NonStop Forward
Phil Ly

Firstly, I want to thank CONNECT, HPE, partners, vendors, and users alike who helped to make this year’s, virtual TBC such a success. Given isolation and fragmentation we’ve experienced during the pandemic, it was especially enjoyable to reconnect with old friends and build new NonStop relationships alike. In reflecting on this year’s experience, as well as my almost four decades working in the field, I have been giving a lot of thought about the future of NonStop. It is something that many of you have heard me discuss quite often in this column, and  in my users’ group presentation. I know that this is an important topic shared by our NonStop community.

This focused interest on the future motivated me to participate in the TBC topic “NonStop For Beginners” started by Robert Bruce. I was looking forward to meeting a new generation of NonStop users, and to find out how we can help that community excel on NonStop. To my surprise, our chat group was only attended by experts, rather than colleagues new to the platform. While there were a lot of excellent recommendations posted in that forum, it would have been great to actually hear from the newcomer community.

What more can we do to encourage more community participation by newcomers?
Perhaps we the NonStop experts and users need to step up, and play a more active part in recruiting our community’s next greatest resource: future NonStop users.

I would like to challenge all of us to set aside time as this year closes out, and 2021 begins, to take action as a mentor or educator. For the coming new year, let each of us commit to engaging at least one new user to learn and do more with NonStop, and participate in Connect community activities, I’m confident that even the smallest acts of service in this area, such as connecting with a new company colleague, who might have an enterprise-only background, or volunteering to lead, and recruiting under 40s for a 101 tutorial at a users’ group meeting, will pay dividends for the NonStop community.

Additionally, I welcome others to guest spot in using this column as a tool to share ideas on how we might reach out to NonStop’s next generation. In the coming weeks and months, I look forward to sharing with partners, clients, and colleagues alike the new education and knowledge-share efforts we will be rolling out at TIC. I hope all of you will join me in this NonStop future-focused call to action.