TCM: Working together to bring success to your business!

When it comes to sales of NonStop systems we would be hard pressed to recall a sale that didn’t involve a solution. The ties between solutions providers and the NonStop sales teams are strong and have proved beneficial to both parties. Over time, the mix of solutions available for NonStop has varied between regions, but there has always been a focus on customer engagement.

Whether it is a real end user, a system acting as a user or even a controller front-ending a line of robots, it’s always been about real time interaction where the results provided by the solution running on NonStop are material to the required outcomes of the business. For more than four decades, enterprises worldwide have relied upon NonStop for support of their most important mission critical solutions.

For all of these four decades, the ties between NonStop and banks, retailers, manufacturers and distributors, telcos and even transportation have become widely known. The market segments supported by this coupling between NonStop and solutions providers has evolved and sometimes even revisited, but the underlying justification for deploying any vendor’s solution on NonStop is the enterprises’ need for absolute availability.

This need to remain operational 24 x 7 through system upgrades, new middleware rollouts, application fixes and even database maintenance has been at the very core of why NonStop is as prized today by enterprises as it was at the time the first NonStop systems rolled out the factory door. What is perhaps even more important is that there are vendors out there who know how everything works, together.

“Whenever we are called upon to support a NonStop customer,” said TCM CEO, Daniel Craig, “we realize we are not just another partner working with the customer but rather, an independent source of expertise that otherwise might be hard to find. Just as your NonStop team may not know the application well so too your solutions provider may not be current on everything that comes with today’s NonStop system.”

This happens to be especially true when we help out a new NonStop customer who may not have the necessary skillsets to manage a NonStop at hand. What we have encountered through the years we have been supporting NonStop users is that for many of them, while management fully understands the value proposition of NonStop they are overly cautious about anyone touching the NonStop. In former times, it was argued that to keep a NonStop system running 24 x 7, you need to deploy a guard dog – perhaps two – to stand between operations personnel and the systems’ consoles.

Why two dogs? Well, of course, that is part of the NonStop mystique where combinations of duality and redundancy make the NonStop as available as it continues to be and a reminder too that the human element can undo even the best laid plans of management. When NonStop systems were deployed in support of the New York Stock Exchange, apparently it was roped off within the data center to prevent anyone from touching it. Here at TCM, we have seem almost everything an enterprise can do with a NonStop system and the value we provide is that we can support the solutions and NonStop working together with HPE and the solutions vendors.

Furthermore, and important in today’s fast changing world of NonStop, “TCM can help migrate both your systems AND your applications including the latest payments solutions, treating them as one unified solution,” said Craig. Now that NonStop has made available new models of the NonStop X product line – the NS8 X4 and the NS4 X4 – many enterprises are already looking ahead to when they make changes and this is always a critical time for the NonStop user. Staff that may have been present when the previous upgrade was performed may no longer be available and this is why they turn to TCM for assistance.

“We can take a proposal to our NonStop customer, the benefits of one partner migrating both the system and the solution where we highlight the efficiencies in costs, the improved communication etc., as well as the peace of mind that comes with handing off all this effort and risk to TCM, said Craig, “is greatly appreciated by the NonStop customer.” And migrations to new NonStop X systems is only one part of the story as there are now customers looking to migrate to more modern offerings, such as BASE24 eps and the offerings from Lusis.

“Whichever way you look at supporting solutions whether it’s a simple system upgrade or the modernization of what has been the workhouse application for a very long time, this is what we do best.” According to Craig, “It’s really quite simple; we have a greater exposure to many more environments than any one of our NonStop customers can expect to see over the life of their NonStop system.”

TCM has the system expertise, the payments applications experts and the wrap-around service/project management skills to deliver it all as a fully supported “bundled” program. In so doing TCM is in that unique position to serve any market segment, even one that only just opens up to NonStop. Yes, we can honestly say, we have seen it all! As we observed in our previous article, “Our NonStop clients appreciate that they can leave it up to us to make it all happen!”

Should you have a situation where you need to talk to someone about a system migration, the pursuit of a modernization program or simply looking for guidance on how best to work with multiple vendors, TCM would be only too happy to take your call.

Contact TCM at: nonstop@tcm.uk.com