HPE NonStop – one partner’s perspective

In the June, 2019 issue of NonStop Insider the observations about HPE and NonStop reflected information gathered from a number of sources. Presentations made at ETBC, Scotland, provided informative and accurate information concerning the improving sales landscape – clearly the addition of new systems in 21 countries is news in itself . Also, the HPE press releases following the release of its financial results for Q2 contained a lot of material. However, as good as this information was there still is nothing better than hearing it from the executives themselves and in this regard the HPE Discover 2019 didn’t disappoint. Of course, HPE US NonStop sales made their presence felt at the N2TUG RUG event that followed HPE Discover 2019 and it was good to see Ken Goldman and members of his team present for the occasion. Hearing the good news from both Neil Davis and Ken Goldman over the course of a few weeks certainly helped cement opinions about HPE that had been circulating among the NonStop community for quite some time.

For information about what was covered at HPE Discover you may want to check out twitter and look for combinations of #HPEDiscover and #HPEinfluencer as these were rather well-referenced with a seemingly endless string of tweets covering the event pretty much minute by minute. As for blog posts, as a vendor we were very busy in this regard posting three feature articles on HPE Discover 2019:

Off to HPE Discover: “It’s Vegas, baby – Vegas!”

https://itug-connection.blogspot.com/2019/06/off-to-hpe-discover-its-vegas-baby-vegas.html

All that was revealed at HPE Discover 2019

https://itug-connection.blogspot.com/2019/06/all-that-was-revealed-at-hpe-discover.html

Some late-developing thoughts from HPE Discover, 2019

https://itug-connection.blogspot.com/2019/07/some-late-developing-thoughts-from-hpe.html

One specific reference triggered a lot of conversations and it is covered in the last two posts referenced above and that was when HPE CEO Antonio Neri introduced the concept of Cloudless and of the Cloud being an Experience. For now, you can check out these posts and look for additional references in other publications, but at HPE Discover 2020 Neri promises to reveal the products (and services) that will come together in support of Cloudless. In the meantime, having introduced Cloudless, it’s not a case of Neri being Clueless as one LinkedIn post suggested, but rather a breaking down of siloes that will continue unabated even as mixtures of private and (multiple) public clouds are drawn into enterprises’ Hybrid IT.

The picture above was used in one of the posts referenced above and it highlights how HPE made executives apart from Neri available for interviews with independent bloggers like myself. It is also an indication of the informality that HPE now supports when it comes to interacting with HPE people driving vision, strategy, products and services – having worked with IBM in the ‘70s and ‘80s apart from the period under the leadership of Lou Gerstner, I couldn’t image IBM being this informal. Certainly as a former board member of the IBM SHARE user community I never witnessed anything closely approaching the informality with which HPE operates today – and no, there aren’t any questions HPE is not prepared to address. HPE provided a separate work area for those who were part of HPE’s “influencers” and on this occasion, I represented Mission Critical Systems with a focus on NonStop as well as Payments and Infrastructure in general.

Did I mention the food HPE provided was terrific and the team overseeing the program – a series of broadcast #CoffeeTalk dialogues – did an outstanding job supporting this ragtag bunch of independent writers! As for the HPE executives being grilled during this specific session they happened to be the CCO – Jim Jackson, HPE’s Chief Marketing Office and Jennifer Temple, HPE’s Chief Communications Officer. Given the presence of both of them I thought it only prudent that I ask them about NonStop participation in Greenlake, the program charged with ensuring that by 2022 every HPE product would be available as a service. They were rather nonplused in their response. They didn’t know. However, when I suggested that they already had a great example that they could showcase – HPE’s own IT – they brightened up noting that it would be a very good example of HPE being a vendor that “ate its own dog food!”

All of this is symbolic in a way of a totally changed HPE. It is proud of its culture even as it evolves it, following years of indifference. The HPE staff is more energized than I have seen before. HPE is reshaping itself to be a first choice vendor when it comes to addressing difficult deployments among enterprises looking to embrace Hybrid IT. Having said that it is neither interested in selling deeply discounted servers to tier one cloud providers nor is it interested in competing with the services they provide. Rather, HPE is tackling the integration of the whole and in so doing, has declared its intent to further develop just three systems – ProLiant, Synergy and Apollo. I have started blogging about this decision, but it is worth noting that already NonStop runs on ProLiant (including at the Edge) and Synergy. Given how Apollo caters for the High Performance Computer (HPC) community and it is all GPU based then it is again worth noting that in Leipzig at the GTUG hosted European user event, reference was made to NonStop supporting GPUs … so don’t try to put limits around NonStop.

Last month I closed with how encouraging the news about HPE has been of late. Furthermore, I was encouraged too by the participation of NonStop in programs clearly outside the box in terms of traditional packaging of NonStop. While I am not anticipating NonStop users today migrating to some of these alternate NonStop packages I do anticipate that they will open doors to new markets and attract new partners. As an aside there was references made to the possibility of just a handful of HPE’s largest VARs gaining access to NonStop as well and while I have nothing concrete in support of this right now, other than what can only be viewed as anecdotal, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear more about this in the future. 2019 and into 2020 will be very interesting times for NonStop and for an independent blogger like me, it seems that there will be an endless supply of headlines many of which will feature NonStop. Again, this is a new age for NonStop as we enter a period of what I candidly referred to insider HPE Discover 2019 as NonStop, no limits!

All opinions and observations expressed here

are those of Pyalla Technologies, LLC,

and are not provided by HPE employees.