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Tandem – the next 35 years?

2010-01-03T19:36:00.000-08:00

Over the holiday season I didn’t spend as much time pulling bottles of wine from the cellar as in previous years, yet sadly, I have to admit, the inventory is beginning to thin out. On the other hand, what has been growing has been my collection of model cars and motorcycles and now, spread across the tasting table, they capture quite a bit of history – the picture above includes most of what is on display.

Obviously, there are several model Corvettes in the collection. Among the models are F1 cars – the Ferrari of Schumacher and the Jaguar of Weber – as well as a Yamaha R1 sports bike that’s a constant reminder of the fickleness of youth! Missing from the display is the one car I thought would always find a place in my collection – the mighty Porsche Turbo!

When I returned to Australia in 1977 I took up an assignment with a small software distributor that represented The Computer Software Company (TCSC) of Richmond, Virginia. However, in those early days I was in desperate need of technical support so TCSC assigned a young IBM systems programmer, Brian, to help me out. Business began to go well and I thought an upgrade of my company car may be in order and I began to think the time was right to buy a Porsche Turbo.

Dreaming big was rarely an issue for me, and I had become extremely passionate about Porsches. One evening, on returning home, I found Brian waiting for me - all smiles and looking excited, with a bunch of papers in his hand. “Sign these papers,” he prodded me. “There’s a surprise in the garage for you!” The papers I quickly realized was a car leasing agreement, and Brian cagily hid most of the pages from my view but just once I happened to see a reference to a Porsche Turbo. With the paperwork completed the time had come to head for the and, with the door opened, there in the middle of the garage was a Porsche Turbo – but in miniature. It was a Matchbox model!

“As always you were a ‘voracious’ car enthusiast,” Brian reminded me this week. “Russ, one of your neighbors, had boys with Matchbox model cars, so we ‘borrowed’ the Porsche and placed it in the garage.” Recalling more of the incident, Brian then added “Russ was very good at leading up to the idea that the financing was not really an issue … but your face dropped when you saw the miniature!”

The Porsche Turbo remains the pinnacle of auto engineering, and my passion for the car remains to this day. So you can imagine my surprise when I began reading this month’s car magazines only to learn that the Porsche Turbo is 35 years old! Recognizable worldwide, the Porsche Turbo continues to promise unbelievable performance in the hands of those passionate enough to wring the best from such a supercar!

A new engine? The first upgrade of the engine “form factor” and, a first for this latest iteration, an engine that shares the same construction as the standard 911! With the same direct-fuel-injection system as found in all 911s, this “new engine” is simpler and lighter than any previous engine, with commodity components prevalent everywhere! As I read the specifications I almost forgot I was looking at 35 years of Porsche history and not at 35 years of Tandem history!

Pinnacle? Passion? Promise? The emotions they generate are very similar for both product lines.

Cars have been featured in my past two blog postings on Tandem’s 35th anniversary with references to the late Graham Hill in the posting “Happy 35th, Tandem!” on May 28th, ’09 and to Corvettes in the posting “Is there gas in the tank?” on October 16th, ’09. In both postings I also included a number of quotes from current and former leaders of Tandem.

The two comments however that continue to resonate with me were those of Martin Fink and Winston Prather. “From the introduction of NonStop until today, NonStop has represented the pinnacle of high availability,” Martin had told me. And then, as I exchanged emails with Winston, he talked openly of how he hadn’t “fully understood then was the incredible passion and commitment this team has to our customers, partners and each other!”

In the November / December 2009 issue of the Connection magazine, Winston wrote in his column of how “from our origins as the world’s first fault tolerant server, through mergers and acquisitions, the evolution of IT and its role, processor and form factor changes, the original promise of NonStop has never changed.” He then closed his column with “we are as committed to delivering on this promise today, as we were 35 years ago.”

There has always been passion in the NonStop community. And the NonStop server has remained at the very pinnacle of fault tolerant computing. But what will the next 35 years promise for the NonStop faithful? Will support for NonStop continue to play a major role in HP’s server strategy?

In a blog posting of February, 12, ’08 “’My Wish’ for NS Blades” I described three wished I had for NonStop as it began supporting Blades. My first wish was on seeing a “shared infrastructure” Blades package delivered, while my second wish was to see a hypervisor developed such that NonStop could operate as a guest OS, and where the fault tolerance of NonStop wasn’t compromised in any way. As for my third wish, I was looking to see if a case could be made to support a NonStop that could float and “adjust” automatically whenever business-critical transactions arrived that required the levels of fault tolerance NonStop delivers.

I have been talking of this to many audiences over the past two years, but I was somewhat taken back when I read the latest white paper from The Standish Group “Megaplex – and Odyssey of Innovation.” Jim Johnson and his analysts at Standish talk about the possible emergence of “Megaplex, a collection of server blades acting together as a single system using multiple types of operating systems, databases, and other computer resources.” Standish recalls Tandem’s history and describes a future role for NonStop that is far removed from anything that has found its way onto HP’s roadmaps to date.

Standish was looking at the characteristics of NonStop that would help support the NonStop platform for another 35 years. In perhaps the most remarkable observation in the whole white paper, they propose how “The Standish Group sees the death of operating systems and the advent of operating environments … the operating system of tomorrow will be a lightweight hypervisor that calls on a set of common services,” starts Jim. “In the Megaplex fabric these hypervisors will each have their own persona, such as VMS or the NonStop Kernel, to facilitate applications services,” he then explains before adding “many of the NonStop Kernel functions, such as fault tolerance, will be available to these other personas to increase their functional capabilities.”

When I posted my own observations to the blog in February, ’08 I predicted that, at some time well into the future, NonStop would be available to process any transaction whose attributes qualified it for processing on NonStop. With Megaplex, Standish take NonStop many steps further and suggest that the NonStop kernel, as well as being able to run natively, would pass on critical capabilities that had always been unique to NonStop to other HP operating systems.

I promised myself a Porsche Turbo one day – and perhaps after all these years, it will end up being just a model after all! And the similarity between the history of the Porsche Turbo and the Tandem computer is remarkable. Thirty five years on, they both remain the pinnacle of engineering excellence and performance. And their supporters are enthusiastic and passionate about both platforms. It may be hard to imagine all of what Standish predicts actually coming to fruition, but it would be hard to bet against the folks still working on NonStop.

Jimmy Treybig has always been extremely proud of the people who worked on Tandem. In the post to the blog of May 28, ’09 I included Jimmy’s final email remark to me “I was amazed at the capabilities and drive of our people and very proud of how they met our very aggressive goals while we had great fun!” And the passion for NonStop remains today as strong as it ever has so I will not rule out anything from happening with NonStop in the future.

I don’t think anyone in the NonStop community senses that the commitment to NonStop, within the NonStop development organization, has lessened. But the effort needed to fulfill my own predictions, let alone those of Standish, will require significant investment from HP. But there’s always hope – and in his closing remarks in the most recent issue of the Connection magazine, Winston did state that “we are committed to delivering on the promise today, as we were 35 years ago. With our modern infrastructure that delivers uncommon value through common standards, the future is indeed bright.

Pinnacle! Passion! Promise! No, Porsche doesn’t have a lock on these emotions after all!

Lights are turning green!

2009-12-18T13:31:00.000-08:00

I was out driving the other night when through the snow-laden clouds came a sudden burst of sunlight that created spectacular lighting effects! For just a brief moment the sky turned every color, from red through orange to yellow with splashes of violet and mauve thrown in as well. I was able to get off a snapshot of the sunset, as I approached Golden, Colorado, and I have included it to the left.

Natural lighting effects always provide us with a treat, and on those occasions when we see something special, it stays with us for many years. On a trip to SATUG, a few years back, there was a reception on a river cruise where we were treated to a colorful evening sunset that I will remember for many years. And on a flight from San Francisco to London, the Sunday evening that the San Francisco 49er’s were playing in their last Superbowl, I was fortunate enough to have a window seat. On the port side!

Leaning back against the airplane fuselage, straining to pick up the commentary on my airline headphones, as the signal faded I glimpsed the northern lights for the first time from a plane. I stopped trying to follow the game and just absorbed the beauty of the Aurora Borealis. Probably at its very best at that time of year and I was fortunate to find myself in the right place, at the right time.

At this time of year however, with Christmas only days away, the streets are full of strings of colored lights. Margo and I took the long way home last night, and turned into every cul-de-sac just to take a look at the festive decorations draped from rooftop gables and chimney stacks - some homeowners had gone a little overboard! The amount of energy consumed had to be substantial and, for the first time that I could recall, there was ample evidence this year of the “greening of the ‘burbs!”, as many of the light displays incorporated LED’s!

There have been many advertisements this year promoting the benefits from using LED’s and of the energy savings that came from using LEDs. Our local TV station has decorated its entire premises with nothing but LED lights for big savings on their monthly energy bill. Not just for use with decorations, LED’s are becoming more popular with any lighting application. The last car I bought featured extensive use of LED technology in the front and rear of the car. Car designers now have so many more options with the availability of LED’s, and I don’t think anyone can mistake a modern Audi, with its curved display of LED’s surrounding more traditional headlight enclosures, as it drives towards you!

I was reminded of all of this when I caught up with my good friend Adam Rubey. He owns the company Acoustic Visions that wired my Boulder home, installed the audio / video components, and programmed the controllers, so that even I can watch television! Adam regularly drops by with new ideas and suggestions as, after ten years, we have both come to realize I now have antiques that today could well find a home in any city museum. The monitors are still glass – not a single flat-screen in the house. No high-definition sets anywhere. The house is awash in cables and the lighting system relies solely on traditional incandescent light bulbs!

And what brought Adam to the house this time was the availability of a new generation of LED’s suitable for placement in the old fashion “cans” that pepper every ceiling in the house! Impressive enough, in terms of energy savings, that Adam has incorporated a new company (RAEnergySolitions - http://www.raenergysolutions.com/) to aggressively pursue opportunities with LED lighting. Surely it was time for me to look at reducing my energy bills!

As I did the background research for this posting, I became aware that my old lights will be “outlawed” according to 2007 legislation signed into law by the previous president. “The incandescent light bulb, one of the most venerable inventions of its era but deemed too inefficient for our own, will be phased off the U.S. market beginning in 2012 under the new energy law just approved by Congress,” wrote journalist Marianne Lavelle in a December 19, 2007 article for US News and World Report.

While driving around Boulder, admiring the lights, I couldn’t help noticing the illumination coming from the enormous car-parks surrounding IBM’s facility at the bottom of the hill. Even through the heaviest snowstorm I can make out the rows of orange lights illuminating the vast lot. Many years ago, this facility had been the center of IBM’s printer manufacturing, but today the site has become a key data center in IBM’s consolidation initiative. IBM, in a move similar to the HP CIO Randy Mott’s, is eliminating thousands of data centers as it consolidates around just six mega-data centers, including this Boulder premise. This was going to save IBM $250 million in energy bills each year, according to ZDNett publication TechRepublic (July 31st, ’07).

I emailed Ed Sterbenc of Modius, and a long time friend of the NonStop community, to find out if data centers were capitalizing on LED lights and whether Modius were seeing any substantial replacement of lighting systems. “It is being discussed and there does seem to be some movement towards new-gen fixtures and LEDs,” he volunteered. But then Ed added “the bottom line, though, especially in a world moving toward "lights-out" operations, is that there just isn't enough consumption of power there, compared to Computer Room Air Conditioning (CRAC’s), Computer Room Air Handling (CRAH’s), and Blade Centers to generate much excitement about the incremental savings on a comparative basis.”

Why would I be interested in pursuing LED lights for my house? We can change the lights, but when compared to everything else, the savings may not be all that great! It has a lot to do with versatility and flexibility, Adam told me, adding “users can pick size, shape, color, Kelvin temperature and lumen output.” As for data centers, the potential to run off of “high voltage, low voltage, battery or solar with no I/R, no UV, and with very low heat and very little EMF,” has to be attractive and mesh well with any green plans!

In his first deployment in the area, Adam approached a local Toyota car yard. Typical for this industry, where acres of cars were on display around the large lot, bright lights bathed the rows of cars to attract prospective car buyers. He was able to swap out the entire system, replace with an LED alternative, and offer a new twist on the traditional approach to illuminating cars. Enough light was made available to highlight the car yard, but as prospective car buyers paused alongside a specific car, motion sensors would detect their presence, and communications between the lights resulted in just that individual car being bathed in a bright bean of light!

What about the data center? True, many are going to a lights-out operation – but there are times when illumination is still required. How useful would it be for the network of LEDs to be tied into the management frameworks such that, as a component failed, a path to that component would be illuminated with a bright beam targeting the item requiring attention! Perhaps it’s already deployed in some of the data centers just built.

During a “Green and Clean” event in Menlo Park, California, this past August and where Cisco, HP, and IBM shared their own experiences on “greening their data centers,” John Hailey, Cisco’s senior manager of workplace resources, talked of how he is looking ahead to new technologies, such as LED lighting, which is destined to be big and smart enough to adjust to daylight conditions and instruct nearby lights to follow suit. Hailey then added, according to a posting to TechPulse 360 (Aug 7th, 2009), “it means monitoring energy use at 600 buildings across the globe to reduce a $130 million electric bill. It means locating data centers where power is not just cheap and plentiful, but where it comes from less-polluting sources.”

We hear so much about locating data centers near alternative power sources – wind, solar, etc. and this “meshes well” with the story Adam told me. LED’s work efficiently and easily off of solar power sources. Perhaps they will play a major role inside data centers. At the very least, every data center manager should take a look at deploying them over their growing car parking acreages. This scenario did get a response from Ed Sturbenc, “as a long time amateur astronomer, I sure appreciate the effect the directional LEDs are having on the night sky!”

Wherever the deployment of LEDs takes place there’s little argument against doing everything we can to improve our use of energy. As Cisco’s Hailey told the assembled audience that Thursday evening in August “our customers and partners are demanding we be a green company.” Becoming even more frugal about our energy usage is going to continue, and none of us will miss illuminating any opportunity for energy savings, whenever they appear.

It may even be time to take another look at my own usage!. Who knows, perhaps I can program a clear path to the refrigerator and feel good about the savings I am making as I grab my last snack of the day!

Widening my options?

2009-12-12T07:22:00.000-08:00

It has been terribly cold in Boulder these past few days. Anyone living in the US will have been hard-pressed to miss the weather reports featuring stories coming out of the Rockies and the nearby plains states. It was a deep freeze that came suddenly and viciously, and much earlier than the locals had predicted. And the usual run down to the coffee shop for my morning constitutional became a challenge in finding enough clothing to wear. The picture to the right is what greeted me the past couple of mornings as I walked out my front doors.

A walk through the garage is a sad journey. The cars of summer tethered to battery charges and the motorcycles serving no other purpose than places to support growing stacks of miscellaneous items that I will get around to putting away some time soon. Where riding jackets, gloves and helmets once hung, there is now just a variety of heavy overcoats. Reluctantly we hunker down indoors and catch up on the football, and on finishing off leftovers from the recent holiday weekend – now nothing more than the candy remained.

Our most recent visitors have left so there’s still plenty of wine to fortify me. But not much else - it’s just a time to sit down, kick back, and take it easy. A time to enjoy the simple things – and I do so like the simplicity of life that comes with winter! Perhaps I will get the Christmas tree out of the basement and set it up, but then again, perhaps next trip!

Growing up in Sydney, a little west of the northern beaches, winter in the US was summertime in the antipodes, and a time for swimming, snorkeling, and sailing. For laughing at the Santa’s at the shopping malls still clothed in red and trimmed with fur as if they were still ensconced in the northern hemisphere. Although this is my fourteenth winter in Colorado, winter in the Rockies is still an amazing novelty for me, so far removed from what I had grown used to for most of my life.

