HPE RUG events worldwide, 2018

All eyes will now be focused on the newly created Hybrid IT business unit and its leader, elevated to the lofty position of President, Phil Davis. For as many RUG and HPE events that have been held over the course of the past three plus years, Hybrid IT has held center stage. However, responsibilities were spread over multiple organizations. But no longer, as there is now just one business unit that is connecting the dots from development, supply chain and operations, product management and marketing to sales and supporting services. Former heads of Software Defined and Cloud, Alain Andreoli, and Hybrid IT Infrastructure, Ric Lewis, will now have a single boss and this will make go-to-market plans easier to execute. The message from HPE about simplifying the transformation to Hybrid IT now makes its presence felt across the HPE organization.

What can we expect to hear at future RUG events? What changes of direction, if any, and what new messages can we expect to hear from NonStop product management? The fervor is still there, of course and the evangelism being done today by NonStop product management will continue but increasingly, anticipate seeing a more inclusive approach being taken by the NonStop team. Open source, open platforms and in general, open everything as it all pertains to consuming compute any which way you want and yes, paying for it as and when you need it will certainly take on a new level of prominence. After all, it’s always been the message from HPE senior management that the real benefits of cloud computing lie in the elasticity of provisioning that comes with being able to configure resources on the fly.

However, when you look at the big picture and consider the positioning that was being done strategically, you will see that HPE will be moving NonStop closer to its core solutions, in particular, SimpliVity and Synergy. OneView is another important component and what was once referred to as New Stack is now OneSphere. When you consider the primary strategy slide (below) that first appeared in presentations given by Ric Lewis at HPE Discover 2017, Madrid, you can see that for enterprise users where scale and capacity are important, it is Synergy that dominates the slide. Does NonStop run on Synergy? For now, the short answer is no, it does not. However, don’t hold your breath on this one as all that it will take is for one enterprise customer to ask for virtualized NonStop to run as a virtualized NonStop workload on Synergy (using Synergy composable infrastructure), then it will happen!

Over the past three months I have had the good fortune to present at both GTUG (Leipzig) and N2TUG (Dallas) as well as vendor kick-off events (Denver) with more to follow this month. What this has allowed me to do is to dig deeper into the presentations and video clips HPE has posted to the web site – is the HPE videos shot at HPE Discover from “The CUBE” something you all checked out? You should, as they hold a wealth of information and VP & GM Randy Meyer has been featured more than once. Maybe at future RUG events there are opportunities to play a couple of relevant videos during the luncheon adjournments. Just sayin’!

When it came to RUG events in July, the focus was definitely on the Asia Pacific region where events were held in both Korea and Taiwan. There was good representation by HPE that included NonStop product management participation with Mark Pollans making the trip to the other side of the Pacific. These events attracted HPE’s partners and resellers, SI and implementation services providers and among the audience were new prospects for NonStop as well. When you consider the intentions of those putting in the effort to organize RUG events anywhere in the world, high on the list of goals is to attract prospects so it was good to see this occurring at these events.

As for upcoming RUG events, August will be a quiet month as is usual, given the northern hemispheres predisposition to take a summer break, but already the calendar for September is filling in. Check out the following update for RUG events close by to where you live:

DUST – September 11 (Scotsdale, AZ)
ATUG – September 19 (Atlanta, GA)
OzTUG – September 18 (Sydney, Australia) and September 20 (Melbourne, Australia)
CTUG – September 26-27 (Toronto, Canada)
MATUG – September 28 (Baltimore, MD)
NonStop TBC – November 11-14 (Burlingame, CA)