Welcoming the New Year – and watching the continuation of growth for NonStop!

The message coming from HPE about the NonStop product family is one of return to profitability and a return to growth. This has been a major undertaking on the part of HPE executives but it goes a long way to reinforce the message that the value proposition of NonStop cannot be counted out – it’s as relevant today as it has ever been. Perhaps fault tolerance across virtual machines may be challenging to some to grasp but it’s as important as fault tolerance across real machines was four plus decades ago. What we have all learnt is that you cannot bolt-on to an existing architecture fault tolerant. It has to be engineered in from the ground up and having a powerful integrated stack on offer that integrates every level from the metal to the database to the user interface is key to ensuring fault tolerance remains a viable option for those enterprises that have no tolerance for downtime of any kind.

All of this is not to suggest for one moment that there aren’t challenges ahead of NonStop the most critical of which is to break into new markets. This is seen by Pyalla Technologies as the most important aspect of the work that lies ahead of the NonStop team going into 2017. It will be a year where decisions must be made with respect to re-entering former strong markets for NonStop, even as it has to prioritize which new markets to tackle. Top of my list for markets to re-enter are transportation (particularly air transportation) and healthcare. The world’s population is aging even as it travels more and the recent spate of airline computer outages together with the need to tackle inequitable healthcare programs suggests that the value proposition of NonStop can be leveraged in new and interesting ways. And yes, inserting NonStop into the burgeoning IoT marketplace (running analytics in real time close to clusters of sensors) is also open to discussion!

The return to growth and popularity is now beginning to have an impact on the NonStop vendor community. It’s taken a while and just as the fallout from a decline in NonStop usage took two years to make such changes felt among vendors, so too it’s taken the full two years (following the return to growth and profitability for NonStop) for this to have an impact on vendors. In the dealings Pyalla Technologies has with the vendor community it’s clear that for some of the vendors, the corner has been turned and once dour predictions for the NonStop marketplace have been overturned. From just a few discussions that have occurred this month, visions strategies and plans are being adjusted to accommodate additional NonStop systems being deployed and increasingly, the support for hybrid Converged Systems is attracting more attention from the vendor community. And then there’s the bigger impact that will come following the arrival of vNonStop and potentially, offloading to clouds hybrid, private and public!

But the issue of there being too many small vendors supporting the NonStop community is likely to be a concern for everyone as enterprises up their investment in (and indeed to) new, more powerful, NonStop systems. The challenge here for vendors will come into greater focus as HPE NonStop development continue to place huge bets on NonStop products and features; NonStop development is outspending NonStop vendors and the vendor community needs to recognize this. When it comes to 2017 there is an awareness that M & A activity will take on a new sense of urgency and I expect to see the emergence of several much larger NonStop vendors surface before the countdown to 2018 commences. It will certainly make attendance at upcoming NonStop user events more important for all NonStop stakeholders and already Pyalla Technologies is making plans to attend a couple of them before the industry returns to Las Vegas for HPE Discover 2017.

Looking forward to seeing as many of you as we can at these upcoming events and, like so many other in the NonStop community, Pyalla Technologies wishes all of its clients and business associates the very best for 2017 as it welcomes a year of heightened expectation for all things NonStop!

Richard Buckle
Cofounder and CEO
Pyalla Technologies, LLC