Today, we can just head for the airport and know that within a day, we can put winter behind us and step into the bright sunshine of summer. We have options, and we have the opportunity, to pretty much arrange our lifestyles so we are no longer constrained by the seasons. And with each year I wonder whether it will be last time I step out onto my front porch to be chilled to the bone and struggling to retain my footing, all because I want a cup of coffee from the local village café.

A few days ago Marty Turner emailed me with a pointer to archived copies of the Tandem Systems Review: http://www.hpl.hp.com/hpjournal/tandem/vol5num2sep89.pdf

It took me to the September 1989 issue that included an article by Marty that provided a technical overview of the latest SNAX offering – SNAX/CDF (Cross-Domain Facility). In the preface of that issue, Editorial Director Susan Thompson introduced Marty’s article with the observation “connecting networks from different vendors is becoming increasingly important … users need the ability to quickly access other networks without taking the time to learn a new set of interfaces.”

Fast-forward twenty years, and we still have SNA with us despite all the naysayers and futurists having predicted its demise for fifteen or more of those twenty years. True, SNA networks of client SNA devices have pretty much been eliminated. Many of these networks, particularly in the financial services and retail industries, have seen wholesale migration of their client devices to low-cost PC technology and with TCP/IP – Ethernet connectivity became the preferred networking solution. Inside the data center however, it was another story entirely.

The bulk of today’s mainframe applications continue to depend on legacy IBM Transaction-Processing Monitors (TPM), including CICS and IMS. Mission-critical transactions, implemented using either CICS or IMS, were exposed to a lot of the infrastructure supporting the transactional environment, including the critical SNA “Virtual Terminal” access method (VTAM). Migrating these mission-critical applications over to support a modern networking topology like TCP/IP necessitated considerable code changes and given the critical nature (to the corporation) of these applications, any number of protocol convertors, network bridges and gateways, as well as terminal emulation packages were deployed rather than risking the potential impact a network outage could have had on the business.

Technologies like Local Area Networks (LANs), and protocols like Data Link Switching (DLSw) and High Performance Routing / IP (HPR/IP), all brought with them some measure of utilization of a TCP/IP fabric, but they all suffered with the ongoing presence of SNA – either higher up the protocol stack or inside the application itself. Adding extra controllers, running TCP/IP and SNA, and retaining skilled technical staff capable of sorting it all out, eventually drove the prices of these data center networks to exorbitant levels and corporations felt trapped within silos with few options for a way out of the tangled mess.

Finally, hardware vendors took some of the options away altogether. The new high-speed controllers, standard with most large servers today, simply stopped supporting even the switching and bridging options – yes, they could still connect, but not at the speeds of other TCP/IP components. One statement Marty made in his article stood out as I re-read it this week “SNAX/CDF widens the options available to users when they plan their distributed OLTP applications, and design the networks, that best suit their business needs.” At the time, these options for NonStop users were well-received and today, it’s not how wide a choice of options we have that is the issue, as we no longer think in terms of canyons to be bridged or seas to be crossed; now that the islands have disappeared, but rather the issue now is how to best capitalize on the one network fabric that ties it all together!

There’s a new product under development in Sydney called uLinga – an Australian aboriginal word for “to fly!” It’s an appropriate product name, under the circumstances, as it’s leveraging new technology on the IBM mainframe to allow SNA applications to communicate without the presence of the SNA “stack” – essentially, for the purposes of supporting mainframe to NonStop communications, removing the need to retain VTAM! uLinga is a product for the HP NonStop server that, when installed (replacing products like SNAX and ICE that may still be present in support of connectivity to the IBM Mainframe), makes the HP NonStop server a peer to the IBM mainframe as though it was another deployment of the same IBM mainframe technology.

No programming changes are required. Nothing! And there’s only configuration changes required on the NonStop side – the support for native TCP/IP across the latest high-speed controllers and adapters is immediate. The creation of uLinga is being undertaken by the team at Infrasoft Pty Limited and includes some of the original architects and developers that brought the ICE product to market in the early ‘90s. For those who may have missed the news releases earlier this week, comForte GmbH and Infrasoft announced a joint development and marketing agreement and already a number of conference calls and webex presentations have been completed.

According to Dr Michael Rossbach, “we are responding to customer demand for such a solution and by leveraging Infrasoft’s highly skilled development team with a lot of experience in developing solutions for the communication between HP NonStop and IBM mainframe systems, and comForte’s expertise in communication middleware and security solutions, we are well positioned to offer a best in class yet cost-effective software solution.” uLinga has been in the works for some time now and I expect to see it generate considerable interest.

I have been involved with communications products and technologies for nearly thirty years. And in the spirit of full disclosure I have to admit that I am on the board of Infrasoft, as well under contract to comForte. So I will exhibit some restraint over my enthusiasm for this new product, and leave it to others to provide more detailed information. But what really encouraged me to develop this post is that there continues to be infrastructure development being undertaken for the HP NonStop server!

Too many times I read commentary on how few companies elect to focus new development on the NonStop platform. Too often it’s easy to dismiss the NonStop platform for consideration as the centerpiece of a new solution! The Infrasoft developers had the opportunity to work on other platforms but, being experienced developers familiar with many other platforms, they have once again turned their hands to addressing current-era connectivity opportunities on NonStop.

Not every user will opt for the uLinga product. Just as not every user will feel compelled to pull the plug on SNA. However, knowing that there will be even more choices on offer shortly is something that encourages me as, after all, one of the key messages for NonStop is modernization and nothing will contribute more to this initiative than to see the need for a legacy protocol like SNA removed.

Sure I like options, but I like simple solutions a lot more! Connecting networks should not be the stuff that still demands the infrastructure complexity it once did, and with the increased loads of data that need to be transported fast – if we think there’s any potential for enterprise clouds forming behind the firewall, there’s just no room for SNA to retain a presence. And, the long-a uLinga on the option for an all-TCP/IP infrastructure the more, I think, we will see uLinga fly!

I want to see some passion!

2009-11-30T19:32:00.000-08:00

It’s been a couple of busy weeks and this has been my first chance to write in some time. I was in Germany for the Connect Germany / GTUG IT Symposium that attracted NonStop users from all over Europe. The picture above was captured during an evening event at GTUG and is clear evidence of the tradition of Tandem continuing even after 35 years, and I was able to enjoy a few down nights with some great German hospitality.

I had the opportunity to participate in the event moderating a short, but well attended session towards the end of the first day on the upcoming 35th anniversary of Tandem. The interest, the enthusiasm, and the passion for Tandem and now, NonStop, platforms has not lessened with the years. Everyone associated with the early days were quick to recall stories and to share amusing anecdotes and the history of the company generates interest no matter the occasion.

Returning to California from GTUG, within hours I was repacking for the weekend drive to Boulder for the Thanksgiving holiday. I continue to be amused by the folks who ask me how Thanksgiving is celebrated in Australia, completely unaware of how uniquely American this celebration of the harvest has become. No, we didn’t grow corn and no we didn’t hunt turkeys and no, the local indigenous native population didn’t help us out – American Indians, after all, never did quite make it to Australia’s shores. But like every “New American” I have adapted and grown to enjoy the festivities at this time of year.

Our eldest daughter brought pumpkin pie but, as anyone from Australia will tell you, you don’t make pies from pumpkins! Where we come from, the majestic Queensland Blue was best served baked, with roast lamb. And no matter how much I was “encouraged to try” I just couldn’t bring myself to having a wedge. Mind you, I eventually did take a small bite, but just to be polite. And to keep the freshly whipped cream off of my fingers! When Australians celebrate important occasions, it’s best to leave vegetables with the main course as the king of desserts is the mighty Pavlova.

A combination of meringue and marshmallow, topped with fresh “real” whipped-cream, and best finished with slices of banana drizzled with the pulp and juice from a passion fruit, this is a treat everyone who visits Australia needs to sample. And no, I can’t accept that this wonderful creation came from New Zealand! Up there with Vegemite, Weet bix, Tim Tams, the mighty Pavlova has become a true Aussie icon and no celebration would be complete without a serving of Pavlova.

That evening we adjourned to watch the local football team, the Denver Bronco’s take on visitors from New York. It was only a couple of years ago that the New York Giants had won the Superbowl, and the Denver team, after a strong opening to the season - winning the first six games - were in a slump having lost their last four games. But the young coach, in only his first season with the Denver team, wasn’t going to let the situation deteriorate further. As the game developed, his enthusiastic support for the team and his passion for his players, became highly contagious. With each change of possession the new combatants literally raced onto the field anxious for another opportunity to attack the opposition.

And the lowly Denver team just beat up on the visitors and never gave them a chance to find a rhythm. Event the hardened television commentators found the impact the coach had on the players was the difference that separated the two teams! As we left Boulder and headed through the western suburbs of Denver and on up through the front ranges, we drove past a billboard promoting the Denver football team - “Welcome to Bronco Country: Passion!”

Clearly, the events of the previous night had involved passion in all its guises. From our vocation, to our foods to our sports teams, what really engages us is when we are in the company of folks who are genuinely passionate about what they do. As the sports commentators broadcasting from the Thursday night game observed so openly, passion is contagious and the actions of a few passionate leaders can alter the course of any event.

Last week, Nigel Baker emailed me a short report from a participant at an IBM data base show, their Information on Demand (IoD) event. Blogger Robert Catterall had posted a short piece on November 22, ’09 “Mainframe DB2 Data Serving: Vision Becomes Reality” where he described a presentation on a “reference implementation” of IBM’s System z mainframe deployed as a data base server.

Interested, I read further “you're not going to beat the uptime delivered by that configuration: formerly planned outages for maintenance purposes are virtually eliminated (… software components can be updated, and server hardware can be upgraded, with no - I mean zero - interruption of application access to the database), and the impact of an unplanned failure of a DB2 member or a z/OS LPAR or a server is greatly diminished … And scalability? Up to 32 DB2 subsystems (which could be running on 32 different mainframe servers) can be configured in one data sharing group.”

Nigel finished his email to me with “at least IBM users still have a passion about the mainframe and DB2. What have HP done lately to promote passion amongst … NonStop users and ISVs?” While the remarks made in the blog posting above may not be news to many in the NonStop community, and I am not underestimating the work needed to make the IBM mainframe almost as good as a HP NonStop server, it still serves as a reminder that passionate users (and vendors) within the NonStop community are a crucial ingredient in ensuring the NonStop platform remains relevant.

But are we seeing enough passion being communicated? There’s so much to be excited about – the support of NonStop on Blades, for instance, is changing much of the traditional “price baggage” that for so long has dogged the NonStop message – and the rate of customer take-up of Blades should be fuelling even more excitement. But passion truly does filter down from the top. And this is where I am on the same page as many others across the NonStop community – surely, we should be seeing a lot more passion today? How could you miss any opportunity to showcase NonStop on Blades!

At the final Q & A session at GTUG, Werner Alexis asked the executive panel about innovation – and in what innovative solutions NonStop was engaging. It brought a very passionate response from Winston Prather, VP and General Manager, HP NED, as he talked about the innovation associated with the move of NonStop to support industry-standard commodity hardware.

But there was more to Werner’s question and one we all need to recognize. Werner was looking for more excitement, more passion, over the application of NonStop to solving business problems in new and innovative ways. It’s certainly good news to hear about what HP is doing for the platform, but what is the platform doing for business? For the data center? And in support of new cool applications we tend to associate with the web and the Internet?

As Nigel reminded me – other platforms certainly attract their evangelists whose passion certainly comes through. No one should be left uncertain or unsure of how important the NonStop platform continues to be for HP. And no one should be left wondering about the support for the platform particularly by those who are its “coaches” – it should be visible to everyone in the community that the coaches are 100% committed to the success of the team!

Looking further afield, it was Shaun Clowes, Product Manager NonStop and Payments at Integrated Research who reminded me recently of how “the NonStop forms the centerpiece of important business operations … (for us to) provide insight about the value of the existing systems helps justify the investment in those systems. Having a system for insight that allows you to also see into the processes that surround NonStop (and the eventual merging of the NonStop into an enterprise cloud) is critical to managing the complexity and delivering the service levels and ROI that is demanded.”

Clouds, SaaS, ever-greater use of client-side mashups, all steer technology discussions to systems that are available and scalable. Are we just going to let IBM take the leadership mantle away from HP and NonStop? Or do we see the value that comes from being passionate about NonStop and are prepared to speak up?

I think we would all like to see a lot more passion coming from HP and the NonStop team – but should we be relying solely on their fervent zeal? Could it be that the group of writers, bloggers, community agitators, user group leaders, online forum participants will prove to be a much larger source of the passion for the platform?

Perhaps, the passion will even see new uses for NonStop materialize – every change inside a data center today has to only add to the opportunities open to leverage and to further engage the NonStop platform! After all, there was no shortage of passion at GTUG and I have no reason to consider others within the NonStop community any less passionate. And I for one will feed off it at every opportunity as I am sure everyone else will as well!

A good glass of Aussie Shiraz!

2009-11-19T03:19:00.000-08:00

Following the last posting where I talked of how I enjoyed riding my motorcycle along the Colorado front ranges in the cool of autumn, I found myself this week relegated to doing chores. One item I had to complete was the smog-testing of our faithful old-world, heavy-weight, gas guzzling Cadillac SUV. It passed without any issues and I then drove to the county offices to renew the tags, and I came across something so completely different from my SUV: a brand new Tesla! And the picture above is of the Cadillac SUV parked behind this rather photogenic battery-powered coupe!

For those not familiar with the Tesla, it pretty much is the polar opposite of the Cadillac – powered by batteries with no emissions, and helped out by the folks at Lotus, wrapped in a very attractive package. But as tempted as I was (after all, it was the season to look at what the auto industry was bringing to market and to think about change), I really have grown fond of the old SUV. It would take a lot of extra mileage from a new car to offset the high prices demanded by today’s efficient hybrids. Every time I turn the ignition key in my Cadillac it starts, and it’s proven to be highly reliable. And it size is a serious consideration: I am still old-school and feel so much safer on the long cross-country drives than I do in a small car.

That night, after a quiet dinner at the local eatery, I pulled the cork from a 2001 Penfolds’ Magill Estate shiraz. An occasion I noted in a network update I posted to LinkedIn. If it ever came to a situation where I could only drink the wines from one producer I would be hard pressed to think of anyone other than Penfolds. My first exposure to the Magill Estate came while I was visiting Sydney, back in 1992, when I was a Program Manager with Tandem Computers and in the Distributed Systems Management (DSM) group. I was managing the NonStop NET/MASTER program and it necessitated frequent trips back to Sydney.

The history of NonStop NET/MASTER, I am the first to admit, certainly proved to be anything but spectacular. When I joined the project I was coming off a background that had been exclusively IBM, and IBM plug-compatible (PCM), mainframes. I had been successful introducing a line of small plug-compatible mainframes for Nixdorf as I had funded the porting of NET/MASTER from MVS to DOS/VS, a version that ran exclusively on the Nixdorf mainframe. In a single deal, Nixdorf sold twelve PCM mainframes to the Australian Federal Government. The deal clincher was that the IBM mainframe operators could monitor and manage the Nixdorf PCM mainframes using the network management tools they were already familiar with as they appeared as just another networked SNA device.

