Social Media Round-Up

Leadership comes in many forms and presents itself in many guises. What may seem to be a leadership for one situation may not work in another. The captain of a rugby team may be the right individual for an on-field confrontation but inappropriate with a game of chance. When it comes to IT and the support of an enterprise, poor decision making can lead to not just damage to a brand or the services being provided but to a decline of the business itself. All too often, leadership is the difference between success and simply going nowhere at all.

While responding to some recent tweets, a colleague reminded me of a scene in the movie Stripes where Bill Murray’s character turned to an army sergeant and said, “you are the big toe!” Or to be more precise, Murray said, “Sergeant Hulka is always gonna be here to be that big toe for us.” The response from the sergeant was a surprise and then scorn as he misunderstood the context; being the big toe meant he was the leader who the rest of the “toes’ would follow. Absence of your big toe meant you really couldn’t consider going anywhere.

Take for instance the following post to LinkedIn by Micro Focus:

“It’s the ingenuity and innovative thinking of our Software Engineering and IT teams that make Micro Focus a leading global enterprise software company. They are responsible for ensuring that our world-class secure infrastructures exceed business requirements and for advancing the performance and capacity of our solutions.”

This certainly covers all the bases in terms of keywords and phrases. However, it’s the opening phrase “ingenuity and innovative thinking” that should get your attention. Increasingly today, leadership is coming down to how ingenious and innovative your leadership happens to be – doing the same-o, same-o may be good for some fast food outlets but in the world of finance and even more importantly perhaps, retail, given the circumstances the global pandemic is dictating, you have to try even more options to simply stay afloat. If you are the big toe, then lead!

Perhaps the heading of the latest HPE press release says it all; “New HPE Trusted Supply Chain initiative launched today to expand HPE’s supply chain offerings and advance end-to-end security with U.S. factory-made servers that feature hardened data protection during manufacturing process.”

What does this mean for those enterprises looking to add new servers to the server farms?  Turns out, according to this press release, HPE is the only major server manufacturer to produce made-in-USA industry-standard servers.2. The new servers include advanced security features that are built by vetted HPE employees in highly secure U.S. facilities as part of the HPE Trusted Supply Chain initiative launched today.

The new HPE ProLiant DL380T server is shipping today to U.S. customers as the first industry-standard server to be produced through the HPE Trusted Supply Chain process, which HPE plans to expand to the rest of its portfolio in 2021.

“Customers turn to HPE to accelerate innovation and power any application need while gaining data protection throughout the lifecycle,” said John Grosso, vice president of Global Operations Engineering, Supply Chain, at HPE. “With the new HPE Trusted Supply Chain, we are furthering our commitment to deliver the highest level of security in all of our server products by diversifying our supply base with U.S. sourcing and applying stronger security at the factory floor. We are ensuring that our customers will have full visibility and cyber assurance of their servers to focus resources on deploying their new solutions and optimizing their IT experience.”

In the coming months we will be hearing more about these servers as there is every likelihood that they will find their way into the NonStop product line. I have to believe that anything that adds to cyber assurance (of their servers) even as they leverage advanced security features which I am assuming not only is coming from diligence on the part of HPE but Intel as well. Likewise, anything that suggests there is even more performance coming from Intel should never be discounted by the NonStop community; if it happens then yes, we will take it.

While I am not privy to either HPE or Intel roadmaps it’s certainly easy to find out more on social media and while there are no guarantees that these will result in future take-up by HPE or the NonStop team, they do provide a sense that the game is far from over for the Intel x86 architecture.

Social media this month not only led to video clips, promotional posts to LinkedIn and press releases by HPE but made it clear that HPE isn’t sitting on its laurels. When it comes to being “the only server” wanting to “accelerate innovation” and yes, “the first industry-standard server to be produced,” its backing up earlier claims that it is leading the way!

For NonStop, for the Enterprise, and for the NonStop vendor community, this is indeed encouraging news and as you continue to look through posts and commentaries in the media – social, as well as traditional – you will be hard pressed not to see that the commitment HPE is making to leadership is one that has depth. Nothing superficial or simply market-speak but rather, taking “ingenuity and innovative thinking” very much to heart. And for that, this is news that the NonStop community can take to heart.

Of course, wrapping up this month’s column on what’s proving of interest on social media wouldn’t be complete without some reference to the global pandemic and to the upcoming NonStop virtual TBC – The NonStop All Digital Experience.  There are certainly more than enough headlines on both of these topics to fill this column.

But it’s all interrelated; it may not come easy to some but in its own way, the global pandemic is driving a rethink of the way we do business and in so doing is fueling yet more innovation. The upcoming virtual TBC is bound to have news we will all welcome even as it conveys a sense of community in ways that are far removed from any previous experiences we may have enjoyed. So yes, there is still plenty of time – make sure you register! And we will join you in the world of virtual events, shortly.