Social Media Round-Up [September, 2018]

Increasingly we are turning to video for information on everything, from maintaining household appliances or fixing our cars to purchasing televisions. If we don’t know how to do something we “google” it and sure enough, someone has a video explaining everything. This past week I backed the RV into its storage shed only to hit the external mirrors. How to repair, I thought and more importantly, have I done serious damage? After watching a video I realized it was quite easy and armed with the right tool, I returned to the RV and fixed it! As people will tell you, I’m no handy man, but more often than not, with video clips I am beginning to convince myself that I am.

Social Media is the primary publication channel I tap into for everything related to HPE. If I hear about an announcement or breaking news story, whether from a vendor or customer, I simply google it in order to see for myself so when a post to LinkedIn crossed my screen advising that HPE CEO, Antonio Neri, together with HPE Board Member, Maggie Wilderotter, would be making an appearance on a popular morning financial television program, CNBC Squawk Box’s CEO Call,  promoted under the banner of HPE CEO Antonio Neri joins ‘Squawk Box’ to discuss HPE’s new leadership and the enterprise business, I viewed the clip that lasted less than ten minutes and can be viewed simply by following this link –

https://www.cnbc.com/video/2018/09/27/cloud-enabled-data-enterprise-is-going-to-be-the-future-says-hpe-ceo.html

If you want to see Neri handle a variety of questions that more often than not come up in our own NonStop community meetings, this is a good place to see first hand Neri (and Wilderotter) in action delivering responses to some tricky questions. For instance, Neri was asked whether he was part of the discussion that jettisoned certain parts of the business which led to Wilderotter jumping in first to say that before Neri became CEO he was involved in the process such that when he was elevated to the position of CEO, he had the full support of the board. As Neri saw it, there were two aspects to the move to further trim HPE. One was the reality that in doing so, HPE would increase shareholder value. But more importantly, as Neri saw it, whereas previously (and prior to the spin merge of non-core software and services businesses) it have taken away focus from what was important now to HPE to focus on what matters most to HPE customers.

“As an engineer,” admitted Neri during his opening remarks, “I like to use technology to disrupt things!” However when asked whether HPE was responding to market forces Neri responded, “No; more so responding to real customer needs.” And yes, according to Neri, this means helping customers implement the right Hybrid IT. When it comes to the enterprise of the future Neri believes that “it will be an edge-centric, cloud-enabled and data-driven enterprise.” In recognizing that this will be the areas HPE is now focused on, it’s also an admission that so much will be happening at the edge. It’s a world where everything computes and by this, Neri said “the analogue world is getting digitized (and with this) there is so much being computed on the edge” that then begs the question, “how much is going to get transferred to the data center, the cloud!”

To hear Neri talk more on the above and on other topics as well, including why infrastructure matters, why customers are looking to consume technology differently than in the past, and why ultimately it will all be about services, it would be good to set aside ten minutes to watch the video. As a community, all stakeholders in NonStop do need to know what is being communicated to the world at large by the HPE board as well as its CEO. After all, it’s all trickle-down technology populating our roadmaps – in other words, there’s the big picture concerning the simplification of the transformation to Hybrid IT followed by the Software-Defined and Cloud pursuits before we get to Mission Critical Systems, the business unit where NonStop resides.

If you don’t think anything else is going to happen with NonStop, now that HPE has made the big investments needed to embrace x86 and then, virtual machines even as it pushes NonStop SQL into a DBaaS offering then you are being sorely mislead. For NonStop, it’s only just beginning as future on-premise private clouds will all likely have the option to be underpinned by NonStop! If you have any doubts about this then let me assure you that more than one NonStop vendor has begun to build out their own Linux / x86 private clouds leveraging NonStop to underpin it, all to ensure reliability, performance and keeping costs low!

Before leaving the topic of social media activity for September, there is one last item worth mentioning. How many of us are routinely following twitter tweets coming from HPE as well as from members of the NonStop community? If not, isn’t it about time? This morning Striim retweeted the following:

Pretty cool schematic isn’t it and what of the questions being raised. Analytics play a huge role as does the combination of Machine Learning and AI. Which brings us all back to the question – if you consider the above schematic (developed for one industry approach, but easily adaptable for other industries), how big does NonStop need to become and indeed, conversely, how small would we like NonStop to become. And the driving consideration will always be the value we place on deriving insights (our enterprise can provide) from storing (and accessing) the smallest amount of data – do we need NonStop to filter even as we need NonStop to respond?  So no, don’t yet place any limits on where NonStop will be applied, even as we watch more from HPE about where they are taking the company.