2021. What an interesting year. With the world turned upside down by a pandemic that seemingly had its sights set on...
NTI watching what’s changed: the need for social distancing and what hasn’t changed: the need for business continuity.
NTI
DanKnowing how well NonStop customers and vendors have made adjustments during this time of dealing with the global pandemic, it wouldn’t be a surprise to read that here at NTI, we too have been making adjustments. The NonStop community has reacted positively and in this issue of NonStop Insider there are sure to be many articles covering the changes made. What NTI would like to emphasize is that from its earliest days, NTI has been about supporting our employees who prefer to work remotely.
Development and support have worked remotely for many years – it’s just the nature of our business working with the NonStop community; to tap into resources wherever they can be found. Expertise has never been centered in just one town or region and while we reference Silicon Valley, for us it’s not about a bright and perhaps futuristic campus or a shiny tower building, but rather, it’s about our people and we have had infrastructure in place to support working remotely for a very long time. The single biggest positive outcome from this global pandemic is the effectiveness of remote conferencing, whether full-on video or not, as NTI has turned to this medium to great success.
What has changed of course is the willingness to embrace new business models to best respond to a world that remains in lockdown and where conducting business of any kind is mostly done online. eCommerce rules and with eCommerce comes a sizable uptick in transaction processing. Just watching the bevy of UPS, FedEx and PRIME vans moving up and down our streets is a constant reminder of how much business has changed to address a new and unexpected change in social interaction. Will we return to long commutes once a form of normality returns? Will we happily flock to large educational institutions? Will our ideas on healthcare undergo even more change? In all likelihood we will become even more dependent on our online infrastructure even as transactions lead to so much more data being captured and as we have all heard of late, NonStop is where data is created. And that is a changing landscape we all need to be cognizant of – shaking hands, high-fiving and sitting for hours around a conference table may be a thing of the past.
What hasn’t changed is the need of businesses everywhere to proactively pursue workable business continuity plans. “The focus on Business Continuity remains as strong as ever,” said Tim Dunne, NTI’s Senior Vice President Worldwide Sales. “And for good reason; no business wants to be offline as the world of business becomes a fully online business. As an industry we can debate whether it’s happening in the data center, out on the edge, or even whether it is driving business to the cloud, but the bottom line remains.” What hasn’t changed is businesses’ desire to attract and retain customers and nothing impacts that bottom line more adversely than you driving your customers into the arms of your competition.
“It’s all about maximum uptime and this calls for an all-inclusive approach to ensuring there are more than one data center, cloud or service provider on the ready and fully capable of taking over the operations should anything happen. Recent earthquakes here in America, as small as they may have been, are a reminder that the global pandemic isn’t the only potential natural disaster that may impact our ability to remain in business.” NonStop has been fortunate to be well served by product offerings that support business continuity but as focus of business continuity vendors turns elsewhere, there are many NonStop users looking for more modern solutions in support of their new NonStop systems.
It was only last month that we announced that NTI was expanding the partnering with TANDsoft that dates back to 2003. In so doing NTI added FS Compare (and will add shortly FS Repair) to our product portfolio. FS Compare has attracted considerable interest and already we can see a half-dozen or so PoCs being started in the near term. To date we are seeing that this offering is proving to be attractive to those members of the NonStop community that have relied upon GoldenGate product. This has now led to a number of Proof of Concepts being undertaken and we anticipate that this will open up an even bigger market opportunity for NTI and its data-focused solutions.
When it comes to business continuity knowing your replication solution has you ready to switch to a disaster site where data is truly replicated, having speed on your side really counts. What we are observing in practice is that NonStop users are seeing how fast FS Compare performs – simply accessing data at the block level, regardless of data base size. Already TANDsoft has reported that in customer trials, “FS Compare reduced data validation from 1 hour, 12 minutes to 4 minutes.” And that’s fast! Social distancing has forced us to undo lifelong practices and make adjustments to the way we pursue work. Our homes have been turned into remote offices even as the stream of delivery vans has helped maintain a sense of normality. When it comes to business and its support of customers, business continuity needs haven’t changed and NTI continues to provide leadership in all aspects of business relating to data – replicating, integrating, distributing and transformation.
Should NTIs addition of FS Compare to our product portfolio be of interest to you we would welcome you calling or emailing us at any time – we would be only too happy to provide further explanation of our strategy, products, customer support and yes, all that NTI does to bring a better business continuity
Network Technologies International, Inc.
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Westerville, Ohio 43081-2877
Phone: +1 (614) 794-6000
N.T.I. Limited
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Ireland
Phone: +353 (91) 463086