It’s almost the summer season, but already there’s no mistaking that summit season has arrived. While there have already been promotional posts in support of the HADOOP summit and Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference is well and truly over, it has been a summit of another kind where I spent the better part of a week. It was the middle of June and already the heat was oppressive, but it didn’t deter a substantial number of participants showing up in Las Vegas for 2015 HP Discover. As in years past, the highlight of the conference has been the Wednesday afternoon’s General Session hosted by HP CEO, Meg Whitman, and featuring HP EVP & CTO, Martin Fink. Last year it had been all about The Machine, so many attendees were curious about what would be featured this time and in some respects, the audience was left more puzzled than pleased.
For the NonStop community, the highlight of any calendar year has been the NonStop Technical Boot Camp held late in the year and it’s usually where NonStop users gather in numbers. The session tracks at the Boot Camp are all devoted to NonStop, with ample opportunity for partners and customers to present specifics about their products and implementations and where the roadmap presentations by product managers are the highlight. However, HP Discover summits are altogether different, as they are big tent marketing events with HP owning the program. It didn’t take long before CEO Whitman made it very clear that HP Discover was a Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) affair and to reinforce this message the new HPE colored squares were ablaze above Fink’s HP Labs stand on the exhibition floor (where the picture above was snapped).
The NonStop Community Sees HP Inc. & HPE on the Horizon
The NonStop community knows the split is coming whereby today’s HP would divide into the consumer focused HP Inc. and the enterprise business focused HPE. While we may have elected to put that to the back of our minds and simply ignore what was going on inside of HP as the date of the split draws near, there wasn’t a message or session where the presence of the new HPE wasn’t obvious. The key focus areas of Mobility, Security, Cloud and Big Data remained central to all that was on show – Helion, HAVEn, Converged Infrastructure, etc. all had their exhibition floor “islands” populated with evangelists anxious to attract your attention, but with all the talk, I still don’t believe HP gets the message about Big Data intersection and integration with the Real Time world.
The NonStop community knows all about realtime transaction processing and the important message in support of modifying transaction paths based on detected behavioral changes, whether they are part of the security checks performed or simply the promotion of a suddenly popular product simply flying off the racks. NonStop systems are often the last processor in the path between consumers and applications and as such represent the last opportunity to influence decisions, and yet, with all the wealth of information Big Data affords companies, its value is greatly lessened with passing of time. HP is splitting in two, heading in different directions but if the enterprise business focused HPE simply doesn’t get it, that realtime means NonStop and with NonStop that too means WebAction, the NonStop community does, and with its background anchored in NonStop, so too does WebAction.
WebAction Connects the Latest NonStop Systems to the World of Big Data
Analytics isn’t the preserve of data scientists working behind closed doors but rather the processes that steer the ship and ensures businesses stay in business. “Ideas have always fueled business,” said HP CEO Whitman. “How quickly can I capitalize on a new idea and how quickly I can respond to a new idea that may threaten my business,” Whitman added, is what is “driving a future where business and IT are indeed inseparable”.
NonStop remains firmly in play as one of the most viable server options for those supporting consumer facing applications. This is evident in the investments HP continues to make to bring NonStop to market on industry-standard hardware components – nothing in the new NonStop X system is proprietary or custom. That WebAction connects these latest NonStop systems to the world of Big Data only ensures NonStop systems become more valuable to business. When it’s all under the big tent, as it was a week ago in Las Vegas, and where so much attention was given to the upcoming company split, seeing NonStop as firmly in play as was apparent can only be viewed as good news by everyone in the NonStop community.