Talking with the executives of the company that developed NET/MASTER, the one system in an IBM SNA network that they struggled to manage was the Tandem. NET/MASTER was just a VTAM application and it was proving to be a big hit with bankers and retailers, and nearly every one of them had a Tandem front-ending their ATM and POS networks. Wouldn’t it be advantageous to all if some NET/MASTER components could be run on the Tandem, and surely, it wouldn’t be any more difficult than the port to DOS/VS undertaken for Nixdorf?

The senior Tandem technical folks from Cupertino took a trip to Sydney in late ’88 to consider the opportunity - a number of large banking customers were working behind the scenes to make NET/MASTER on Tandem a reality. And as I recall, following many glasses of good Australian red wine, a decision was taken to deploy NET/MASTER on Tandem. But then it all fell apart – for one reason or another, what was considered at the time as the world’s best network management implementation, was not ported, but re-implemented and not as a network management aid, but as a new system management subsystem!

It proved to be a classic “overkill,” and for the Tandem systems of the mid ‘90s, there just wasn’t the capacity available (as was routinely exploited on an IBM mainframe of the day) and the solutions struggled to perform. Although the NET/MASTER solution proved to be less than stellar by any account – but the problem it addressed remained. In a heterogeneous environment, where Tandem systems were a part of the solution, there were demands not only for Tandem to be well managed, but to be easily integrated into the enterprise management tool of choice. Visibility of the systems, the networks, and the applications being run, from a central “flight deck” became a necessity.

But the circumstances did change and the explosion in server populations changed the nature of the problem for good. As these servers were racked higher and higher, and spread deeper and deeper, the human factor took over and simple errors from missed messages often brought down critical applications, and as the pressure increased to protect private information many of these outages made it onto the front pages of major newspapers and into the evening news broadcasts on the major television networks.

The data center had to be automated and the servers charged with the oversight of the data center quickly became the most important servers of all. Across many installations, the trusted IBM mainframe became the central management hub filtering every event message and routing it to the appropriate application. Surely, just as we had seen upon the arrival of ATM and POS networks where 7 X 24 operations were mandated, the NonStop would become central to any data center managers plans!

It never happened! And the innovation I thought it would trigger, didn't appear! Not up until now, it hadn’t. In the feature I wrote some time back, on Wednesday, February 18, 2009 and posted as “Game changers!”, I reflected on how “NonStop servers can be deployed as critical components to monitor everything to do with a data center facility – whether a single building, or just part of the facility, or the entire global enterprise. Every major data center in the world, and the count of these facilities climbs quickly into the thousands and tens of thousands, could witness a NonStop server overseeing it all.”

A small start-up company, Modius, was porting their environment management application to NonStop. I added that “every time a customer took me on a visit of their ‘flight deck’ where the applications, systems, and networks were managed, I wondered why there hadn’t been an innovative engineer front-ending everything with a NonStop.” And then I concluded with the bold prediction “NonStop is poised for a new era of cool-ness! … a NonStop in every data center!

It hasn’t turned out to be quite this explosive and Modius continues to look for the best channel to work with - the typical HVAC salesman isn’t quite up to the challenge of a NonStop, it would appear. In recognition of this, I have just read where Modius has recruited Ed Sterbenc a former Tandem executive and well known to many of us. Particularly for those of us with roots in the old ICON division of Tandem Computers, and this “addition” bodes well for Modius. But the basic premise remains – for key manageability solutions the NonStop server remains an ideal platform. And it is the coming changes in the data center that may just fuel the interest once again.

As we move to cloud computing, particularly within the enterprise as we deploy the clouds ourselves behind the firewall, the expectation is that the cloud will always be available. Transactions are routed around downed servers, those experiencing peak loads will have secondary transactions routed to less stressed servers, and the same application may run on different platform / OS combinations when their SLA’s don’t mandate specific response times.

Relying on something other than NonStop for this level of oversight may prove extremely short-sighted and become a risky proposition for many data center managers. For many of these managers, the NonStop has almost been forgotten; running for many years without an outage of any kind. These same data center managers can be hard-pressed to even identify which of their servers is the NonStop - it’s in there somewhere – and no, I can’t recall what it looks like! The time may be right to re-evaluate the role of NonStop, and with so many of them deployed in critical situations it may surprise data center managers how effective a “tool” these servers have become!

I didn’t buy a new motorcycle, and I didn’t buy a new car. And no, I didn’t open an exotic-car dealership, either. Readers of the last blog may have been left speculating about the outcome. It’s going to take a lot for me to move away from my SUV – perhaps I will replace it with a more energy efficient hybrid as my green-side continues to develop. But the role the SUV fills, and the requirements I have for it, haven’t changed. I still need to navigate the winter roads of Colorado and make it through to sunny Southern California no matter what!.

As I enjoyed my glass of shiraz, and thought back on earlier projects, I couldn’t help but think about a future of NonStop with respect to manageability and the potential for NonStop to play an even bigger role. It still makes so much sense, to me even after all that was done with NonStop NET/MASTER. Isn’t it about time we revisited the very attributes that make NonStop so valuable to our business units and, as we contemplate moving to a different computing model, use it to keep everything operating reliably?

I am confident that some data center managers will recognize the value proposition as I am confident solutions providers will renew their interest in NonStop. After all, the server has been in our data center for decades in support of transactions – isn’t the stream of management events just another transaction stream? Perhaps we will see a NonStop in every data center after all!

Fall, a time to buy?

2009-11-13T09:12:00.000-08:00

I just stepped back indoors after taking the motorcycle out for a 75 miles late-Fall jaunt. With the continental divide well covered by early season snow, and plenty of evidence that there had been recent snowfalls along the Colorado front ranges, with loose grit in many of the corner apexes, it was good to catch a break in the weather. Just to enjoy the autumn colors, still present, framing many of the deserted back-roads that I ride, provided a pleasant change from the routines of the past few weeks. And the picture above is of looking back at a new line of "snow clouds" descending. Oh well!

Cutting across some of the main roads to get to my favorite highway, I passed a number of motorcycle and car showrooms. I thought that it may be a good idea to stop by and walk the deserted lots on my way back – after all, there’s nothing better to do on quiet days then to check out the new models.

I subscribe to many car and bike magazines and generally read them from cover to cover. I am not sure how my mind functions, but even the smallest details on even the obscurest model I somehow seem to be able to recall. Much of what goes on in my daily life, I seem to be having a tough time recalling accurately, mind you, but knowing that the cylinders inside a Honda motorcycle cruiser are now much bigger than those lying in the engine of a Dodge Viper, for instance, is something I read somewhere. Many years ago! So, with the new model year now in full swing and show rooms beginning to fill up with the ‘10s, it is always a great way to idle away a late autumn afternoon.

I have always been puzzled why the new models always start arriving in the Fall. It so happens that this is a byproduct of the impact of the July – August summer factory shut-downs that take place each year. As they restart, the factories begin cranking out the new models. Something a city boy from the Southern Hemisphere could never figure out. But in the run-up to Christmas many suburban driveways begin to display the latest offering from the more popular manufacturers.

It’s been a while since I bought a car. And it’s been much longer since I bought a new motorcycle. The current motorcycles are both ’03 models and while there’s absolutely nothing wrong with them, it’s kind of un-American not to be seriously considering replacements. With a couple of ’08 cars in the garage, perhaps it’s not as urgent a situation – but I may have to get the oil changed, again, on the bikes and this would be a first!

Seriously, I really like riding motorcycles and driving cars and regular readers of this blog would not be surprised to know this – rarely a month goes by when I don’t manage to work into my blog something about bikes and cars. And the motorcycles and cars I own are not “garage queens” (for the most part) as they are ridden and driven on a regular basis. But with my new career and its focus on writing, I have little need or use for them to commute to work. No, I often take to the road simply to enjoy a break from the routine. And styling aside, whether a bike is two years old or ten, these days there’s little difference in how much they cost me to maintain. These things don’t seem to break, ever!

For those of us who have responsibility for the computer systems in our data centers, however, and who have the responsibility for matching user requirements to a budget, holding on to a server for more than two years can often prove to be a liability! In the months following the beginning of this century, and with all the clean-up work that went in to ensuring the Y2K “bug” didn’t put us all out of operation, I thought we would see a slowing in technology lifecycles and a fall-off in the pace of new product developments. But nothing could have been further from the truth.

The impact of the Internet, even with the bursting of the DOT.COM bubble, and the explosion in networking bandwidth; the need to comply with all sorts of government regulations from security to reporting “down systems;” and the continued gains being made in the power of chips and the shrinking of storage have all made systems we bought this century close to being obsolete! The “greening” of the data center and with it, a much greater appreciation for how much heat is being generated, has also made systems installed only a few years ago “too expensive” to continue to be supported.

As I listen to product roadmap updates provided by product management executives at user group events, I can’t help but pick up on the reports about the number of new systems being purchased and of the length of the pipeline (for new systems) that’s developed. It’s as though all the data center managers took a look out the window and saw that the season was changing and with it, realized it was time to buy a new model! While car showrooms are crowded with hybrid models and the motorcycle showrooms are catering for a graying population, computer “showrooms” are full of new hardware packages and on the pedestal, bathed in the spotlights, the new models are heavily Blades oriented.

Today’s modern Blade chassis has come a long way from lining the dark hallways inside of telephone exchanges, where I had, in fact, first encountered similar packaging. This past summer I had attended the HPTF&E event in Las Vegas and had walked through the inside of a container full of Blade enclosures (check out the posting of July 2, ’09 Common standards, uncommon advantages!) – what HP was calling the “Performance-Optimized Datacenter” (POD). And it reminded me of the many times I had walked through telco data centers. The beauty of Blades, however, is not in the packaging, or in the choice of chip sets used, but in the way engineers can more beneficially manage the heat being generated. Dealing with “hot spots” and ensuring data center managers do not have to upgrade or reroute their HVAC “plumbing” has many advantages in today’s business climate.

And the prices have come way down. For the NonStop community in particular, the support for Blades by NonStop has changed the pricing dynamics completely. And the product management presentations highlighting the “ramp” Blades purchases have produced, can’t escape noticing how steep the upward angle of the ramp has become! Compared with the inclines of other product lines, the ramp is more akin to looking up at a modern, Olympic sky jump platform!

About the only concern I would express when it comes to considering a transition to Blades is the roadmap for the Blades chassis itself. Blades will continue to be upgraded on a regular basis and in line with the chip manufacturer’s roadmap. In the case of NonStop, this is the Intel Itanium roadmap although, I would like to add, that a complementary x86 program would be nice to see. But regardless, Intel is on a tear with the program it has for the Itanium chip and when you consider the power coming with future Tukwila and Poulson multicore packages, NonStop will be getting access to unbelievable processing power.

The big question continues to be software and, in particular, the pricing of software particularly when it is infrastructure and middleware sosftware. Having a history with ACI / Insession and, more recently, GoldenGate, I have never been far from this debate. What value is reducing the price of the hardware if the cost of the infrastructure in support of the hardware just keeps going up? And does HP decry the cost of ISV-provided software because it’s messing up the value proposition of the deal, or because they would like to be able to keep all the funding budgeted for the upgrade? For the most part, software for NonStop is as expensive as it is today because it really does cost that much to develop and maintain.

Seriously, again. I really like being in the software business. But pricing is influenced by at least two important metrics: the size of the marketplace and the cost of the (human) resources. For the moment, these metrics continue to work against NonStop infrastructure prices coming down, in the short term, at least. Many ISVs in the NonStop marketplace understand this and are pursuing avenues to ensure their products can run on other platforms, in addition to NonStop,. Others yet, are migrating to programming languages where the pool of expertise is much larger. But it will never come down to commodity levels – users have the expectation that they will be supported and that expert services will be available, and how low the pricing for this can go will depend, in the end, of how big the NonStop marketplace becomes.

The ride back home grew much colder than I expected. I never did get the chance to walk around the lots or stop in at the bike shops I knew stayed open. There’s probably a lot I could find to talk about should a salesman come by. As an aside, with my passion for cars and motorcycles and my never failing memory when it comes to the fine details differentiating one car or bike from all others, there are some family members wondering why I wouldn’t open an exotic-car dealership that included a well stacked flower shop: at the end of the day you wouldn’t want to go home with a high-priced exotic without a bunch of yellow roses, now would you?

And I will probably make a visit to the showrooms sometime soon. While there’s so much more I could add to any discussion on software licensing, if a user should ask me, I am sure in the weeks ahead as I participate in even more user events, the topic will never be far away! See you at GTUG!

Real “stayers”

2009-11-06T06:25:00.000-08:00

Suddenly, I was caught up in the fever that surrounds the annual running of the Melbourne Cup. A historic horse race held at the Flemington Racecourse, outside of Melbourne, Australia, it’s a long race of 3,200 meters (trimmed a few feet in recent times after the metric system was introduced). And it’s an ancient race, by Australian standards, having had its first running back in 1861. And it truly lives up to its billing as “the race that stops the nation.”

Visitors to the LinkedIn user group, Real Time View, will know of the discussion “Fast Lane” and of my social blog “Buckle-Up-Travel” where I frequently refer to events involving motor cars. And it was only a few weeks ago that “The Great Race” was held for Super V8s around the Mount Panorama circuit to the west of Sydney. On display on that occasion was an over-abundance of horsepower, but this week, it all came down to just a few horses.

While Melbourne enjoyed a public holiday, and the government of Australia was officially “adjourned” for the day so that dutiful members of parliament could all crowd around strategically-placed TV sets, it was a lot less formal in Sydney with business just turning a blind eye to all of their employees taking extended lunch breaks at their local watering holes. And the picture above is of me at sunny Manly Beach where it proved difficult to find a quiet venue for the evening on the day of the Cup.

But there had always been something that had bound the event at Bathurst with the event at Flemington. Both races covered a lot of ground –1000 kilometers for the cars (up from the old 500 miles), and 3.2 kilometers for the horses (down from 2 miles) and tactics and preparation played a very big role in deciding the eventual winner. Not for the fleet-of-foot or for anything lacking stamina, the events were designed to push both sets of contestants to the very limit.

When I first went to watch a running of the Bathurst 1000, back in the early ‘70s, the talk was all about who would lead for the first couple of laps, who would hang around and watch what developed, and who would preserve their car to be in contention for the last half hour! In other words, when it came to cars, running in The Great Race called for patience, and a measure of driver skill, so as to preserve the car for the final laps. But with time, and with the tremendous improvements that have come from technology improvements, watching The Great Race these days suggests it has become nothing more than an extended sprint. Certainly, teams send out two cars and often the lead car drives hard from the first flag fall, with the second car driving a little more conservatively should the team leader encounter any difficulties, but it looks to all watching that the cars are going flat-out for the duration.

Not so, for the horse race down in Flemington. Two miles is still a long way and horses bred for the shorter sprint events that dominate today’s racing calendar, are not up to the challenge. Horses that win the Melbourne Cup are clearly “stayers” and there’s nothing negative about using this word to describe the few horses up to the challenge of racing over this distance. Yes, they leave the gate as eagerly as any car leaving the starting grid, but it’s up to each horse’s jockey to manage the event. Not to get caught out wide for too long, and have to cover even greater distances; not to get caught too far back in the pack and unable to see the leaders; but just back a few and away from the fences. Running with a measured pace to ensure that the horse has enough to finish is the responsibility of the jockey but in the end, as with car races, every winner of the Melbourne Cup needs a small break and a little measure of luck!

It was only a week ago that I wrote about the user event in Canada – CTUG. And in another week’s time I will be off to attend the European event in Germany, an IT Symposium jointly held with GTUG. These events are giving me a new opportunity to look at the Independent Software Vendor (ISV) community that has grown up around the NonStop platform, and the pleasing aspect to this, from my vantage position, is that I recognize so many of them from the ITUG days. So many of the ISVs I knew from my time at Tandem Computers remain very active today, and the ecosystem in support of NonStop is as active as it has ever been.

