HPE RUG Events Worldwide

It was a time when the NonStop community could be seen enjoying time in the Sun!

NonStop Insider

SunTUG is now behind us and as expected, turnout was excellent. For those left behind in the grips of a winter landscape, it wasn’t unexpected to be inundated with happy snaps of folks at the event or pictures taken later on the golf course. Perhaps the best presentation came from HPE NonStop Worldwide Product Management leader, Karen Copeland, who gave an update on HPE and NonStop and it was both comprehensive as it was enlightening. Of particular interest to those who pay attention to what HPE is saying in the marketplace was the update provided by Karen on just how big a deal NonStop happens to be for HPE’s own IT organization. If you get a chance to hear Karen give this presentation, don’t miss it. I hear from those attending SunTUG that it was among the highlights of the event.

According to SunTUG’s Pat Hill, who along with SunTUG President, Teri Sears, did much of the heavy lifting to ensure a successful RUG Event;:

We had another well attended event with over 100 attendees. We had Karen Copeland (Manager, Worldwide Product Management for HPE NonStop Mission Critical Solutions) kick it off with a very informative discussion on the state of the NonStop platform and where it is headed. We also had great presentations from OmniPayments, NTI Network Technologies, Gravic, CSP, XYPRO, comforte, Idelji and TIC Software. We had great support from other vendors in attendance as well, including Integrated Research, ETI-NET, ACI Worldwide, QSA, Ascert, Crystal Point and Connect. We ended the event on Saturday with our annual golf tournament. This was a great event and we appreciate all who attended and the vendors for their support.

The participation by so many NonStop partners is once again a reminder of just how important the support of partners is for all members in the NonStop community. In a recent presentation at the ABB Customer World event (held by HPE Partner, ABB), HPE CEO Antonio Neri noted that 70% of HPE business is derived through partnerships. In a popular car journal, extolling the virtues that come when two car manufacturers joined forces to work on a single vehicle, it was hard to miss the emphasis being placed on partnerships. “Toyota found a willing collaborator to share engineering and financial resources with – in this case, BMW.” After which the journalist wrote how, for the new car, “Toyota worked closely with BMW, which engineered the hardware and hardpoints of the entire shared platform. What comes out the other side is an ‘engineering package.’” And now, Toyota and BMW have brought to market two cars differing only in the final styling elements each manufacturer embraced. Point is, the car involved was always going to be a specialized, low volume sports car appealing to just a select subset of the marketplace and separately, these two manufacturers couldn’t have made the financials work. But together, they produced something quite extraordinary.

For the NonStop community as we listen to HPE NonStop’s presentations throughout 2019, the value of partnerships will be hard to miss. Whether it is new products being added to the NonStop price book, well-known third party products replacing existing products, the access to services for migration and new platform deployments, the NonStop team is going to extraordinary lengths to embrace partnerships and to demonstrate that together, NonStop and its users benefit in ways unimaginable just a decade ago. For those who at one time or another worked inside NonStop development, it had always been a case of casting a wary eye over any potential partnership opportunity – would they understand the essential NonStop “special sauce” well enough so that they wouldn’t compromise its fault tolerant properties? The skepticism was rampant for a very long time, but no longer. And this is a very big takeaway for anyone attending NonStop RUG events anywhere they are held around the world.

At SunTUG, Karen covered this in her keynote presentation. Her session provided an in-depth look at where NonStop sits today in terms of product features, product directions and even additional insights into new customer deployments. However, her slide on NonStop partners has grown considerably since the last time it was shown:

More impressive still for those looking to migrate and modernize their systems via NonStop X deployments or perhaps even to launch into virtualized NonStop (vNS), Copeland made it a point to call out all those NonStop partners who would join with the NonStop team as participants in HPE’s Migration and Modernization Services. The following slide Copeland used in her presentation is a summary of all those partners who have met HPE criteria and who have been chosen to participate in this program:

In other submissions to this issue of NonStop Insider you will read of references made to a very successful partner event held in Bangkok. This involved the participation of a select number of partners who are already actively engaged with HPE in the AsiaPac/Japan region. This is just further evidence of the commitment being made by HPE in support of the NonStop vendor community and every stakeholder in NonStop benefits greatly. Of course, there are still major event coming up in Edinburgh (ETBC) and Las Vegas (HPE Discover) about which there will be references made in future issues of NonStop Insider so make sure you keep checking each issue as they come out!