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Pyalla Technologies … NonStop: Time to talk about unspeakable taboos!

Pyalla

DanDan

pyalla-technologies

pyalla june 19 - 1

The major European user group event of the year for the NonStop community – the European (NonStop) Technical Boot Camp (ETBC) hosted by BITUG and yes, superbly managed by the BITUG Committee – is well and truly over and the many presentations provided are starting to become available. What doesn’t cease to amaze the NonStop community is just how far NonStop has come in a relative short period of time to where the number of choices as to how to deploy NonStop available to the community is remarkable. And yes, outstanding; no matter what your business needs may happen to be, traditional or as-a-service, you will be able to negotiate with the NonStop sales team almost any combination of NonStop to best suit your plans as you transform to Hybrid IT.

However, there is still one topic that barely sees the light of day. With all the talk about the new, very modern NonStop packaged traditionally as well as virtually, why are some in business still talking about NonStop as a legacy platform? The architecture and the programming model no longer in tune with today’s business needs. Indeed, when it comes to the financial services industry and all the talk about open banking and modernization, why is it that there is a reluctance to push for NonStop to be included in the conversation. I cannot recall how many times I have received disdain for apparently, “still holding onto that Tandem box!”

Sitting in the audience at ETBC I was thinking of just how modern, open, capable and yes, ideal the latest NonStop system choices are today when it comes to what businesses think they need. And yet, having said this, it really should be a goal for each of us to play industry analyst at some point and give our enterprises the inside “skinny” on just how good NonStop really is in today’s world of heterogeneous and hybrid IT. Take Gartner for instance – there isn’t a single analyst tasked with tracking NonStop to produce research notes. Not a single analyst and why? Apparently we simply aren’t vocal enough – the enterprises we work with aren’t pushing back on the analyst vendors like Gartner asking them for more information.

I have just posted to the NonStop community blog, Real Time View, the following article – Legacy IT – a world apart from NonStop! Yes, a play on words, but well, hopefully you will appreciate the idea that the world of Legacy IT isn’t inclusive of NonStop. When it comes to Legacy in general NonStop really was never part of that world and for one very good reason. Continuing investments in the platform allowed it to reinvent itself with every changing industry fad, be it for really big systems (e.g. Cyclone), for distributed processing (e.g. CLX), for LAN-centric Client – Server packages (e.g. Himalaya), for any of CISC, RISC, EPIC, etc. technologies and now industry-standard x86 to where today NonStop is disappearing into clouds, fully virtualized and supported by hardware from vendors apart from HPE!

This is by no means a diversionary tactic on my part meant to distract you from what others might be saying about NonStop. On the contrary, I think we absolutely have to start talking about the subject of Legacy and of how NonStop was never a Legacy System. In this latest post, you will read:

“For many of us, there is a reticence to talk about legacy systems. There is almost a fear that even mentioning the word legacy might encourage those around us thinking of NonStop as part of a legacy world. Unfortunately, in our reticence to talk about NonStop and legacy is the very clear perception that we are being evasive – we don’t talk about it so it must be true: NonStop is part of the legacy world! However, NonStop was never part of that legacy world and today, remaining modern, we see NonStop – a vital cog in the transformation to Hybrid IT machine – offering even more options to better capitalize on the growing world of transactions, be they originated in traditional or virtualized environments.”

In other words, by our abstaining from the conversation on Legacy Systems, it leaves other IT professionals with the perception that we are all OK with being called Legacy and in our silence we are leaving open the door to our own eviction! What right do we have to complain if we never told our peers in IT of the full value proposition of NonStop? Many years ago I recall the words of a former ITUG board member who, on receiving his blade system declared “Java Rocks!” To the surprise of many he was able to singlehandedly guide his enterprise to moving applications developed in Java to NonStop and to have these Java applications inherit all the availability and scalability benefits of NonStop. But wait – there is more. Your HPE NonStop development team is doing even more to optimize the performance of Java on NonStop! You want more from your NonStop system then yes, you have been heard and there is good news on its way!

But Java deployment at one enterprise is just the beginning of the story – solutions vendors are gradually catching on. OmniPayments leverages Java as it leverages a lot of open source. Lusis was a port from the Java world and yes, while at ETBC, we heard of more solutions vendors porting to NonStop to leverage the new modern NonStop platform in ways we may not have considered doing it up until now. And so the story goes – nothing breeds success like success. How successful with NonStop do you want to be? The diversion that NonStop has been subjected by “Legacy”! Keeping it out of the conversation has ended! Yes, “Diversion Ends” – just as the sign says. This latest post to Real Time View ends with:

Whereas HPE understands it is very fortunate to be the home of NonStop – is your enterprise, on the other hand, pleased to be moving NonStop into their home? After all, there really isn’t another viable alternative to NonStop when you get right down to it; yes, it is still very much a case that, in today’s world of computing, a very strong argument can be made that #NonStopRocks !!!    

What more could I possibly say!

Richard Buckle
Cofounder and CEO
Pyalla Technologies, LLC