Infrasoft warms to news from TBC

It has been our experience that the NonStop Technical Boot Camp (TBC) has always proved to be spirited affair – the HPE NonStop team is always excited to be revealing something new! Over the past couple of years we have been presented with the news of the deep port to the Intel x86 architecture and more recently, the NonStop developers added what they now refer to as a second product line, with NonStop capable of running on top of virtual machines. Support for both traditional and virtual machines certainly  opens up doors for vendors including ourselves here at Infrasoft but it always comes back to just how rapidly the NonStop community embraces the changes and equally as important, what new customers they can attract to NonStop.

Conventional wisdom among the NonStop community suggests that change will be embraced slowly and this has more to do with the types of industries served by NonStop than anything else. When it comes to big banks and telcos making sudden technology moves, it rarely happens. However, this is good news for the NonStop community in many ways as vendors do need time to work through the specs and look to how best capitalize on opportunities as they surface – for Infasoft, it has been good news all around, with the retirement of SWANs and the retirement of SNAX following the introduction of NonStop X.

However, this year there wasn’t a whole lot of new information revealed during the event itself. Blockchain, and the news coming from HPE that it will be offering “Blockchain-as-a-Service” and that it will be based on the port of R3:Corda to NonStop X (and NonStop SQL/MX), had already been announced but all the same, it was good to hear more on this message by someone within HPE who was new to NonStop and brought with them a fresh perspective on the value proposition of NonStop underpinning such an important technology. The message, though, that blockchain has the potential to be as disruptive a technology as was the arrival of the internet wasn’t lost on the attendees and we expect to hear a lot more from HPE on their blockchain pursuits in the very near future.

In many ways it was news from the HPE NonStop team that didn’t surprise us that had the biggest impact. When news first broke of virtualized NonStop (vNS) and that it would be running solely on commodity, off-the-shelf (COTS), hardware that wasn’t coming from the HPE NonStop team, we were a little surprised. To then be briefed by the HPE NonStop team that configuration of a functioning NonStop system on top of COTS was problematic at best and more likely, extremely difficult at worst, that early surprise proved to be a big reality check. To then be given a sneak peek by HPE NonStop of what was to be added as a third product of the NonStop family, a Converged Virtualized NonStop product line, with the hardware pre-configured and ready to run NonStop on top of a virtual machine, it was confirmation that NonStop was stepping into some difficult territory.

And it has been our experience that when such steps are taken they would open up a raft of new opportunities for the vendor community. Infrasoft, like many of our peers within the NonStop vendor community, will be taking a long, hard, look at this new system once it is formally announced as we are more than likely to see something we can leverage that helps bring Converged Virtualized NonStop to even more new users than HPE may expect to reach.

Perhaps it was fitting that the best party of the event was hosted by comForte. Amazing may be a more fitting description, as the dinner attracted the cream of the NonStop community including a number of executives from HPE. comForte needs to be credited for pulling such an event together as it is never easy to transport that many people offsite and yet, they not only pulled off the transfer but ensured that everyone was well looked after. When CEO, Michael Deissner, briefed the crowd he found an attentive audience and with news that comForte would be taking security beyond NonStop and into the broader enterprise markets together with the announcement that it will be entering the solutions marketplace with a payments solution offering, the attendees received the news with surprise tinged with just a little wonder.

Overall, Infrasoft partners with comForte and has enjoyed many years of working together, we need to thank comForte for the invitation they extended to us even as we have to thank all those involved with organizing TBC itself and if you would like more information about Infrasoft products then please reach out to the comForte sales team.

And of course, you can always contact me directly at our Infrasoft office.

Peter Shell | Managing Director | Infrasoft Pty Limited
peter.shell@infrasoft.com.au | tel +61 411 105 330
www.infrasoft.com.au