NonStop CEOs have their say

What is the business of your company, 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?

NuWave Technologies is a provider of middleware targeting the NonStop community. We have been in business since the late 90s and have steadily built up a sizable base of well-known brand-name customers. “We are the middleware guys,” when it comes to Web Services, SOAP and more recently, our LightWave products, that support JSON and XML over HTTP, giving both REST client and REST server capabilities. Our approach to providing middleware has always been to supply easy-to-use, but powerful products that require only a small footprint on the NonStop system and that quickly and easily provide standard protocols to integrate with other systems, whether they are operating as a client of NonStop or as a server to NonStop.

While I am quite new to NuWave, having been with the company for about 6 months, I have some experience with other NonStop middleware products at other vendors.  I’m happy to bring that experience to my new role, and am also pleased to see how well NuWave have developed their own suite of products to provide a comprehensive set of capabilities to allow any NonStop application to participate in a REST environment.  I’m also really happy to find myself part of an excellent team of professionals, with many years of NonStop and middleware experience amongst them.

We have enjoyed a long relationship with HPE and are very pleased with recent announcements from HPE about the future of NonStop. HPE recognizes NuWave as the leading provider of Guardian-based REST services middleware, and we work closely with the NED Product Management and Sales teams to maintain that position.

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 NuWave Technologies?

 NuWave is very much focused on the needs of the NonStop user community and we have worked for many years to make sure that NonStop solutions can be integrated with whatever else resides in the data center. Our early products, SOAPam Server and SOAPam Client. were focused on support for SOAP and XML protocols and payloads and these continue to be important product sets for NuWave but increasingly, with openness and standards dominating the conversation, the transition to JSON and REST has brought even more attention to NonStop, and hence our newer LightWave products.

What we have learnt about NonStop this year has to do mostly with the fact that we see so much R&D expenditure – it is very clear to us that HPE has made a renewed commitment to supporting NonStop. There is no question that these are significant investments – to see just how far, and how quickly, they have moved the NonStop system out of the corner of the data center where it essentially played a role that was little more than a transaction switch, to where it can now be an integral part of the business, is stunning.

From our customers’ perspective, it all comes down to the NonStop operating system. The excellent work that the NonStop development team has performed to ensure any applications running on the new L-Series operating system now have the option to run on physical or virtual machines. The ability for a NonStop user to run virtual for Development and Test, and converged (physical) for Production, for instance, provides a level of flexibility never seen before on a large-scale platform like NonStop.

Then the news that you can support blockchain for instance – and NonStop was the first system to see a blockchain distributed ledger implemented – suggests that HPE has even more development in store for NonStop. This is good news for everyone who is a part of the NonStop community. At NuWave, we see blockchain, and other modern applications and infrastructure like Hybrid IT, as further proof that our industry is moving more and more towards REST-based interactions, creating additional need to for our LightWave solutions.

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?

Our solutions are all fully tested on, and certified for, NonStop X, and have been for some time.  We have a number of customers who have purchased NonStop X systems and are in various stages of deployment.  I believe all customers are pleased with the underlying message of the NonStop X – and that is that the investment in moving to Xeon, and therefore a fully standardized platform, shows a level of commitment from HPE to the platform that may have been questioned in the past.

At NuWave, the emphasis we see HPE placing on the openness and standardization of NonStop together with the important message of transformation is encouraging as we see that with our middleware, we too are helping with transformation – bringing NonStop out of the corner, using JSON / REST to better integrate applications and overall, helping remove the “proprietary” label that was once associated with NonStop.

The solutions our customers have deployed are typically reliant on older technology and it may be some time before the vendors involved re-architect their products to align with what is happening in the financial services marketplace, for instance. With all the noise surrounding Microservices, APIs, Blockchain and Clouds, NuWave’s middleware means that today, you can work in this environment without having to touch in-place solutions – and this is great news for all those who value the solutions they have in place.

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?

As with many in the NonStop community we were both surprised and pleased when we first heard of talk that NonStop would be able to support virtual machines tomorrow in the same way as it supports physical machines today. The work that the NonStop development team has done to ensure any NonStop user running on the L-Series operating system would see applications protected, no matter what machine they chose, was quite remarkable and clearly reflected customer input concerning changes to code. In particular we see that the new Converged Virtualized server should be a great entry point for customers – allowing for (hopefully) a low cost, but also a good introduction to NonStop virtualization.  But the really outstanding issue here is that HPE funded NonStop to go down this path and that is indeed equally as remarkable and certainly lays to rest any concerns customers and vendors may have about the future of NonStop.

NuWave remains committed to NonStop and to ensuring NonStop plays well within the broader IT landscape. With as much talk as there is of late about transformation and transforming to hybrid IT, NuWave is committed to modernization and assisting customers with transformation in whatever form they require. As the “Middleware Guys” we see a very bright future where we will be able to provide key integration middleware to those NonStop users who need to not only bring NonStop out from the corner, but to have an active participant in all that the enterprise is engaged in – whether it’s a payments solution, a health care system, a manufacturing application, or something newer like distributed ledger, NonStop will continue to be the fault tolerant platform we have all come to value through the years, and NuWave looks forward to being a part of it.