. That’s how we started. But today, it’s all about the software, it’s all about experience, and all about analytics in that context. That’s where the excitement is …

“We’ve invested in IT, because through the last 15 years, all the spins and mergers and whatever, there was no real investment in modernizing the IT side. Now we have an opportunity to really rearchitect everything. When I launched HPE Next we had 11 ERP systems in the company going all the way back to the Compaq merger. By the end of 2020, we’re going to have one. We used to have 23 master data systems; now we have only one.”

Perhaps my favorite PowerPoint slide coming out of 2019 paints the comprehensive story of how far NonStop has come in forty plus years through multiple acquisitions and mergers and yet, it now plays a pivotal role in the plans where Neri is taking HPE –

It is the recognition that NonStop “continues to evolve with current processor and software technologies” that stands out the most with the images beneath it going a long way to illustrate just how far NonSotp has come. But there is more to this story as evident by HPE posting a 2020 Gartner report to its web site. In case you missed it, only a few days have passed since the Gartner report was made available for downloading on February 12, 2020:

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) secured positive rating in all 6 categories in 2020 Gartner Vendor Rating report

This report opens with –

HPE continues on its multiyear path to transform its business, delivering its consumption-based as a service model to evolve the IT infrastructure and platform software market

And then provides its own take on how HPE is delivering on its strategy with references provided to fault tolerance and NonStop –

HPE continues to have a broad portfolio that is led by its servers and storage offerings as part of the Hybrid IT division that strives to implement a multicloud strategy, which allows organizations to deploy and manage applications on-premises or in the cloud. The focus of the entire HPE organization has been to drive the consumption-based as a service model and the ability to deliver, manage and service the entire HPE portfolio.

HPE is the second-largest server vendor globally in both unit shipment and vendor revenue, behind Dell EMC but far ahead of the next-largest competitors — Inspur, Lenovo and Huawei. HPE has a very large installed base of server customers and offers a wide and deep portfolio including industry-standard, fault-tolerant, UNIX, scale-up, HPC and edge servers.

Within its mission-critical system segment, HPE is in the midst of a multiyear transition from Itanium to x86-based hardware, with the latter now available in both its fault-tolerant NonStop portfolio and scale-up Superdome systems.

It’s not every day you get a Gartner report solely focused on HPE and to have it mention NonStop, albeit briefly, is encouraging. However, after successfully navigating forty plus years as an architecture designed specifically to support mission critical applications needing to run 24 x 7, it’s satisfying to realize that the story of NonStop continues unabated and that HPE itself values the architecture enough to anchor all of its own businesses on NonStop and the NonStop SQL database.

You can always reach me via email at:
Richard@pyalla-technologies.com

All opinions and observations expressed here

are those of Pyalla Technologies, LLC,

and unless otherwise expressly identified,
are not provided by HPE employees.