NonStop CEOs have their say –

What is the business of your company, Insider Technologies, and how do you work with the HPE NonStop team today? HPE is a partner? Or planned to be? Do you have other partnerships – how would you rate HPE today?

 Insider Technologies manage data for some of the world’s most demanding organisations. Our NonStop applications provide monitoring, tracking and batching solutions that improve efficiencies and reduce risk.

MultiBatch is a next generation Net-Batch tool that reduces batch runtimes, with zero impact on JCL maintenance. Advanced architecture in our Reflex provides object based, state table monitoring of all critical NonStop services.

For nearly 30 years, we’ve put the client front and centre. We’re a dynamic, AGILE-led development team, enabling us to scope and deliver critical solutions that match our customer’s requirements. We are committed to the continuous development of NonStop technologies. ETI-NET’s purchase of Insider Technologies in 2015 underpins this.

Our relationship with HPE goes from strength to strength. Fantastic engagement with the community and the investment to the NonStop platform promised by HPE at TBC2017 is excellent news for everyone involved. HPE has a great solution; Insider Tech has complimentary applications. We’re keen to exploit these synergies whenever possible.

Partnerships are essential to our success.

We continually assess the market to ensure our propositions remain commercially attractive and functionally superior, and we are constantly seeking new Partners who can offer added depth to our portfolio.

What have you learnt about NonStop this year that has you excited for the future of NonStop? Will NonStop continue to play a dominant role when it comes to your product development at Insider Technologies?

 The passion that surrounds NonStop is completely unique. It remains a critical part of any of our client’s infrastructure and there is no sign of this changing. The enthusiasm we saw at eBITUG in London and more recently, at TBC 2017, is very encouraging. We are always evolving our products – MultiBatch 9.5 launches in January – and the NonStop is core to our strategy. We’ll always explore new technologies, but our NonStop applications are our foundation.

What is the status of your work with NonStop X – do you have customers now? In the near-term? And, do you anticipate seeing NonStop customers upgrading to NonStop X? Have you installed NonStop X for your own usage? Do you have access? Have you used the Advanced Technology Center (ATC)?

 We’ve been testing and validating our applications on NonStop X for some months now. Whilst there is some effort involved in migrating our services, we’re well placed to seamlessly migrate our services. Overall, moving to an industry standard architecture with the price reductions that comes with this has to be good for the NonStop community. A slight criticism of HPE: they could make it easier to access lab / test environments for Partners. We’ve gained access to the ATC via ETI-NET; it would be much more efficient if this was openly offered to trusted vendors.

What role do you anticipate seeing for the new Virtualized NonStop (vNS) within the traditional NonStop community? And the new Converged Virtualized NonStop system “package” – a good thing for the NonStop user community? Do you anticipate virtualized offerings being deployed for testing and pilots or will they have an impact on production deployment? Will you be ready or do you have concerns? Do you see it having the potential to open new markets for NonStop?

Virtualization is here and it’s not going away. There will be challenges for our client’s, especially in secure sectors, but there is also terrific opportunities to take traditional NonStop services to a new audience. Our products lightweight and simple to consume, so a move to a virtualized environment doesn’t concern us. The onus is on HPE and its Partners to help develop a clear value proposition that matches up against our competitors in the Enterprise space.

The decision of HPE to introduce a third product to the NonStop product suite – the Converged Virtualized NonStop system really didn’t surprise us as left on their own, we weren’t all that sure how many of our users were equipped (and educated) sufficiently to assemble all of the x86 servers and Ethernet switches to truly emulate a NonStop out-of-the box. In so doing, HPE is ensuring that virtualized NonStop can be tested in a manner where our customers can focus on the application rather than the underlying technology and this just has to be a good thing for everyone. We will keep a watchful eye on how this develops but our initial reaction is that this has to be a good start for the overall NonStop virtualization program.