On May 6th, N2TUG’s members came together for our 2026 meeting. As this year is the 250th Anniversary of the US Declaration of Independence, and that just happens to coincide with the 50th Anniversary of the first Nonstop system shipped to a customer, our theme this year was “Revolution, Nonstop!”. For those working on the Nonstop platform, it reminds us how much Tandem revolutionized the business computing world back then. And North Texas was a part of that, as within a couple of years, the second Nonstop was shipped to Radio Shack in Fort Worth to help them manage their inventory. Others followed suit soon, including the UT Health Science Center at Dallas (underneath the Parkland Hospital emergency room), and General Dynamics (my first Nonstop job) in support of their new candidate Air Force fighter plane, the F-16.
AI Notice: the above photo was generated by ChatGPT, and does not imply that Jack Loustaunou, Mike Green, Jim Katzman or Jimmy Treybig were active participants in the US War of Independence in the 18th Century. It’s intended to represent that they helped lead the computing revolution of the 1970s providing better alternatives than ‘Big Blue’.
As in the past 3 years, our event was held at the Hurst Conference Center in Hurst Texas, not very far from D/FW Airport, attached to a very comfortable Hilton Garden Inn for convenience.
The day kicked off with a breakfast taco buffet at 8. At 9, President Bill Honaker of XID Software, Inc. highlighting the US Semi-quincentennial (250 year) anniversary of independence, but more pertinent, the first shipped Nonstop system. He noted some area customers as well as the first North Texas customer service office just a short walk from the Event Center.
Our audience that day had representatives from 9 current customer companies in financial and healthcare fields, as well as a wealth of sponsor and HPE folks for those customers to talk to. Justin Simonds, our Liaison, was unable to attend, but Robert Martin did a great job in his place!
HPE next took to the stage with Karen Ramirez, HPE’s North American Director of Nonstop Sales, followed by Roland Lemoine, Product Manager for the Nonstop Enterprise Division. Karen led off with a quick look at the 2026 Highlights for Nonstop. Then Roland covered the Nonstop Roadmap and product highlights.
N2TUG was fortunate this year to have six Gold Sponsorships, five of whom were able to attend and share their stories for the attendees.
Odyssey Information Services invited Juden Supapo, HPE Principal Presales Architect, to present an overview of their OpsRamp platform, which is an AI-driven, Enterprise-wide set of tools to monitor critical subsystems and take first-level support actions. Odyssey is in the process of creating agents for OpsRamp to support the Nonstop platform.
Next up, Mike Mitsch of ETI-NET updated us on their Nonstop product family, including BackBox, QoreStore, and others. XYPRO’s Gabriel Alvarez followed, highlighting their CVE Intelligence features and other XYPRO product updates
For lunch, we had a lively (and filling!) buffet sponsored by NTI. Attendees feasted on Steak, Salmon, some great salad and vegetables and a challenging set of desserts, and enjoyed lively conversations at the numerous tables.
Tom Miller of HPE had the post-lunch assignment, and he kept us from nodding off by presenting some techniques for using Python on Nonstop. Gustavo Cavazos of NuWave followed Tom, sharing info on their integration products, focusing in detail on their LightWave server and client. Our last Gold sponsor speaker, Sachin Aher of OmniPayments, gave updates on Payments as a Service, Tokenization, and their tools for Nonstop.
We broke for everyone to catch their breath and network a bit, with snacks and beverages to help fuel the discussions. Edward Adams of comforte focused his talk on Nonstop data-centric security, and used the event to introduce their Unified Protection product TAMUNIO. Paden Holenstein of Gravic shared the final technical session of the day, sharing all the newest features for the Shadowbase suite of products.
CSP (Computer Security Products) was our final Gold Sponsor, but at the last minute was unable to attend. N2TUG is very grateful to all of our sponsors for making the day possible, allowing us to provide meeting space, food and beverages for meals and breaks, as well as a chance to unwind and network at the Evening Reception.
Many of our generous partner sponsors contributed door prizes, and we ended our main sessions with a drawing for the attendees that survived the day while representing customers. Odyssey, ETI-NET, XYPRO, NuWave, OmniPayments, comforte and NTI all participated, so please look for some of the recipients pictured later in this article. N2TUG really appreciates our sponsors’ generosity, and it was a great way to reward those die-hards! The day ended with networking at the evening reception. There were a couple of hours of beer, wine, cocktails and unique hors d’oeuvres, honoring the tradition of the legendary Tandem ‘beer bust’.
N2TUG is well known among the sponsor community for having the most engaged attendees of any of their regional meetings, and they didn’t disappoint. Our knowledgeable speakers fielded them all. This reinforces why in-person meetings are so valuable to everyone involved. It was a day packed with information, networking and social engagement, and we are already looking to what we’ll provide next year!
We also appreciate the team from Odyssey for providing logistics support with registration, badges, lanyards and printing, as well as sponsor XID Software for providing Bill Honaker’s time and planning to make the day go smoothly.
We’re looking forward to seeing many of you at Connect Worldwide’ s Technology and Business Conference in Orlando this September. And of course, we hope to see you and your associates at next year’s N2TUG Meeting. Take a browse through our photo gallery, and hopefully it’ll help you decide to and make plans to join us!
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