May-June2020

As we’ve been thinking more about the future of NonStop in this newly established column, an item of real concern has been how to continue to build community among vendors and customers, in the absence of users group gatherings. With most companies, including TIC Software, working remotely, how do we reach across the screen, so to speak, to cultivate key personal relationships?

Satisfying today’s very demanding applications and business needs is a made to order scenario for NonStop.  As the following chart highlights, NonStop is a superior platform for enterprises if the goal is to improve outcomes.  The platform options to support applications essential to business success are summarized in the following chart.

If you follow my column (and if you do, thank you), you know that I tend to favor the ‘Trends’. I confess the technology does hold more fascination for me but it is high time to discuss some NonStop success. Now, first off, NonStop is a unit inside Mission-critical systems which is a business unit inside High Performance Computing which all rolls up to Compute within HPE which is still just one of several major business divisions. I say this because I don’t want the percentages I am going to disclose to be interpreted as a recommendation to buy or to not buy HPE stock. That would be between you and your financial broker. Also the percentages I am discussing refer, this issue, to North America. So that being said and without disclosing any real numbers I am okay in relaying that so far this year NonStop is about 15% up revenue-wise over last year (Y/Y). This quarter NonStop is up over 30% (Q/Q). And for the year so far we are tracking over budget. So wins are definitely happening. Since I do not have customer permission to disclose any specific names let me just say that major banks, major retailers and major credit card companies continue to be pleased and are investing in their NonStop mission-critical systems. The x86 platform systems are the predominant platform that is selling, and the latest systems (HPE Gen 10 or for us X-3) takes full advantage of the HPE silicon root of trust, making it the most secure x86 architecture available. See this article on HPE cyber security or search the website for Cybersecurity or silicon root of trust. Pretty cool stuff. If you have an existing Gen 8 or 9 system (X-1 or X-2) you may consider a processor swap to the latest Gen 10 (X-3) processors. They are faster and have the added security built in (see link above). If you saw my last article on the old syndromic surveillance pilot, I am happy to say that there is renewed interest in that solution both in the United States and overseas. We are seeing the criticality of systems as Covid-19 is cresting in the United States and starts, hopefully, to begin to decline.

The maximum speed limit in Texas is 85 mph.  Maybe not everything moves fast in Texas, but cars and trucks certainly do.  Perhaps it is just due to the geography.  There is a lot of area to cover in the vast state of Texas. It is the largest state in the Continental US, although Alaska is 2.2 times larger by area, and Texas is second to California by population.  The GDP of Texas is $1.6 trillion, comparable to Russia, South Korea, Tokyo or New York City.

In Japan, a lot of companies are working from home since the end of March when COVID-19 became more serious, and sales activities have been restricted. Under such circumstances, we held a Webinar on April 22nd promoting the NonStop database “SQL/ MX” so customers could participate from home. The Seminar title is “A recipe of system construction that never stops business”, and introduced how to build a system that cannot be stopped by using the NonStop Database.

A major U.S. merchant provider operates a major payments transaction authorization switch – to several million small to medium-size businesses throughout the world. The merchant processes payment authorization for Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover, Diners Club, and other major credit and debit card client companies. The cards are issued by banks and other financial institutions for consumer purchasing at brick-and-mortar and online stores, and for withdrawing cash from ATMs. Each card transaction must be approved by the issuing bank before it can be accepted by a merchant or an ATM.

Insider Technologies recently went through a significant technology refresh of one of our core products, Reflex.  This article explains the reasoning behind that refresh, the steps that we went through to develop the refreshed solution, and the benefits we are enjoying as a result of the updates.

During this time of unprecedented uncertainty, we at XYPRO are concerned about the safety and health of our employees, their families, our customers and everyone who makes up our global community.

The L20.05 RVU is a significant release for NonStop middleware. It carries one new product and a major version upgrade of an existing product along with appropriate enhancements in others to support these two. The new product is HPE NonStop HTTP Server 2.4, a new web server, ported from the open source Apache HTTPD Server. The major version upgrade in L20.05 RVU is that of the Ported Binaries on HPE NonStop Servers, Java SE 11, called in short as NSJ 11. Both products are delivered via the commercial and telco SUTs upon ordering the RVU.

Every day, employees log in to many different software programs, from email to payment systems, and a myriad of other applications designed to help accomplish their daily tasks. Remembering all of the usernames and passwords associated with these products can be a real challenge with some users storing passwords insecurely, leading to serious data breaches. Single sign-on systems (SSO), i.e. moving to standardized services for digital identity, are crucial in alleviating the need for — and stress of — recalling a multitude of credentials. Providing a good SSO user experience has become more complex because the technical professionals responsible for implementing identity and access management (IAM) systems must balance user convenience against enterprise security risks.

Cash has been having a hard time lately.  With social distancing, retailers no longer appear to want your cash, they want you to keep a safe distance, but they still want your money in other ways.  In the most developed countries, payment by card is well established, and there’s generally a good infrastructure to accept card payments.  Globally, card schemes like Visa and MasterCard have reported a huge increase in the use of contactless payment in the stores where cards can be used, and many consumers have adopted cards in ways new to them…