The solutions providers are not always present at user events, as much as I would like to see more of them participating. For the bigger companies in the solution space, the economics are such that they can afford to hold their own user events and the likes of ACI, GE Healthcare, and those in the telco space have invested heavily in their own, or related vertical, events. The infrastructure and middleware providers, however, still rely on being seen alongside the primary vendor, working closely with NonStop product managers. These are the vendors who have proved, to the NonStop community, that they are “stayers” and have the stamina that the user community demands.

Many of the vendors offer solutions on platforms other than NonStop and a liberal sprinkling of products running on Linux / Unix / Windows (LUW) can be seen. For many products on offer this makes a lot of sense, as the need to use NonStop cycles for some features may be questionable. With the languages and tools underpinning these products, such flexibility is more of a byproduct, as the openness of NonStop today doesn’t preclude anything developed for LUW platforms running on NonStop any more than it precludes anything developed for NonStop from running on your favorite flavor of LUW. And for those vendors who have been part of the NonStop community for many years now, this has come as a huge relief as it not only gives them a bigger marketplace but the opportunity to recruit from among a younger generation of developers.

Managers of today’s NonStop ISVs are acutely aware of the messages coming from HP’s NonStop Enterprise Division (NED). Bringing costs down, pursuing standards, and integrating open “software stacks” with key NonStop middleware, is beginning to bear fruit as new vendors are attracted to the platform. In the presentations provided by HP to the CTUG community, two new solutions providers were identified. These were established companies that NED was working with, to port their offerings to the NonStop platform, and the expectation across the community that there would be new NonStop users as a result.

If the term “stayer” can be applied to the ISV community then it can certainly be applied to NED as well. The business environment has changed so much over the 35 years the NonStop platform has been available and, during that time, there has been times when the platform has faced serious challenges. At first, the competition came from other start-ups with alternate approaches, as the fault tolerant market blossomed. Then there was considerable pressure exerted by those commodity producers who turned to clustering – surely, the solution had to be a cluster of off-the-shelf boxes! More recently, the return of the IBM mainframe has made its presence felt with IBM determined to push the NonStop out of the data center.

But NonStop has truly proved to be a “stayer” and continues to thrive. The world has become even more tightly networked and there’s almost no business that is not connected in some fashion to the internet, and open 24 X 7 X forever. And the original attributes of NonStop are as important today as at any time in the past. Availability? Scalability? Data Integrity? Which of these key attributes has lessened in significance in the “always-on” world we live in today?

There was something historical about this past week as well. I managed to catch up with a good friend that I haven’t seen for many years, Len Rust. As the former head of IDC in Australasia, there wasn’t a trend or industry segment Len didn’t know about and from my early days with EDOS and Nixdorf I had depended on Len for insight into the industry. Len and I had met for coffee in the old Tandem Computers building in North Sydney. The coffee stand was new, but it was outside a restaurant that had been put to good use during my time at Tandem Computers.

Twenty years ago to the day, Steve Bailey and I had met for lunch in the restaurant to celebrate the Melbourne Cup. The horse I picked, in the restaurant’s “sweep” where tickets for horses had been drawn at random, was involved in a photo-finish – but clearly, my horse had! So a good bottle of Champaign was opened just a few minutes before I heard that my horse had finished second! But it did little to curb our enthusiasm. In the weeks that followed, Steve and I left Australia to take up positions with Tandem Computers and we have both remained close to the NonStop ISV community.

Probably too early to call either Steve or I “stayers”, or to think we are winners, but I get the sense that my own involvement with NonStop will continue for many years to come. New vendors! New users! After all, this is why many of us in the NonStop community have stayed in the race and why we have paced ourselves the way we have for so many years. Like good jockeys, we haven't strayed wide, or lost ourselves within the pack!

And if the experiences with the NonStop vendor community over the past few weeks counts for anything at all, this has to be good news for us all!

There's a pot of gold ...

2009-10-23T18:29:00.000-07:00

I am getting ready to make a quick trip down to Sydney. In the last few hours as I pack to leave, however, I just had to comment on the recent NonStop user event I attended in Toronto, Canada (CTUG). The picture I have included above is of a rainbow and it has nothing to do with Toronto as it was taken on a recent trip through Cedar City, Utah, but is more symbolic than anything else I could include in this blog posting.

It was a different experience for me as it was my first outing to any user event as in independent “consultant” working for my own company, Pyalla Technologies, LLC. And I have to admit I was just a little bit nervous, unsure of what to expect. After all, having spent the last twenty years working for companies like Tandem Computers, ACI / InSession, and most recently GoldenGate Software, this time I was participating at a user event without a strong company-supported infrastructure behind me.

My participation, fortunately, came as a result of the generous support from Ernie Guerrera of NuWave Technologies, Inc. I have known Ernie for many years – several of these years as a competitor, back in the time when I worked for InSession which has competing offerings in the SOA and Web services marketplace. Today, NuWave has contracted with Pyalla for my writing services and I am hard at work on an assignment from Ernie.

The CTUG committee, led by Rick Teeuwsen, and well assisted by Dick Bird and Jack McAuley of HP Canada, put on a great event. While I was unable to attend the recent SUNTUG (Connect Florida) user event in Tampa, those who did participate told me of how the CTUG event reminded them of SUNTUG. CTUG saw the same strong user turn out, the same good support from HP, and very similar vendor participation. Chris Koppe, the incoming President for the Connect user community also made an appearance at CTUG, and it was good to see Connect actively supporting the NonStop community.

Events of the size of CTUG, and with the user turn-out that it attracted, ensure a strong HP management appearance. And this year’s event in Toronto was no exception. Randy Meyer who heads the NonStop Enterprise Division (NED) Product Management team gave a product roadmap update and he was supported by Tom Moylan, head of sales in the Americas. While many financial analysts working Wall Street are trying to figure out if the recent economic recession has turned around and become a recovery, a quick exchange with Tom suggests that there are signs that NonStop customers are beginning to show a little more confidence in the economy and that the sale of Blade systems is beginning to pick up. He also gave us the latest score – 49 to 0. Remember this one, you will read more about that in a later post.

The lunch break gave me the opportunity to catch up with Rob Smink, solutions architect at CIBC. Several years ago, at one of the last ITUG events in San Jose, Rob gave a user presentation on his experiences with InSession products and we had enjoyed a couple of adult beverages on more than one occasion at that time, as I seem to recall. But quite a few years had passed since we last had the opportunity to catch up on what he was up to at the bank.

For me, the icing on the cake… was the icing on the cake – Randall Becker had arranged for a cake to celebrate the upcoming 35th anniversary of Tandem Computers. A large, and very rich chocolate cake and on top was an icing silhouette of a tandem bicycle. Before the closing reception started, the cake was cut, and I managed to get a slice with a portion of the tandem bicycle. For the participants with ties back to the early days of Tandem, it brought a flood of memories of our early days in Cupertino.

I have always had a strong connection with regional user groups (RUGs). For several years, when I was on the board of ITUG, I had the task of supporting the RUG leadership worldwide and of representing them on the board. During the time as Director, I developed strong ties with many of the groups and I enjoyed the opportunity this role gave me to participate at their events: BITUG, VNUG, OzTUG, SATUG, CTUG, FTUG, GTUG, and many more. At one point there were more than 30 active RUGs and the annual meeting of the RUG leadership packed every venue we selected for the occasion.

I am pleased to report that what I saw firsthand at CTUG last week really encouraged me. There is a sense of community that continues to thrive at the regional level. HP and the independent vendor community, as I attempted to illustrate with the details described above, will always support events that attract a strong following among the user community, and support from such an important stakeholder, as are the NonStop users, ensures that the drive to develop products will continue. Next month, I will be attending GTUG and I am expecting to see similar support for their event!

But given today’s economic climate, there seems to be a growing population of self-employed folks liberally sprinkled across the NonStop field; consultants providing services to others in the community. Perhaps, given of my own circumstance, I paid a lot more attention to them than I ever had in the past. And even among the vendors that were exhibiting, there were several consultants present.

In the last posting to my social blog site, covering an earlier outing on a Colorado race track, I needed to pay a visit to a nearby tire store. For more on this, check out: http://buckle-up-travel.blogspot.com/2009/09/give-me-brake-concentrate.html. At that time I wrote of how impressed I was with the tire company, suggesting that after a “one and a half hour process (of cleaning the wheels and checking the tires) … the lads at Golden’s Big O tire shop simply told me it was free! I decided: my next set of tires? I am going to give them a chance to bid!”

Well as it so happened, after returning from a weekend a California race track only a week ago, I picked up a nail in a new tire and had to make another visit to this time the local tire shop. And again, they patched the tire, removing it from the wheel, and didn’t charge me anything. They sent me on my way with the simple request to “please consider us when it comes time to make your next tire purchase!”

There have been many times when I have had to visit tire shops through the years, and I recall I had to pay every time – but clearly, no aspect of business is free from competition. The value that comes from taking down my information, and registering me in a data base more than offsets the costs of fixing my tire. Just another example of where the information about the service has become just as important as the service itself.

There is a lot of evidence to suggest that the NonStop community fosters long term “fellowship.” Even when given the opportunity to work on different platforms and support other environments, many individuals that have faced life-altering career choices, have elected to become independent and to stay close to the NonStop community. The collective knowledge of the technology, products, and marketplaces these individuals posses probably surpasses what can be found anywhere else. Probably including what can be found these days within HP. And the opportunity to provide users and vendors alike with a variety of services only makes the community richer!

The photo of the rainbow above is a reminder for me that as the recovery begins to kick-in, there will be a considerably expansion of commerce. As the economy picks up and consumer confidence is restored, people will start to invest and business will become frenetic again. And there will be many corporations that make poor judgment calls in haste when it comes to information technology and products. However, across the NonStop community and, as evident from the continuing support for RUGs, there are individuals only too willing to help out.

NonStop users in particular, are very fortunate as to have access to this sizable pool of consulting and services talent. Rather than walking away from NonStop to find employment on other systems, or simply retiring, these individuals recognize how much added-value they can provide – particularly in these difficult economic times where budgets are so tight.

So many data centers are lightly staffed today and have no “bench” or “supporting cast” ready to be thrown onto the stage to help out. Big consulting firms will always be anxiously awaiting any opportunity to place contractors into these data centers, but their ranks are pretty thin when it comes to NonStop expertise. The NonStop consultants within our community can provide so much value in this respect.

And for the most part, they can be approached to help solve a variety of problems and to address even major concerns, for nothing more than a simple “please consider me when it comes time to make your next service(s) purchase!”

Is there gas in the tank?

2009-10-16T18:33:00.000-07:00

Just finished skimming through the October issue of NonStop Connect Now and read the item promoting an upcoming webinar (December 2, ’09) on the subject of 35 years of NonStop evolution. According to the promotion:

“Throughout these decades, NonStop has evolved continuously and has now become a standards-based, modern infrastructure that continues to meet the needs of the most demanding customers and applications … take a look at the evolution of NonStop and hear about its past, present and future.”

It occurred to me that we take so much of what NonStop has achieved over the past 35 years for granted, and often forget just how hard those 35 years have been. Today when we read of how, after 35 years, “NonStop has delivered on the promise of continuous application availability, unparalleled data integrity and industry leading scalability,” as the promotion piece above led with, how often do we simply forget all the hard work and long hours that a tightly-knit group of passionate engineers gave to the company allowing it to deliver on the promise.

The picture above came to me from Diana Cortes, after I had asked her whether she had any photos from the early days. And for sure, the fashion statements clearly suggest that this is from the seventies. But when I asked who the four men in the photo were, there was nobody who could tell me. Looking at the background, it’s evident that they are in a test facility of some sort – perhaps even manufacturing. And the systems are Tandem Computers certainly. So, leading with this photo is now symbolic for me – yes, they most probably will be recognized after this posting – as it symbolizes the generation of engineers who worked so hard to bring the Tandem Computers to market.

Last weekend I was, again, participating in a track session – this time at Buttonwillow, CA, many miles into the southern end of the San Joaquin valley. We had driven the car to the event via I5, the major interstate through the heart of the valley, and the journey to the track was uneventful. After two days of participating in the high-performance driver education sessions at the track we began the return journey late Sunday afternoon.

However, just as we were finishing for the day, the electrics inside the car failed – a fuse somewhere was blown. The car ran fine, but inside the car, we couldn’t bring the windows back up, adjust the seats, adjust the external mirrors, “pop” the trunk, or release the gas filler cover. We had no way to add gas to the car (yes, I know, Chevrolet had thought of this, I was later to find out, and Corvette’s had a manual gas filler cover release inside the rear of the car that was accessible to any who crawled through to the back!) and with the fuel range showing about 90 miles and the drive home was a little over 100 miles, I knew it was going to be a close call.

Situated between the valley and my condo, was a sharp mountain climb that is called the “Grapevine” with a summit of slightly over 4,000 feet. Not all that impressive for anyone from Colorado, mind you, but suddenly taking on the enormity of Mt Everest! Watching the fuel range drop significantly by the time we crested the summit I eased off the gas and just coasted. For nearly forty miles! Yes we made it home with less than a gallon in the tank – but all the time we were rolling down the hill, I was worried we would not have anything left if we faced another climb. There was no way we could make it back up to 4,000 feet, for instance.

And as I have been looking through early articles on Tandem Computers and at photos chronicling the events of years ago, I began to think of last weekends drive and whether NonStop still had ways to go to reach the summit, or whether it crested sometime back. And just as importantly, is there enough gas in the tank to push on and take NonStop even higher? But having written this, there’s just so much history.

Around the globe, at different regional events, the local offices of HP have been cooperating with user groups to celebrate the anniversary. Back in June at the HPTF&E event in Las Vegas, HP management ensured the date was not lost on the audience and made sure we all knew the importance of this year. In Scandinavia at VNUG a few weeks ago, as well as in India at InNUG around the same time, HP management highlighted the upcoming anniversary. CTUG will be holding an event next week and I have had a brief email exchange with Rick and Randall and perhaps there will be a cake involved.

At GTUG, in a few weeks time, there will be a lot more excitement – forget the cake, there will be a good old-fashioned, traditional beer-bust. The GTUG event will be a pan-European event drawing an audience from many NonStop strongholds: in an email exchange with Dr Michael Rossbach I asked him how he thought it would go, and about the memories he had of his early days with Tandem Computers. Dr Rossbach responded:

"I started July 1979 to work with Tandem and ever since then "je ne regrette rien" We had (still have) some critical economical times, we went through a lot of changes, but the excellent technique, the expertise and skill of the people, the commitment from everybody we were / are dealing with was something I really do not want to miss. And it is still pretty much alive and will be for the next decade. I am happy to be chair of the European NonStop event this year and to host the community. What better opportunity to celebrate the anniversary and to enjoy a beer-bust ‘Tandem style’ on Thursday evening".

The history of Tandem and NonStop, is well worth remembering, and very deserving of the celebrations being planned. But will we also be making time to consider the future, and the hopes we have, about NonStop and about its role for the next 35 years? And just as important as any celebration of its past, is NonStop evolving fast enough and aligns with what our companies are calling for – inexpensive, industry-standard, and open?

