Letters

A year ago, none of us could have foreseen the type of year 2020 has turned into with most of the country sheltering at home or just starting to reopen businesses but when venturing out, wearing masks as we try to go about our lives during the worldwide COVID 19 pandemic.   I’m proud to say that HPE has been very good in moving all employees to work from home, checking in and keeping everyone informed as to the latest information from our governments and the company’s future plans within those guidelines.  And we expect HPE to very slowly begin reopening some of our business sites over the summer.   Before we start talking about the NonStop business and events, I’d like to take a moment to send all of you, our customers, partners and friends around the world our best wishes for your personal good health and the good health of your families during this time of social distancing and uncertainty.  As things start to reopen again, we hope you are continuing to take appropriate measures to keep yourselves healthy and safe.

There is something about having a long experience in this industry that is of high value to us because we get to witness how different technologies are born, going through a hype cycle, being adopted in very specific solutions or getting wider adoption or in some cases just being forgotten. For customers it may be a daunting task to decide where to invest. So many new technologies simply claim to solve world hunger. In general it is rare that a technology becomes universal across all vendors. TCP/IP can claim that, for languages C/C++ and Java have had success, for operating systems, is Linux the standard now? But what else? When it comes to programming for example, not long ago, multi-threading was the common way to scale an application. Then BigData proved that “scale out” may be a better way to address massive scale for data access. I think we knew this already in our NonStop world but the industry didn’t.

There is an old Chinese curse that says “May he live in interesting times” and it seems we all are! With everything happening around the globe these days, we all need to stay alert and make smart decisions. Panic is not a strategy. Many trade shows are being canceled, and time will tell if the regional user group meetings will be canceled too. If they are, I’d like to encourage folks who were going to be presenting to share their message via our publications and website. Our Slack channel is open for business, and as a community we can use it to gather and discuss all things HPE.

With a new year upon us, it’s a great opportunity to look back and reflect on where we’ve been, the successes we’ve had, the lessons we’ve learned, the new friends we’ve made, the relationships we’ve strengthened.

Most of you are used to seeing this column penned by Navid Khodayari, who has done an amazing job for the last two years. With the new year, Navid has been promoted to past-president and I have been given the honor to be your president. I hope I will be able to continue the legacy that Navid has left me, I am sure with your help, along with our newest members of the board we will continue to build upon his work.

We are fresh off another successful NonStop Technical Boot Camp, and I hope all of you that attended found it to be a valuable experience. We had a great few days with presentations from HPE, Partners, and Customers, as well as loads of Networking time. The first-ever NonStop Hackathon was a great success and the second-ever NSU40 Pub Crawl was a great time! Other notable events included the second annual Women in Technology event and our Community Celebration with trivia from Geeks who Drink. The trivia competition that night was fierce, and it took a tiebreak question to determine a winner! Basically good times by all!

Living the NonStop Technical Boot Camp afterglow! There’s nothing like coming back to face day-to-day and end of the year

I hope all of you enjoyed your summer and are excited for the upcoming fall with the TUG season back in full force!