NonStop CEOs have their say

What is the business of your company?

We provide NonStop customers with software technology they need to secure their data coming, going, and resting on NonStop systems, and, we provide solutions to allow NonStop customers to extend the value of NonStop data, mainly through data access, but by also streamlining Operations.

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?

We work very closely with HPE NonStop. Our Account Executives are talking to NonStop customers every day, in turn they work with HPE Account Teams to get a deeper understanding of the customers’ needs and to see where there is synergy in working together.  Having technology solutions – whether in the HPE Price Book or not – that help NonStop customers achieve their business and operational goals is our ultimate objective, and working with HPE is very important to us at comforte.

Yes, comforte do have other Partnerships, and this is also a key strength to our business.  TANDSoft, Carr-Scott, TIC, DMB Group, Nexbridge, Gemini Communications, Infrasoft, 4TechSoftware, all share in the same mission – to provide NonStop customers with the best technology for their business – each partner has a particular focus, which provides them with the ability to be a leader in their domain.  By Partnering with these companies, our Account Executives are able to truly act as NonStop Trusted Advisors when talking to customers in order to help them fulfill their goals.

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 comForte Inc.?

Well it is only the beginning of March 2018 and there has already been an announcement by Mark Pollans about a new NonStop server coming to the market.  We heard publically about the new NS2 – virtualized, converged NonStop which will be available soon.  Along with the additional updates that Mark shared, it does show that HPE is continuing to invest in NonStop technology to match the double-digit sales growth in NonStop systems 5 of the last 7 years.  As NonStop continues to develop virtualized configuration options, customers will start to take a more serious look at deploying these into their organizations.

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?

We definitely see a lot of interest by NonStop customers to upgrade to NonStop X in the near-term.  The interest seems to be driven by the need to get off of older technology, in order to capture new business or handle more growth, as well as the hard to miss performance upgrades coming from the NonStop X platform.

Have you installed NonStop X for your own usage? Do you have access? Have you used the Advanced Technology Center (ATC)?

Yes, we have installed NonStop X for our own usage as part of our Product Development at comforte.  The NonStop will continue to play a key role as NonStop will remain our stable foundation for our strategic initiatives.

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 with your products or do you have concerns? Do you see it having the potential to open new markets for NonStop?

Virtualized NonStop will be the key technology for the future. I can see many customers and solution providers going with vNS for development and QA sooner than later as the idea that every NonStop developer has its own system environment and that you can run various QA processes in parallel is very appealing. The NS2 is right step to get this started now. Once the VMWARE version of vNS will be available I can envision that many customers will look into vNS also for D/R and or capacity peaks. All of comforte products are also available for vNS already.