News from HPE’s NonStop Division

Living the NonStop Technical Boot Camp afterglow!

There’s nothing like coming back to face day-to-day and end of the year work activities after attending a great NonStop Technical Boot Camp (TBC) like we had this year. I find myself in a very good mood with many creative ideas being discussed within my team’s future programs and possibilities for NonStop.

This year’s TBC was truly a pleasure! We had 430 attendees register to attend this year and 115 were first time attendees. We organized a large number of breakout sessions to give customers plenty of topics to choose from at the event.

This year’s show offered a new feature called The NonStop Hackathon which challenged participants to create small programs on NonStop in a fast track way. Led by the NonStop Under 40 SIG (NSU40), this was a first attempt at offering something like this at the TBC and I’m told it will be refined as a feature in future TBC events.

The theme at this year’s TBC was, “Consider the possibilities of NonStop” and the focus was to help make clearer to everyone the investment HPE has been making in NonStop. This year there were many talks on DevOps, modern Java frameworks, middleware and how people can use the latest technologies to develop and sustain applications deployed on NonStop without requiring the ability to code in PTAL, TAL or write TACL. One of our customers spoke up about this saying, “So if I move my NonStop team to adopt the use of these more modern methods, I’ll solve a lot of my resource issues and won’t have to convince young people to learn older NonStop methods – I can just hire recent college graduates?” And the answer of course is “Yes!”

Most participants were probably unaware that we also held the North American Customer Council just after the TBC, starting Wednesday afternoon and extending into Thursday Nov 7th for half a day. The Customer Council is a special meeting of C-level executives from top NonStop customers in North America. This year we had 16 participants who were also invited to attend the full TBC conference prior to the meeting. During these meetings, HPE spends time listening to frank and direct issues these customers are facing in their businesses and markets. We listen to feedback about how well NonStop meets their business needs and where they wish we would improve. The event is very eye-opening for the NonStop team and has had a big influence on NonStop roadmaps and directions in the past.

I spent a lot of my personal time at the TBC in private meetings with customers, and it felt really good to be able to answer questions with the exact information that customers were hoping to hear. I had one customer tell us with a big smile on his face that news of a major feature we released in L19.08 had made his whole trip worthwhile. Many meetings started with customers reiterating how pleased they are with the platform, how they depend on it and how they want to run more applications on their systems, how they want us to do more advertising and find more creative ways to reduce costs.
It was a truly international show this year. We had a large group from Taiwan attending the show, as well as a big group from Japan who received live translation on headsets as speakers gave talks in English to the audience. We also had people from Latin America, Europe, Canada and a possible new customer from Korea who traveled with their own interpreter. It was great to walk around and hear different accents and languages being spoken in the hallways at the event.

So the year is winding down as we all head off into the 2019 Thanksgiving Holiday and the December holidays following fast behind.

For some customers it’s the busiest time of the year while for others it includes the one segment of time when they can plan to reboot their system with a new version of the OS.

End of the year is a good time to reflect on the year behind us, what we can be proud of, as well as what we might continue to improve. I want to thank everyone who helped with this year’s NonStop TBC and everyone who took the time to come out for the event. I’ll also remind you that if there’s anything we can help you with to make your NonStop experience better that we are happy to host calls with you to talk about your needs and work actions.

In the meantime, all of us at HPE want to wish all of you and your families a wonderful holiday season and a Happy New Year!

Karen Copeland

Manager, WW NonStop Product Management
Mission Critical Solutions

Author

  • Karen Copeland

    Karen Copeland has worked in the NonStop business since 1983, holding individual or management positions in IT, Software Engineering, QA, Application development and Product Management. In her current position she is responsible for the Worldwide Product Management team for the HPE Mission Critical NonStop platform.

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