At the InNUG event, where HP management had invited the press, a report by Vishnu Anand appeared on India’s premier IT website, CIOL that referenced the 35th anniversary, and said “NonStop server technology was born 35 years back, and InNUG marks this fete at this year's event by emphasizing the need for Indian enterprises to embrace the technology to 'double the performance at half the footprint.’” CIOL then reported Santanu Ghose, Country Head, Business Critical Systems, HP India, as having said "NonStop, as a technology, has evolved with the times and the Blade offering will make tremendous business sense to enterprises operating in any possible industry vertical.”

NonStop has evolved with the times! Doubling the performance at half the footprint! There’s no question that what we are seeing today with Blades is the evolution of NonStop as it embraces commodity hardware packaging with industry-standard connectivity to storage and communications. Effectively dropping in price and shredding the old price-premium delta! And while there’s no mandate coming from HP for NonStop engineers to embrace modern, open source, software - those product managers who talked with me kept reminding me that it’s just the right thing to be doing. There’s a lot happening these days with NonStop development and the message championed by Randy Meyer “common standards, uncommon advantages” is getting more coverage from industry analysts and the press.

I had the opportunity today to enjoy a brief email exchange with Winston Prather, Vice President and General Manager of the HP NonStop Enterprise Division where I asked him about the upcoming 35^th anniversary and he told me :“when I first took over the NonStop Division three years ago, I knew the technological history of NonStop – from its origins as the world’s first fault tolerant server, the evolution through various processor and form factor changes, and now our move to industry standard hardware and a modernized operating environment.”

Winston continued “what I didn’t fully understand then was the incredible passion and commitment this team has to our customers, partners, and each other; and the deep understanding of true continuous application availability that runs throughout the group. Of course this is not just limited to employees – whenever I have the opportunity to meet with our customers and partners, I see the same passion and loyalty echoed in them.”

There is a strong marketplace for servers and there’s a lot of passion remaining for the NonStop server. NonStop engineers continue to provide tangible differentiation so that the value NonStop provides still separates it from all other solutions. Uncommon advantages, for sure. Riding the Blades revolution, pretty much from the time it broke onto the IT landscape, is positioning NonStop for a lengthy future. Common standards, yes!

In closing, Winston added “whether you’re new to NonStop or have been a part of the community for more of our 35 year journey then you’d care to admit, I’d like to congratulate everyone involved with NonStop over the years. It’s been a pleasure and a privilege to be part of this team for the past 3 years, and I’m truly excited for our future.”

I had serious doubts about making it home as I watched the gas tank drain away. But I made it. And for some time I had serious doubts about NonStop. But after 35 years and after listening to folks associated with NonStop for decades, I truly believe, the summit has yet to be crested! And there’s still plenty of gas in the tank.

Let's talk ...

2009-10-07T21:36:00.001-07:00

I had the very good fortune to spend two weeks back home in Boulder. It gave me the opportunity to revisit favorite spots in and around the town – and to catch up with old friends. Coming from Southern California I wasn’t quite prepared for the weather but then again, being exposed to seasons, has its attractions. And the photo here is of the bike parked beneath a tree in our garden that was putting on quite a show – fall in the Rockies is mostly about the color yellow!

But the coming of fall is not just about the display of colors, but about change. We saw days where the thermometer dropped as much as 30 degrees. One day it was 80+, the next barely 50! And the storms? On two occasions the continental divide glistened white with snow and one early morning, we were treated to one of the best electrical storms I have seen in years – lined up, one behind the other, weather fronts moved across the state with the regularity (and precision) of a metronome!

It was out of necessity that I also had to visit the local tire shop. The frequent driving between Southern California and Colorado was taking its toll on tires, brakes, and wheel alignments. Just as we experience problems within IT in “batches”, with rarely a single problem requiring our attention, so too did I find that I had two cars that needed new tires. And pretty badly – when measured tire tread depth returns a reading of 0mm’s then it’s time! And of course, it’s always good to try out new tires and to change to something different from what had been installed before!

I have often talked of change in these blog postings – it’s the one constant we all have to deal with. IT makes no allowances for our “comfort zones” and continues to throw new things at us – whether processors, storage, or software. And the rate of change makes no allowance for our need to pause occasionally, and to take stock (of our situation or our priorities). Just as the trees of the Rockies react to the stress of summer by shutting down and shedding their leaves, and the tires on our cars react to the abuse they receive at our hands (or should I say feet), we are reminded of how often we are called upon to make adjustments.

GoldenGate has been acquired by Oracle, with the earliest press releases hitting the wire services back in late July. For many of us working at GoldenGate, myself included, the news of the purchase was cause to celebrate. For the three years I had been working at GoldenGate, business activities had all focused on driving up the valuation of the company – and to make it attractive (and highly desirable) among vendors we considered viable suitors. And with the news of Oracle agreeing to purchase GoldenGate, we felt our efforts well vindicated. But then again, for those of us who worked in business development and who had responsibility for partner management, the immediate outlook looked pretty grim.

The nature of business development is to develop partnerships with high profile vendors that “accelerate” the sales growth across the company – a way to augment direct sales efforts by “bundling” features with the partner’s established product lines. But clearly, when a company is purchased, it’s by a much larger vendor as the price tag often takes it out of the reach of smaller vendors. The larger vendor is typically already well-served by partner managers and, just as importantly, probably has far more comprehensive connections into those partners than exists within a typical start-up.

This is exactly the situation with Oracle. In my case, the main partners I had been managing at GoldenGate were HP and IBM – and it was obvious from the outset that Oracle already had these two vendors well covered. All Larry Ellison, Oracle’s CEO ever needs to do is pick up the phone and call Mark Hurd or Sam Palmisano, and there would never be any misunderstanding or confusion by either Hurd or Palmisano about who was on the other end of the line!

So, once again, I am facing change and looking to add another entry into the log that is my career in IT. But how things have changed: the economic climate we all have to deal with has turned the old adage, about doors closing only to have others open, on its head as doors have simply been removed. Senior managers and corporate executives have to reinvent themselves and be highly visible agents of growth and of adding value – otherwise, there are few options. And I was quick to recognize that I had to turn traditional approaches (for my next “gig”) on their heads!

Welcome to Pyalla Technologies, LLC. And no, this has nothing to do with any Spanish seafood dish you may have seen on the menu of your favorite restaurant. Likewise, I can assure everyone, there’s no connection with ill-gotten gains so often associated with the recording industry! And I haven’t butchered anything from my wife’s Polish language either.

When I returned to Sydney in the late ‘70s, I started my own company, Uralla Holdings Pty Limited – and I really liked the sound of the name. It was just not something anyone associated with technology and gave me plenty of opportunity to start a discussion. Uralla was an aboriginal word and the name of a township in Australia’s New England district in the northern parts of the state of New South Wales. And like Uralla, Pyalla is also an aboriginal word.

Only a few tribes around Port Jackson used the word Pyalla. And it simply means “to talk.” Today, we may be more familiar with Port Jackson by its other name, Sydney Harbor. By naming my new company Pyalla Technologies, I am essentially conveying the story of “the lad from Sydney who talks technology!” or something along those lines. My wife, Margo, and I had returned from dinner the other night and, in less than an hour, google.com had provided us with this surprising language discovery – and we quickly registered the domain http://www.pyalla-technologies.com/ and phoned our accountant.

By creating the new company, as I have already stated in a number of discussion threads on various online forums and user groups, I am declaring my intent to turn “pro” – although as best as I can tell, NCAA doesn’t have any rules covering situations quite like this. And no, I felt no need to rush out and hire an agent either. The IT profession hasn’t quite created an environment where this would be welcomed, although those in the recruitment business may argue differently. However, in today’s networked world where so much information is available with just a click of the mouse, I am quite inclined to believe it has become so much easier to communicate intentions and network on a scale unthinkable less than a decade before.

I plan to stay very close to the HP NonStop user community. And I plan to stay very engaged with the HP NonStop vendor community. My interests lie in all things related to middleware and infrastructure – whether communications protocols, or higher level services that we associate with SOA, or even the management and oversight of it all. It’s the data center that interests me most – setting it up, running it, managing it, and connecting it to those that depend on us: whether our customers or our business partners.

To this end, the new CEO of the Pyalla Technologies has accepted an invitation to join the board of Infrasoft Pty Limited, an Australian company focused on communications protocols as well as on Web services and SOA, and this will see me once again reunited with longtime associates from my days at Insession – Peter Shell and Neil Coleman. But I will also be working closely with several other ISVs helping out with white papers, essays and articles, as well as contributions to their social networking pursuits. Already, I am pleased to say, the work has started and I am absolutely thrilled by the reception I have received and with the enthusiasm with which my first inroads into the independent business world have been received.

For me, it’s the beginning of a new phase, a change of seasons, of adjustments better aligned with what I really like to do. Now there’s every chance. of course, that remaining independent may change as well – privatizing individuals is just as likely as privatizing companies in this economy. But for now, it’s a new world and I am having a lot of fun – fortunately, creativity and enthusiasm are still in great demand and I just love to talk (pyalla?) technologies!

While I may not have captured the title of “NonStop Talker,” a title I recently saw attributed to someone else, communicating and networking remain my first love in business and I will continue to write and to blog.

I will continue to be a presence in the HP NonStop user community – and yes, anyone can buy me a coffee at any time! In fact, I hope to start a regular “Coffee with Richard” series of virtual coffee shop meetings, where readers of this blog will have an opportunity to share their thoughts, discuss ideas, and either agree or disagree vigorously with what I will be talking about in the coming months!v

Loyalty programs - an option for IT?

2009-09-24T07:44:00.000-07:00

I have to admit, I am a sucker for dogs. Whenever I’d walk through a mall and see a pet shop, I take time to walk past the rows of puppy cages. My eldest daughter “rescued” a greyhound from a shelter and even in the heart of winter, when she was out of town, with snow piled high along the sidewalk, I still found time to take him for his constitutional walk. As the puppies stare at me through the glass of their cubicles, I find it difficult to just walk away. But these days, with the time I spend on the road, it wouldn’t be fair for any dog.

I had a dog when I was a child. It was a brindle-colored Boxer that we simply called “Loco.” He wasn’t completely normal – he would follow the bread delivery van and retrieve every loaf dropped off. My father quickly tired of compensating the neighbors after each visit from the baker. And when I went to Rugby practice after school, Loco would somehow manage to fix his teeth into the laces of the ball and run away with it. No matter how we all tried, we just couldn’t catch him and we would spend all of the practice session without a ball. I have had other dogs, after Loco, but he was always my favorite and one day, there may be another Boxer around the house!

There’s perhaps nothing more loyal in the natural world than a dog. The family dog has been the symbol of loyalty, and the number of times I have picked up a paper only to read of yet another heroic effort by a dog saving its master can’t be counted. Throughout life we too develop strong associations with people and places. We are often loyal to our home town, to our school, and to our friends. The picture at the top of this post is of me waving the flag for Australia! But these days loyalty is being institutionalized into nearly everything we do and there’s almost no mail delivery where there isn’t some form of enticement asking us to join some vendor’s loyalty program.

In the early days of my career, when I first started to travel on business, there was little attention given to the frequent flyer. There was a lot of attention paid to first class passengers, but for everyone else it was a pretty ordinary experience. And the cost of flying, back in the early ‘70s, meant that airlines didn’t see too many repeat flyers. So, no, frequent airline travel was rare. But today, we pretty much do everything we can to accumulate frequent flyer miles – and for many of us, our annual vacation is often greatly subsidized by the free air travel we earn over the course of a year. And it’s not just the airlines, as hotel chains quickly followed suite. Of late, I have even seen the cruise ships step up to support their most loyal passengers with upgraded cabins and deeply-discounted future sailings.

Across the computer industry, the story is quite different. For companies that really pride themselves on their marketing savvy, it’s been slim-pickings as far as receiving additional benefits for remaining loyal customers. Certainly, the sales teams are aware of lengthy business associations and work hard to retain a customer’s loyalty, but when it comes down to individual IT professionals, there is very little recognition. After all, it is often these individuals who determine future IT purchases and who stand the most to loose whenever a situation deteriorates and projects fail to launch.

For many years, the vendors have built a rudimentary program for their very best customers. Often participation in Customer Advisory Boards is solely the domain of customers with decades of association and where IT budgets often soar into the billions of dollars a year. Sitting around a conference table in a six-star hotel, along southern Italy’s Amalfi Coast, certainly is an occasion many customers would be reluctant to give up. No matter the state of the economy or the potential savings that could come from a switch in allegiance, or so these vendors hope.

Key Customer Symposiums and other targeted events come under the same heading – considerable marketing dollars expended on a handful of extremely loyal customers. It is true, I have to admit, that the vendors do learn a lot from these events and information obtained their always contributes significantly to prioritizing product roadmaps, but what about the remaining 99% of the customers? Those with relatively miniscule budgets yet they too exhibit loyalty and continue to purchase each new product as it becomes available!

For as long as I can remember, it has been the domain of the users groups to fill this gap – events and functions, even parties with celebrities, to help foster the sense of community at the grass roots level. It doesn’t matter to the users present whether you have a single server and a simple Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application, your presence is as welcome (and as enjoyed) as users with the most complex IT deployments. User group meetings, supported by the major vendors, have become extravagant and spectacular love-fests between users and vendors. While we see some recent downturn due to the current uncertain economic conditions – given all other options, vendors still enjoy the time in the spotlight these provide many of the executives.

I recently stopped by my Chevrolet dealer and saw a separate area set aside for Corvette owners, so I asked if the dealership had ever considered creating a loyalty program, along the lines of airline loyalty programs. I even took my question to a Corvette online forum for feedback. I went so far as to suggest to my dealer that I would think about proposing such a program. However, the responses posted to the online forum weren’t all that supportive.

And the general feeling was that, as much as they loved their Corvettes, unless a loyalty program offered deeply discounted (even free) services, no matter how many caps or custom shirts were provided, they would continue to shop around for their next Corvette – yes, the Internet has had a big impact on this community – and support the dealer who gave them the best price on the new car. (But return to their existing dealer for routine servicing, mind you, in nearly all cases!)

The airlines have been extremely successful with their loyalty programs as their recognition of high-value passengers have kept them captive for decades. Many are now too deeply entrenched in the program, with too many benefits, that switching airlines would only come with significant cost. Ongoing participation in the airlines program became a sure thing, and the ongoing participation by the member, unconditional!

But from all the discussions I have, and as illustrated by the Corvette owners, IT professionals just aren’t into protracted loyalty for the sake of a few “special occasions” and reward dinners. Even Apple users, for the most part, would change allegiances in a heartbeat if the new vendor came out with something measurably better and way, way “cooler” than what Apple was offering at the time.

Within the IT profession, loyalty has definitely become multi-dimensional. It’s not only customers remaining loyal to one particular vendor, and across the complex world of partnerships that underpin any successful vendor, partners expect their vendor’s team of professionals to be loyal to the platform as well. But again, in the harsh reality of today’s economic climate, I am seeing less and less loyalty on all sides. The new paradigm for IT vendors where teams, divisions, and whole business groups can be let go for just a short term quarterly bottom-line boost, no one can expect even the longest-serving professional to show much loyalty these days.

My dogs have been great pets. And to me, they showed a sense of loyalty that was unconditional. But was it? Of late I have begun to wonder how loyal they would have remained if I had stopped feeding them? What if a neighbor offered them food and spent more time with them – how loyal would they remain? Is there really any unconditional loyalty anywhere?

Is loyalty today just a one-deal term? And is this necessarily a bad thing for the IT community? Could misguided loyalty hold a company back if it’s IT staff just keeps hanging on to the same mix of products without looking further afield? What happened to all the loyal Burroughs, Honeywell, Nixdorf, Wang users? More confusing? What happens when IT decides to swap out IBM for HP, but stays with IBM Global Services, for instance? It would seem on further consideration that perhaps it is a very good thing that there are no loyalty programs for IT professionals.

