The Connection

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.

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…

Many clients and users at TUG meetings have expressed concerns to me about losing experienced members on their Nonstop team. These team members work in different groups, such as development, support or operations for the NonStop platform. Their contributions are crucial in the ecosystem of their company’s mission critical applications.  There is great concern in losing that pool of expertise.

Under the circumstances, hope everything is going as well as can be expected. All the best in getting through a very difficult time with the Coronavirus.

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.

As a cybersecurity company in Southern California, fueled by a culture of transparency and caring for our employees and customers, we live and operate by our mission: “We protect your data as if it’s our own.” We approached the Covid-19 threat the same way we approach cybersecurity threats, with extreme vigilance and seriousness.

With the pandemic upon us I believe the value of NonStop is paramount.  As many are aware GE Healthcare, the NonStop healthcare solution partner, existed the enterprise side of the business, relinquishing that market to their competitors Cerner and Epic.  However NonStop has done more in healthcare and I wanted to tell an older story that becomes very applicable to today’s environment.

What are some of the latest cyber-security threats affecting organizations? Cyber-crime is a constantly evolving enterprise. Cyber-security threats are becoming

Business today is a world of connected systems. Every application, every piece of data, and every machine is connected and exchanges data at huge volumes at ever-increasing speeds. This flow of information moves throughout every data center and out to remote locations. The data might move between applications within the business or be shared between companies. All this is, of course, also true for users of HPE NonStop systems running mission-critical applications, which need to communicate with other systems and applications in the enterprise.

RedLink is the biggest national switch for Argentina, owned by the major banks here (Banco Nacion, Banco Provincia de Buenos Aires, Banco Ciudad de Buenos Aires, Grupo Petersen and other important institutions).  We work mainly with public banks (the largest being here in Argentina). RedLink processes more than 27+ million transactions on peak days, driving more than 10,000 ATMs all around the country. We work with more than 60 financial institutions and have more than 1,000 employees.

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.

It’s a long way to the next NonStop TBC this fall, but it’s not too far away for most of us in the middle of a cold winter to SunTUG this February 28-29th in Tampa, Florida. In fact, it’s quite inviting right now.