After all, the IT industry’s strength draws from the speed with which new technologies and products can find a community and solve real business problems. I guess we just all have to come to terms with this fickleness and realize that benefits from retaining a degree of independence has outweighed anything loyalty programs could possibly have provided.

And perhaps, knowing that, our loyalties really are tied to the IT industry itself. After all, whether we work for Chase, Exxon, CNN – we are foremost IT professionals!

And the rockets' red glare!

2009-09-13T17:12:00.000-07:00

Friday evening is approaching, and in the final hours of the day I’m multitasking, as usual. On Skype to my good friend Mark Hutchens in Sydney while scanning emails and checking financial markets. Out of nowhere, an SMS message arrives from another good friend, Brian Kenny – “stand by for sonic booms,” it says. Space shuttle Discovery is going to break orbit and land nearby at Edwards Air Force Base.

Sure enough, in mid sentence with Mark, the dual booms rattle the windows. The base is not far from where I work, and only a few days ago, I had stopped by the rocket museum alongside the Naval Air Weapons Station, at Point Mugu, California, and the picture above is of me alongside some of the rockets on display. But these were all ancient relics of a bygone era and miniscule when compared to the Shuttle!

It's now the second time I have heard the signature booms – earlier this year, while at Willow Springs race track, I had just returned from my driving session and was trying to take in what instructor John Matthews was suggesting, when similar dual booms rocked the building. We all ran outside and many of us saw the shuttle. In at least four different locations above us!

This evening, I wasn’t in a position to see anything and from where I live, the shuttle is still very high in the sky. It’s still an impressive feat of engineering – by the time the space shuttle enters the atmosphere, it’s “flying” at more than 17,000 mph! Just thinking about how much energy gets released during the descent, is mind-blowing!

The space station orbiting above us is almost complete. Not sure what exactly is to be added next but, from all the stories and pictures I have looked at, it’s pretty close to being finished. As I listened to the news coverage of the descent and landing, the news anchor commented on how Astronaut, Jose Hernandez, of Stockton California was sending tweets back to his followers on earth.

Among the more amusing was an early one “Met our six neighbors next door and they seem nice! So nice, we are giving one of them a ride home!" Astro Jose, as he is known on Twitter.com, then sent the tweet just before leaving the International Space Station (ISS), “we undocked today. What a sight seeing the ISS from up close and then seeing it get smaller! We also did a fly around the ISS!”

If anyone had told me, a few years ago, that social networking would leave the planet earth and the Internet would carry text exchanges with missions in space, I would have been shocked. While few things surprise me these days, particularly when it comes to the space program, all the same, to imagine this level of open dialogue with an Astronaut and with the same tools we routinely use, was quite a surprise. For decades now there’s been some concern that a returning space flight will bring with it unwanted viruses that wipe out the planet’s human population - but who would have thought that perhaps the ISS is more vulnerable to a virus finding it’s way up from earth!

Social networking has been very much on my mind of late – it’s been hard to escape all the exchanges between many within the NonStop community. A few days ago, a new user group was created on LinkedIn that was called the NonStop Vendor SIG. Ernie Guerrera of NuWave did a good job of getting it up and running, and marketed to the vendor community, and within the first 24 hours, there were more than 40 members. And at last count, it was getting close to 60 members, and only two more days had passed.

Why the rapid growth in membership – well, rapid in terms of what we see across the HP NonStop community – when compared to other sites? Put simply, it was the content and the opportunity to provide feedback, almost instantaneously, that developed the membership. Marketing a web site, a blog, or a user group, isn’t all that hard given the email lists and contact data basses most of us have these days – but getting casual web users to sign-up and become members, and then to revisit the site on a regular basis, is no mean feat and tells us a lot about the type of tools preferred by web users these days.

Social networking is becoming the predominant tool for communicating with our peers, our business partners, and customers. It may not always sit well with your legal staff and still remains a puzzle to many in marketing and public relationships, but I sense there will be no let-up in the number and diversity of on-line communications in the coming years. And blogging is becoming an increasingly important tool for maintaining a presence on the Internet.

“So, blogging can be vitally important, but most likely it will open doors for you that lead to revenue or help you promote things you are selling, as opposed to generating a tone of money from advertising,” suggests web-sales teaching guru, Brian Clark. (Check out http://www.teachingsells.com/) Clark then adds “there’s a huge shift going on thanks to globalization and the growth of the Internet, and those who can create and express ideas online will be at the top end of the economic spectrum.”

As with everything you run across on the Internet, you have to be a little careful applying all that is conveyed. In the case of Clark, he’s encouraging today’s generation of entrepreneurs to begin building their future empires in the virtual world of the Internet. But the basic observations he makes here remain valid; “product placements” in blogs are becoming just as important as in any other medium, and the trend today is that more and more people are relying on the Internet for all of their product information. Ignoring this medium and letting your competitors gain the upper-hand, will be tough to reverse when you wake up and finally “get it!”

Under the label of “Artists and Technicians,” as seen to the right of this posting, I have written six posts on different professions within IT – covering operators and operations (twice), CIO’s, CTO’s, Architects, as well as Programmers. But perhaps, the most important leader to emerge will be the digital, or media, marketing executive.

In my most recent essay in Tandemworld.net (September, 09) I observed how “we read of titles like Ford’s ‘head of social media,’ Levi’s ‘director of digital marketing,’ Intuit’s ‘social-media marketing leader,’ and Intel’s ‘social-media strategist.’ And I have to believe that none of these titles would have appeared on anyone’s business cards five years ago.” I then added “traditional marketing managers may soon become part of a new organization headed by the Chief Blogging Officer, or something along this line but perhaps more acceptable to the marketplace.”

Perhaps this is a bit far-fetched and doesn’t really warrant the creation of a new job title. And perhaps all of this is just a natural progression for all those involved in marketing. However, as forward-thinking and as creative traditional marketing people tend to be, there’s mixed emotions about the need to invest in social networking and in developing a lively presence on the Internet. I cannot tell you how many times I have seen the work I create being dismissed as just a series of unfocused opinions!

Ernie’s creation of the LinkedIn user group “NonStop Partner SIG” clearly demonstrated for me how many of us within IT have access to the Internet and how many of us find time to check out sites relevant to the products we work with as part of our daily routines. With travel budgets cut and money for education withdrawn long ago, creative IT professionals, who really do want to know more about their industry and what their colleagues are pursuing, will always find a way to stay current.

Social networking is rapidly becoming the premier vehicle for doing exactly that – so the rapid growth in membership in the NonStop Partner SIG is further reinforcement, for me, of just how many in the NonStop community monitor social networks loosely tied to our profession. There may be concerns over how many social networks any of us needs to participate in but very quickly, it is the content and the “currency” that tend to draw the crowds. Lively discussions on topics of the day will always draw return visits – and we remain curious creatures so will always check back if we have posted a comment ourselves.

Perhaps there are many years to go before we do see the emergence of the CBO! Perhaps it will take a lot more courage (and insight) on the part of our CEO’s before such a role is created. But if today the likes of Ford, Levi Strauss, and Intel already have leadership in place, it can only be a matter of time. Pulling back from 17,000+ mph can release a lot of energy – but so too can hundreds of thousands of networked IT professionals. And there’s no escaping the booms when that happens!

Not unlike email, that seemed to be only a social and inter-company communications vehicle just 25 years ago that has become a legitimate business tool – and as valid as a notarized signatures on a piece of paper, and is used for mega-million dollar transactions - blogging, social networking, and even video communications via the Web, will in time replace big tent events, glossy marketing brochures, and good old snail mail.

On-line education and webcast meetings are becoming passé – just give it a couple of years and the need for huge conventions may very well go away! Should we be short-selling Las Vegas convention hotels? I am sure that will make CFOs happy, even as they scramble to find the funding to pay the salary of their newest hire – the CBO!

Pour the Chardonnay …

2009-09-07T15:41:00.000-07:00

It’s been some time since I was last in Sydney and I really do miss the place. For nearly two decades I have been “commuting” between Sydney and America – often several times a year. After working in the U.S. I returned to Sydney at the end of ’87 so that I could join Tandem Computers in Cupertino. I had been living in North Carolina but U.S. visa rules required me to return to Sydney, work for Tandem Computers (Australia) for one year, and then reapply for a new U.S. visa. The picture I have included here is of Sydney's famous Manly Beach!

All up, not a bad deal as it gave me the chance to convince local Tandem Computers management to create a Tandem User Group in Australia – a community that was launched in 1989. I came up with the name OzTUG and it gained enough traction with the community that it remains active as an organization to this day. In early ’89 I returned to the U.S. and while I waited for the visa, I commuted between Sydney and Cupertino. In all, twelve return trips, as well as the final one-way relocation trip before Christmas, ’89 that gave me 25 Pacific Crossings for the year.

OzTUG flourished in the ‘90s – my good friend Tony Bond, who I had worked with on getting OzTUG launched, had joined the board of International Tandem User Group (ITUG) and in 2000 became the Chairman of the ITUG user group. And with his rise to the chair, and following some lengthy email exchanges, I stood for elections in 1999 and won a seat as Director. It wasn’t long before the support of OzTUG included ITUG Board meetings that were held immediately after their annual events – a simple way to show support and to swell the ranks of participants.

And the strange thing about the annual user event in Sydney, from 2000 on, was that the vendor participation increased significantly. Many executives found Sydney a great place to spend quality time with their users and with few exceptions, you could see all the CEO’s, Presidents, and Managing Directors sipping chardonnay’s and exchanging small talk as dusk descended over the sands of Manly beach. And it was hard to miss the many quiet exchanges that took place between the vendor leadership and the NonStop executives as product and technology strategies were discussed and new opportunities explored.

With what I observed at these gatherings, it was easy to tell that there were different strategies being pursued. Some executives were very eager to work closely with NonStop while others were anxiously pushing for bigger user communities. Everyone wanted to see the size of the NonStop user community grow even larger and were constantly pushing NonStop execs for the inside scoop on what new marketing program was to be launched. From all of the discussions, there were clearly only two paths that these vendors could pursue – expand beyond NonStop and take what they have learnt on NonStop and adding support for more platforms, or expanding within NonStop by either moving up the stack and embracing applications, or adding additional application and middleware stacks.

The ambitions of the leadership of the first group had end-games that resulted in either going public (through IPOs), or positioning themselves for profitable Merger and Acquisition (M&A) opportunities. Prognosis succeeded with its public offering on the Australian Stock Exchange while InSession sold to ACI Worldwide in a deal beneficial to all involved. And for these vendors, their original product offerings on NonStop had been complemented with offerings on other platforms, and with the balancing of their product portfolios that this led to, their valuations improved significantly!

Other vendors in the NonStop space, however, stayed within the NonStop market. I have always been a strong believe in niche markets – particularly when you have products that allow you to successfully penetrate a high percentage of the niche. To competitors, niche’s often look small and the barrier to entry prohibitively high. But for the incumbent, this can be a very lucrative business. In some discussions that I have had of late, some very successful niche vendors are looking to move up from the middleware and infrastructure offerings they provide today, and to test the market by adding applications. With all that’s happening in the financial services segment recently, this could be fertile ground for imaginative vendors with prior experience in this space who see the value in moving vertically to grow their business.

But perhaps the more visible approach by vendors is where those who are successful within a niche, acquire the technology and markets of other vendors in that niche. Probably no vendor in the NonStop market is doing this more aggressively right now than comForte, and it’s clear to many of us who watch this space that the leadership has a strategy of expanding horizontally, adding more products to their portfolio and all the while, growing their international presence.

Last year, we saw comForte buy a number of companies and use the HP Technology Forum as the venue to unveil their first moves to expand. In the press release of June 16, ’08 they announced they had made moves to “acquire Unlimited Software Associates, in and the Intellectual Property Rights for the security solutions from Baker Street Software, Inc and Cross-El Software Solutions, Inc.” But this announcement wasn’t just about products and markets, the announcement went on to add “The North American region is key to comForte and the addition of USA Inc is another major milestone in the execution of comForte’s strategic plan for growth.”

For a European company like comForte, getting a strong foothold in the Americas represented a major expansion of their international coverage. I was very impressed to read only a few days ago that comForte has now purchased Gresham Software Labs (GSL), a NonStop softwar vendor based in Sydney. The origins of this company go all the way back to the small company Tony Bond started after leaving Software Developments International (SDI), the authors of NET/MASTER.

According to the press release of August 28, ’09 comForte said “through the acquisition of GSL, comForte adds the software product ‘The operations Pack’ (TOP) to its portfolio as well as product support staff and a new office location in Sydney, Australia! Dr. Michael Rossbach, CEO of comForte, was reported as having added “its people and products are very complementary to comFortes product and solution offering …the addition of GSL is an important step in the execution of our growth strategy.” Dr Rossback then added “this acquisition is great for comForte’s customers as we are now able to offer real, global 24 * 7 support through the addition of product support staff in Australia.

In a follow-up exchange I had with Thomas Burg, comForte’s CTO, I asked him about the growth strategy, the increased global presence, and whether this was all part of the plan to expand horizontally within the NonStop marketplace. “we are still gaining market share – but we are looking at a broader product set beyond security, emulation, SOA enabling … (comForte) has no plans to go off-platform at the moment, We still see growth opportunities ‘on platform.’” Thomas then added “I don’t think bigger is always better (but) that said, we do believe that 1 + 1 > 2 in case of ‘fitting’ mergers or acquisitions (into comForte).”

comForte represents one of the new breeds of software companies we are beginning to see emerge in the NonStop space. A vendor strongly committed to the NonStop platform that recognizes the value that can be obtained from pulling together many of the smaller vendors and developing programs to cross-sell. It is part of a new breed of vendor I suspect we will be reading more about. Other companies will pursue similar strategies, I am sure, but for the moment, comForte appears to be the leader.

Many years ago I arrived at Manly very early to prepare for the OzTUG event and for the ITUG board meeting that was to follow. I took an afternoon off to walk along the Manly beach and around to the adjacent Shelly beach that backs on to a public nature reserve at the very southern end of Manly. There is a famous restaurant tucked in behind the palms called Le Kiosk – and as I walked past, there was Dr Rossbach, seated by himself at a corner table overlooking the beach, enjoying a quiet glass of chardonnay. From the very brief conversation we had, I could easily see he had fallen for the Sydney lifestyle!

With the announcements coming from comForte these days, and the clear goal they have of growth and better supporting their global customers, I just have to wonder whether the impact of those early vendor gatherings had a deeper impact on Dr Rossbach than I had at first thought. Perhaps this latest move has as much to do with setting up a place of business in a city he is just plain fond of … and I cannot blame him for that or fault the strategy for one minute. Perhaps all I can add is that the commute will be long but Dr Rossbach will surely love his glass of Chardonnay at Le Kiosk – and I’ll look for him there whenever I’m down under.

There’s more to the picture …

2009-08-21T08:42:00.000-07:00

I took the Corvette to the dealer for maintenance and while it was up on the lift, we found a big hole in the panel wrapped around the windshield-washer reservoir. It’s always an adventure-land for me, whenever the car is on a lift, as I get to wander underneath and look at the “unseen components” that contribute to making the car go, corner, and stop. And I am always amazed at the almost miraculous technology that goes into today’s cars, and at how little we pay for them these days. But what punctured the panel, pictured above, is anyone’s guess!

Technology may keep changing, but maintenance remains a constant – today’s automobile requires routine servicing. Some manufacturers offer better programs than others, with longer service intervals but, no matter the program offered, all cars eventually find themselves in the service center sooner or later. Tires and brakes wear out, suspensions begin to sag and to lose their responsiveness, oils need to be changed, rust needs to be treated, chips in the glass have to be patched, and even the software managing the engine, transmission, brakes, and so forth, requires revising – nothing escapes maintenance these days.

But if the automobile didn’t work so well and it ceased being affordable, and what we find so entrancing that we just “had to have it” proved unreliable leaving us stranded by the side of the road, then all of the technology in the world wouldn’t see us rushing to write a check. No matter how much R&D was expended! Looking under the Corvette, up on the lift, I could almost hear the songs on the Neil Young album – Rust Never Sleeps!

Borrowing the marketing message of a paint manufacturer, this was a great album where most of the songs were recorded only a few miles from Silicon Valley – at the venerable Cow Palace. As I continued to poke and to pull at different components, I thought of the words of his opening song, “My, My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)” that begins with:
“Out of the blue
and into the black
They give you this,
but you pay for that”

And I think everyone who has ever taken a car into service, and then looked at the invoice for the service, can sympathize with Neil Young and, as they begin to lose patience with their service technicians, perhaps see his lyrics in an entirely new light!

As this was taking place, I was still thinking about the financial quarterly results of IBM and HP that have been reported over the past couple of weeks. Mid July saw IBM come out with pretty good results and then last week, HP came out with its results. These too looked solid and helped HP maintain its number one rank as an IT vendor – but I have to add, thank goodness for currency fluctuations! Both scored well when the final figures were presented in US dollars!

Putting that thought to one side, what did amuse me was the comments made by IBM’s CFO Mark Loughridge: “we have operating leverage even when revenue is a headwind.” According to the ZDNet blogger Larry Dignan, “Loughridge noted that IBM’s decision to exit commodity products such as PCs and printers has allowed it to transform its business.” He also reported how Loughridge had added that “IBM is reloading for future growth and investing in cloud computing and business analytics.”

Dignan pointed out how “IBM’s positioning in software and services and away from hardware has been a boon in the downturn.” He then wrote of how “as usual, software and services paced IBM” to these better results. Revenue is a headwind? Paced, by software and services? When I paid to read this, they gave me that! Thanks, Neil Young!

But IBM doesn’t appear to be putting too much distance between itself and hardware, or shedding R&D budgets in support of hardware components. Just as HP was preparing to release its Q3 results, IBM announced it was entering Nanotechnology. Disruptive? Stealing the media limelight? Perhaps! And more evidence that IBM was reloading for the future? Yeah, right!

In an update from Zacks Investment Research, it reported that IBM had announced it will utilize DNA molecules for building next generation microchips, adding “the company’s innovative DNA molecules will shrink microchip sizes, thereby reducing manufacturing costs … it is expected that the technology will facilitate transition to sub-22 nm lithography.” And, almost as an afterthought the writer added “although manufacturing complexities are always a consideration … IBM – through its technology leadership, superior cash generation and significant investment in R&D – would be in a position to capitalize on the opportunity.

Nanotechnology! Using the DNA double helix as a kind of “scaffolds, or miniature circuit boards, for the precise assembly of computer-chip components,” according to CalTech and IBM scientists. One roadblock to the use of this technology is that the structures are made in a saltwater solution. Remember the reports, back in the early ‘90s, of how (from Stan Augarten’s book, State of the Art), “scientists at IBM have been experimenting with an exotic class of ICs called Josephson junctions, which are designed to operate in tubs of liquid helium at temperatures only a few degrees above absolute zero.”

What is it with IBM’s preoccupation with liquids? This earlier report didn’t quite have the impact initially anticipated - should we remain patient and let IBM steal the headlines with something not likely to have any impact on IT for at least ten years? And I find the timing of these announcements coming, as they did, just as HP prepared to release its Q3 results, pretty interesting. Neil Young added another verse:
“My my, hey hey …
It's better to burn out
Than to fade away
My my, hey hey.”

For many of us, the line in this song reminds us of the Highlander movie and the television series it spawned. As immortals, locked in battle until only one remained to claim the prize (which was mortality), they battled each other. And it was Kurgan, an immortal warrior of immense proportions, who berated a priest with the line “I have something to say! It's better to burn out than to fade away!” Perhaps IBM’s investment in hardware, locked as it is in a timeless battle with other, equally as powerful foes is just their latest attempt at letting us know they still have something to say!

For as long as I have been in IT, IBM had been the leader, the company so far ahead of every other vendor, that there was more discussion about who was in second place than about the possibility of IBM’s position as leader ever being challenged. Today, it’s such a different story. HP, the company that for so many years was always credited with being technologically savvy, but with work to do in marketing and sales, now has become the leading IT provider, and IBM has to contend with second place. Fading away? Not likely!

In commentary provided by the “The Motley Fool,” as HP released its Q3 results, analyst Anders Bylund reported on how HP CEO Hark Hurd had said: "HP's performance this quarter is a result of our strong business portfolio, efficient cost structure and scale." Contrast these remarks with what I had previously quoted with IBM entering “Nanotechnology.” The writer had made the observation of IBM being helped by “its technology leadership, superior cash generation and significant investment in R&D”

Whereas HP is concerned about strengthening its business portfolio and getting fully on top of its cost structures so that as business requires more from it, HP can scale up to meet the demands; IBM dwells on what it has been doing and how it’s simply generating cash to just keep doing what it has been doing. Yet, for most of us, it’s still about the budget; about what we can afford. Yes, “they give you this, but you pay for that!”

In his last column for Car and Driver (August, ’09), columnist Patrick Bedard wrapped up by observing how his “loyalty is to what works …. Man is the cleverest of the critters. Have some patience, set up the necessary incentives, lay on the teraflops, and mankind will dazzle you with invention … Patience is the key. Costs come down pennies at a time. There’s no market for miracles people can’t afford.”

So was IBM’s entry in Nanotechnology all that important or was it just another case of distracting financial analysts? And of reminding everyone that IBM remained a major force that still had to be reckoned with. Did they loose patience after all? It’s always a hard call but I am not all that convinced about where IBM’s headed. Perhaps, with both companies doing pretty well, given the economic climate everyone operates in these days, IBM is doing everything it can to stay in the limelight.

And perhaps, it can be summed up, after all, in the last verse of Neil Young’s song:
“There's more to the picture
Than meets the eye.
Hey hey, my my.

A dedicated follower of fashion ...

2009-08-14T14:05:00.000-07:00

It was good to find time to just take it easy last weekend, and once again I relaxed by driving on the Pacific Coast Highway (PCH). On Saturday I had driven along four of the canyon byways that connect the valley to the coast, while on Sunday a more leisurely approach was adopted as, once again, I found myself briefly on Mulholland Drive before crossing to the coast and then heading up Sunset Boulevard. And the picture above was taken of me on Rodeo Drive, where time was found to do a little shopping and to have a late lunch.

Walking Rodeo Drive and wandering through the stores is always entertaining – but at this time of year, tourists pretty much take over the place. I thought I heard as many languages as I had on my recent trip to the Baltic region! But it wasn’t the tourists that interested me as much as number of empty stores we passed. No, it wasn’t as though every second shop had closed down but rather, I only came across three shop-fronts devoid of goods. Compared with what I have seen of late in the local suburban mall, where many retailers have gone out of business, I was surprised by just how minimal an impact from the economic downturn there had been on perhaps the most material street in the world.

This is where fashion shops of Prada, Salvatore Ferragamo, Ralph Lauren, and Christian Dior and the jewelry of Tiffany and Bulgari can be found; and where watches by Ulysse Nardin, Breguet, and Frank Muller tempt those already adorned in the latest styles and merely wearing Rolex’s. And the cars – nowhere else can you see Ferrari’s, Lamborghini’s, and Aston Martins all competing for the same parking spot, and Bentleys have become so common that they simply garner no second glances. An hour’s stroll down Rodeo Drive is a material “sensory overload” unlike any other I know.

It’s also somewhat surprising to see what has come back into fashion. Lamborghini had lost a lot of it’s sheen a decade ago, but with the oversight of VW it is once again stealing the limelight. Very orange Gallardo’s never go unnoticed! And likewise, the turn-around in popularity of Jaguar and even Rolls Royce have been remarkable – but not everything works, as Mercedes Benz is struggling with it’s luxury (and really, seriously over-priced) Maybach brand. What to drive, and be seen driving, is just as difficult a a choice as is deciding between a Dior or a Prada!

But it’s not just about clothes, or cars. This week, sports reporters talked of how for the 2016 Olympic Games there would be competitions for Golf and Rugby (and yes, Rugby for both men’s and women’s teams - but of the seven-a-side variety)! Long forgotten by most sports fans, on the last two occasions Rugby was part of the Olympics (in 1920 and again in 1924) it was the U.S. who took the gold, fielding a team made up of Collegiate players from Cal-Berkley, Stanford, and Santa Clara. France won the initial gold in 1900 while a full strength Australian “Wallabies” national team defeated the local county team from Cornwell representing Great Britain, and the only other team to participate, with a run-away score-line of 37–3. It’s a shame, really, but New Zealand hasn’t won an Olympic medal of any color in the Rugby competitions – and I have to believe they have been lobbying hard to have the sport reinstated!

Clothes, watches, cars, and sports events all follow cycles and not all of them will hang around long enough to make a comeback. With many, they arrive as a fad, perhaps finding niche-appeal with a small crowd, only to disappear and never be heard of again. But others, track to a different cycle, and remain with us for many years. And this can be said about computer technologies and products – like luxury goods and sporting competitions, all of us in IT can recall products we once embraced that few others can remember.

Anyone still using the database management system, Model 204? Anyone remember developing HIPO charts? And can anyone remember the Interdata 32-bit minicomputer? Great machines … history has been unkind to so many products that it’s often difficult to remember all the ones we thought so highly of, only a decade or so ago. And that’s without thinking of all the national brands that were heavily supported, and subsidized, by the governments of the day.

I was checking my email this week when a story in zJournal, a publication for the IBM mainframe community, caught my attention. In this issue there was an article by Denise Kalm, and under the heading of “The Kinder, Gentler Dinosaur” it begins with the observation “you know the mainframe is the leader in reliability, availability, scalability, secure-ability and it is even ‘green,’ offering a reasonable floor space, power and cooling proposition. The mainframe would be the front-runner in many platform decisions based on cost and performance as well …”

The writer then goes on to say “ (but) many CIOs share a concern – where can they get the trained and talented expertise to run it long term? Casting a glance over the cubicles, you see how close people are to retirement. You remember the years of training and experience needed to unleash the power of the platform. Maybe you were even one of those experts, back in the day … The great news is that as the mainframe has begun to appear ‘sexier,’ and young talent is increasingly attracted to it.”

I have been enjoying an exchange on the LinkedIn user group, Real Time View, after I started the discussion “Computer ‘fashions’ - does technology follow popular trends?” Without repeating all that has been written (and I do suggest readers with LinkedIn profiles check it out), one observation I want to make is of how the discussion had “got me thinking about this whole topic of cool, fads, trends, and popularity - I recall a colleague of mine telling me how cool it had been, in his college days, to have authority to ‘access the mainframe’ - essentially a badge of superiority back then ... but then, the IBM mainframe keeps on ebbing and flowing in the trend / fashion-ability stakes … so, is its long term popularity at risk? Is its trendiness sustainable over time ...”

A kinder, gentler dinosaur? Cubicles populated with people about to retire? The mainframe has begun to appear ‘sexier’?” For those of us who have been around large systems for several decades, cringe at the thought of these boxes ever becoming sexy! But the IBM mainframe and, just as importantly after 35 years, the NonStop (it never did attract the label dinosaur, thanks goodness) have remained popular with those who needed to anchor their business solutions to technology well-architected for reliability. Yes, clever system designers have mirrored the internal “special sauce”, peculiar to NonStop, on clusters of Unix and Windows in a pursuit of greater availability, but the long term maintainability (let alone scalability) has always been questionable.

Is this all a case of NonStop being recognized very soon after its introduction to the market as being cool, and later as a trend-setting “disruptive technology” that changed the game, fueling a popularity that sustained it for all this time? Has such popularity of these products blinded us to potential weaknesses, whether price, access to qualified staff, or software offerings, as we embraced each new model upgrade? Do our IT peers view our loyalty simply, as the Kinks used to sing, “’cause he’s a dedicated follower of fashion.”

Trends, popularity, fashion, fads, whatever – when blindly followed can lead to disaster. When it comes to technology, some solutions have proven to have lives that outlive the lifecycle where they first belonged. As the pendulum swings endlessly, or so it seems, between centralized and distributed computing solutions (is cloud computing nothing more than a return to centralized, once again?), does each swing generate a new lifecycle and are the products enjoying such long lives simply because they more adept at jumping to the new lifecycle?

Is the longevity of NonStop nothing more than an acknowledgement of how successful it has been in making those jumps? If this is the case then, by their very ability to jump, is their age relevant any more? Have we seen them as cool products many times – has each new generation of IT professionals been exposed anew to the special attributes that make NonStop so enduring? Do we breed new evangelists with every swing of the pendulum?

With continued HP support, and with no new disruptive technologies on the horizon, NonStop could be around for decades to come. And should that happen, there’s every chance IT professionals will continue to rely on NonStop at the core of whatever technology model for computing emerges next. Yes, NonStop is still cool, and is more than just a passing fad, or even a short-lived trend - it has stepped beyond being fashionable. Yes, NonStop is proving to be sustainable over time!

At the very least, when Tiger Woods walks out onto the first tee at the 2016 Olympic games, all of us who bought tickets will have likely touched NonStop somewhere along the transaction path. Again. And that’s probably a safer, surer bet than thinking the US team will win the Rugby gold medal. Again. Probably, even safer than betting on New Zealand!

"Throw-away" corners ....

2009-08-06T21:16:00.000-07:00

This past weekend saw me once again driving around a race track. This time it was at the very impressive Auto Club Speedway, formerly California Speedway – the site of NASCAR and Indy Racing League events. The professionals race around the main course, which looks more like a “D” than an oval, while we ran only on a portion of the oval – the curved main straight that passed the Start / Finish line and includes NASCAR corners 1 and 2. We left the oval through a very tight left hand turn half way down the back straight, and continued around an infield road course. And the picture here is of the Infiniti coupe, prepared, and ready to leave for the track.

The designers of the track threw in a couple of surprises and those drivers new to the course took some time to figure it out. It wasn’t just that it was a mix of high-speed straights with some diabolically slow corners, but on two sections of the track, the sequence of turns forced you to look a lot further ahead. As the goal of a driver is to maximize the time spent going fast, figuring out where the business of going fast really starts becomes one of the most critical elements that need to be determined. No matter the type of car on the track, going fast is usually best achieved when you have the car pointed straight ahead!

Readers of this blog may recall how the exit from any corner is perhaps the most important element (of the track) to execute well. And that this was the subject of a blog posting I wrote in May 31, ’08 “Heading for the exit!” on how “the process of cornering was broken into four components; braking, turn-in, apex, and exit. Of these, the most important component being the exit – the car will always follow your eyes – (and then) when committed to the corner, (look) for the next corner!”

For those readers who also read the postings on my social blog (http://www.buckle-up-travel.blogspot.com/) chronicling these times on the track, may recall the story I posted on October 17, ’08 “The pedal on the right ...” where, following a session on the track, a question arose about the correct line to take through a specific corner. The instructor responded with “there’s no right way to get through it – but when you realize that you don’t gain any real advantage in these corners – you just work on minimizing your time in them … in every circuit, you will find a corner that is just there to mess with your head!”

The designers of the Auto Club Speedway “roval,” the combination road course and oval, had added several corners that “messed with our heads” - “throw-away” corners where following normal cornering disciplines didn’t apply. If you did try to follow “the racing line” you finished up being way off line for the turns that followed. Given that the most important aspect of driving on this track was to go fast down the long, banked straight, working back from the return onto the oval highlighted the one “apex” that just had to be taken correctly – all those that preceded it weren’t important!

Just as a good card player knows when to discard cards, when to hold on to others, and when to “fold” and wait for another opportunity, the good drivers in our group this weekend knew when to take what appeared to be the completely wrong line while patiently waiting for the next “real” corner where they positioned themselves to go fast. And I am reminded of how, in IT, there are so many times when we are better served recognizing throw-away products as we better position ourselves (in terms of time, and resources) to address the real product we know will provide us with much more value!

I am constantly reminded of how not every new product is going to be a game-changer, or the much-anticipated breakthrough, we all eagerly anticipate. Very few products manage to fall into these categories; most are just refinements on what has come before. Truly innovative products, that change the course of IT and propel our businesses into new and fertile marketplaces come around only so often. It is the astute CIO, who understands the business goals and is aware of the course that has been set, that recognizes these throw-away turns!

For more than a decade, the Gartner Group has used the “hype cycle” to illustrate “the maturity, adoption, and business application of specific technologies.” Comprised of five phases, the hype cycle starts out with a technology trigger followed by a rapid upward climb to the peak of inflated expectations, only to drop dramatically into the trough of disillusionment before turning upwards again, only more gradual this time, with the slope of enlightenment that leads to the plateau of productivity. While these descriptions bring a wry smile to our faces and, for many of us, recollections of past experiences, they do spin a cautionary tale.

When viewed alongside traditional product and technology bell-curves, Gartner’s hype cycle highlights how we should never get too carried away by everything we read about in the press, or have pitched to us by our favorite vendor. There are just a lot of corners that don’t need to be taken, and turns that are purely throw-away. For many of us, sighting the proverbial plateau of productivity, as we wallow in the trough of disillusionment, proves to be next to impossible.

When I became a programmer, I had a tough time figuring out which programming language I should learn next. After listening to a lot of advice, I thought that perhaps the smartest thing to do would be to start out by learning a low-level language like Assembler – so I began with IBM’s 360 Assembler language. But my next decision, in hindsight, probably wasn’t quite as smart as I then added PL/1 to my repertoire … COBOL was definitely on its last legs and all I could see was that throw away corner right in front of me. Forget about my information source being IBM, I became completely at ease with the prospect that PL/1 would dominate for decades, and it wasn’t until I came to the US in the late ‘70s that I saw how much COBOL was in use.

Much later, I was participating in development discussions over languages and sure enough, fell in with other participants and supported Modula-2 for use in a new project, as the R& D Director was well-connected with the folks developing it. No option to use C, or even Pascal, with this group and no thoughts about the longer term objective of supportability, or ease of recruiting new programmers – no, someone knew someone who was close to the author of Modula-2! And wouldn’t it be so cool to use a language almost nobody had heard of - so yes, down that path we headed!

As the 80’s came to an end – all we could talk of was CASE tools, 4GLs, and object-oriented programming! The technology bell-curve was showing how important programming languages had become, but the hype cycle was telling us that many of them were about to flame out on the peak of inflated expectations. Those that looked further afield and valued productivity were already complementing their usage of COBOL with C and would later gain more productivity “speed” as they entered the C++ and Java straight!

It isn’t only languages that have presented challenges over the decades. Much the same can be made for knowing when to invest in database management systems, when to invest in system and network management systems, as well as when to invest in just about any other application suite or infrastructure components that has come our way.

In each case, there have been many changes in direction as products mature and new incarnations arrive – but truly innovative solutions have not typically appeared with every turn. Often we end up spending too much time sticking with something that really contributes little to the longer term goal. If only getting onto the plateau of productivity was easy to do!
This past weekend was very encouraging for me – and as I finished my final session of Saturday, I was able to move up a group. No longer a member of the novice group – I was now a member of the beginner’s group! A very small step for sure, but nevertheless, progress, particularly as I know what my goal is and can clearly see where I’m headed.

Seeing how IT solutions often make turns, and that there’s really no right way through many of them – and no real advantage to be gained from mastering them either – it’s easy to see that there’s rarely any speed gained made from ignoring the goal. I see many signs that our economies are about to improve with many experts suggesting that the economic “bottom” is behind us (almost a surety that investments (in IT) are about to ramp up) – so, for many of us, the temptation to stay with a turn when there’s little to be gained will be something for which we need to be prepared.

After all, there will be others who do see past it, and have already begun to accelerate into the straight – and shouldn’t we be up there with them? The slope of enlightenment is out there – we just have to look further ahead and we should see it clearly!

Getting aligned ...

2009-07-31T14:31:00.000-07:00

Many external conditions influence the direction we take. Often it is simply something we have seen in the media or have overhead in a coffee shop. Other times, it’s just a situation or circumstance we may unexpectedly recall. The picture I have included here is from a few years back when NonStop solution architect Gary Stevens arranged for his son to take Margo, Brad Poole, and myself on a hot air balloon flight over Phoenix, Arizona.

This picture reminded me of how the simplest elements can change the direction we are taking. The slightest breath of air can easily push a balloon off course. I always thought landing a balloon would be problematic and so it was with this flight – coming down, as we did, alongside an Ostrich farm during the commercially important egg-laying season! Not a happy farmer.

Closer to ground-level, every little bump and pothole can deflect us from our desired path. While I am ignorant of all that goes into the maintenance of a hot air balloon (and I have to assume that they are far from “maintenance free”), I am a bit better informed when it comes to cars and these days I seem to be spending a lot of time at the service center of the local car dealer. Maintaining cars not only for daily use, but for occasional time at the track as well (under the eyes of expert tutors of course), seems to have increased the frequency of these visits. And on the most recent trip to the shop, I caught up with a good friend who was having a wheel alignment done.

In daily driving, particularly on the freeways of Southern California, the conditions are anything but helpful when it comes to keeping a car’s wheels pointed straight ahead. Even with 65 mph speed limits posted, running over any potholes or roadside junk, can change a wheels alignment by just a few tenths of an inch. But it’s enough – the car looses its ability to go as straight as it may have earlier, and tires begin to deteriorate.

In the case of my friend Brian (and fellow Corvette driver – yes, it’s red!), he was adjusting the angle of the front wheels, adding a little more negative camber. On the big banked-track in Fontana that once a year we share with NASCAR, the car will have more “bite” and turn in more aggressively. And the ever-so-slight change from 1.5 degrees, 2.0 degrees, of negative camber may appear to be very small and probably not even noticeable, this adjustment will make a significant difference to how his car would handle at speed. But it’s all about “hot laps” and for Brian and his red ‘Vette, these ever-so-small adjustments are very important!

Just as the wind can change the course of a hot air balloon with only the gentlest of puffs, so too can the slightest change in angles influence the line a car will take through a corner. External conditions influence so much we do and no matter how small or inconsequential they may appear to be, we are often surprised with the outcome. And so it is with me that, as I paged through the pile of magazines stacked on my desk, I caught the last column of Patrick Bedard, a contributor to the magazine Car and Driver.

Bedard had been providing commentary for more than forty years, and in his last column observed how “time passes, and along with it the urge for hot laps (and), in today’s lingo, I’ve moved on.” The rest of his column reflects on how he never envisaged the complete reversal (of fortune) that’s taken place in the auto industry. But it’s his last comment that caught my eye. “Hey, I’m not the official cheering section of the 130-some-year-old internal-combustion engine. My loyalty is to what works.”

Readers of this blog, and of the discussions I post to the LinkedIn user group, Real Time View, will have seen how I was looking at what comes next for NonStop. I have become a little uncomfortable with NonStop not quite succeeding in reinventing itself. But, then again, and to paraphrase Bedard then perhaps I’m not the official cheering section for the 30-some-year-old NonStop platform. And perhaps my loyalty is to what works!

When it comes to what’s next for NonStop, I recently wrote in the eNewsletter Tandemworld “in talking with a number of ISVs looking into building product for the cloud, the number of times NonStop has come up is beginning to make an impression. No, none of them as best as I can tell, is prototyping a NonStop server under the product banner of ‘Silver Lining’ no matter how tempted they may be! But if ISVs are talking NonStop – somewhere out in the IT user landscape, smart architects must be giving some thought to the possibility.” In writing this, I was thinking of how quickly markets can turn around – how a gentle puff of wind, a well-placed success story, could so easily nudge NonStop into a completely new and more broadly-followed marketplace.

Big changes triggered by a single story are not unknown in our industry. In the Tandemworld article I continued with the thought that all it may take would be for “a highly publicized success story to appear in any trade publication (and) the rest of the CIO / CTO community quickly follows. And should that situation arise, and momentum builds, then we just may see the development of a new product lifecycle where NonStop begins to rapidly ‘take-off’ that more than compensates for any tapering we see with existing product lifecycles.” In developing this thought, I recognized how seductive a good story can be – in today’s risk-averse economy, fiscally-conservative CIOs are even more reluctant to “gamble” on anything unproven than before.

But hey, when something works and generates excitement, the situation can be turned around pretty quickly. Traditional product and technology lifecycles may not tell the full story, should a product be able to leap from one curve to another. And this led to my last observation in Tandemworld where I revisited HP’s success with Blades, and of how it’s “a long-shot still – but definitely something to keep an eye out for and who knows, potentially something many of us familiar with NonStop will have no trouble accommodating in our data center. Returning to the comment about the success HP is having with NonStop on Blades – in many data centers, the CIO / CTO crowd may not even be able to identify the NonStop servers present in the BladeSystem!”

I am not only a reader of car magazines, as I do find time to check out business and IT publications as well. In the June 22nd ’09 issue of InformationWeek, Bob Evens a senior VP of InformationWeek, wrote of how the new Coca Cola “Freestyle” drink dispensers is a case study on how “companies can imagine fresh new approaches and processes that give customers more choices while simultaneously driving more actionable knowledge back to headquarters.”

In other words, with such a minimal change as adding a chip, and a communications link, the old-style Coke dispenser became a new product addressing the needs of an entirely new marketplace. What Evens suggested was that Coke had produced a product that was “truly (a) transformative device that shift(ed) more customization and product-creation power from the seller to the buyer.” Innovation doesn't have to always be revolutionary - sometimes it is the little adjustments, the small additions, that lead to the creation of a product that simply confounds the pundits!

And what I find so tantalizing with the advent of cloud computing, is that it presents an opportunity for NonStop that is little different to what NonStop was called upon to do with the advent of ATM and POS networks – meeting the need for an “always on” gateway to the data center! Penetrating this new and exciting marketplace calls for such a small change. The tiniest of course corrections!

NonStop has already shown how it can accommodate small changes – in the late 90s and with the advent of the web, commercially as well as socially, NonStop sales benefited as the likes of Sabre, AOL, and even a key PC producer entrusted their business to NonStop. At that time, the NonStop fundamentals really shined and it seemed to be a good fit for the technology. And deal by deal, NonStop gained a foothold in the eCommerce marketplace.

As I listen today as other ISVs discuss clustering, and the use of redundant processors and controllers, and about all the code and procedures required to ensure reasonable (and maintainable) uptime levels, the “elegance” of the NonStop approach is inescapable. It just works! And if NonStop gains even a small toehold in cloud computing, case studies will emerge that open the eyes of many of today’s risk-averse CIO’s. And there may just be enough wind to blow NonStop into new marketplaces. I am not a champion of the brand NonStop as I am passionate about the need to solve a problem it so easily solves. Again, it just works!

Coca Cola didn’t change the product all that much – from outside, the “box” still looks much the same. And it’s red. Brian didn’t change all that much with the alignment of his Corvette – it looks the same on the outside. And yes, it’s still red too! Perhaps it will be the little changes to NonStop, and to how it is used in the future as we see continuing interest in gateways and in simplifying / securing access that attracts the bright lights again. And who knows, future packages of NonStop, too, may be red!

Change is everywhere!

2009-07-25T07:35:00.000-07:00

Readers of this blog will recall that, in my last post I was aboard a cruise ship anchored in St Petersburg under overcast skies, and not all that enthusiastic about going ashore. There was a sense of moodiness, almost indifference about the city, and walking through its parks and visiting its historic mansions was no longer the priority it had once been. The following day, just after I had posted to the blog, the sun finally came out and we took a tour of the chateaus of the former Czars.

There have been many generations living in the city created by Peter the Great – many more following the rise of the Bolsheviks. The present generation, still reeling from the break-up of the former Soviet Union and a little uncomfortable with their position in the new world order, proved to be somewhat indifferent to visitors. Tolerating them, up to a point, and their cash, but not really welcoming them.

St Petersburg had been built as the Venice of the North – with canals and bridges evident with every turn as we motored across the city. It was interesting to learn of how this new Venice suffered flooding almost as routinely as its Italian cousin. Storms that lashed the Gulf of Finland would frequently push the sea deep inland and the rising waters would simply flood the city. But apart from having canals, there was little else to remind a traveler of the legendary city of Marco Polo! That evening the ship pulled out of the port and headed into the Gulf of Finland, and I kept thinking of the turbulent times that had engulfed generations of St Petersburg’s citizens, and of how much work still needed to be done before anyone could really consider the city as grand a place as Rome or Paris.

And I was leaving with the sense that the residents were in no hurry at all to develop the city further to better reflect the aspirations of a new generation of citizens – a circumstance that didn’t feel right to me as I watched the terminal fall away. Our Russian guide, in his last comments to us before we left the bus, explained how the changes brought about by “perestroika” were perceived very differently by the elderly than by the cities youth and even those of middle age: the government-controlled economy, with its free education and miserable, but free, health-care was suddenly no longer! And the older folks had no time to “retool” while the young ones felt utterly lost. The middle-age group figured out very quickly that corruption was now a part of the new system, and seemed to be coping! I wondered if ages of oppression conditioned the people to actually be confused when there was no strong-man ruling.

The medieval town of Tallinn, Estonia, was our next stop and what a contrast! Coming so soon after leaving St Petersburg, it gave us the opportunity to meet folks who were genuinely pleased to see us! Back in 2007, Estonia was subject to one of the first Denial of Services attacks apparently coming from a foreign country. “Cyber-warfare on an unprecedented scale has hammered Estonian web sites for the last two weeks in the aftermath of the government's controversial decision to relocate a Soviet-era war monument from the center of Tallinn to the suburbs,” was how one paper I read reported the incident. As we continued to explore Tallinn, and spent a short time with the locals, the changes younger generations were bringing about were very apparent.

While in some countries there maybe a reluctance to accommodate change, other communities, separated by only a few hundred miles, shrugged off what had happened in the past and quickly embraced completely new lifestyles. Hot dog stands, coffee shops, and displays of expensive running shoes were all in evidence among those communities in transition. And they derived a lot pride from what they had achieved.

For the past week I have been engaged in an exchange with the participants on the LinkedIn user group, Real Time View. I posted a discussion topic “Does Data Base benefit from NonStop? Or does NonStop benefit from Data Base?” and it generated considerable commentary. While I am not going to go over the same ground – and readers can check out the comments already posted – or even discuss the state of data bases on NonStop, what I have been thinking about is whether we should be even more concerned about the future of NonStop?

Is my appreciation for what NonStop can do, and my understanding of where it can play a role, purely a rose-tinted glasses, “legacy,” thing? Is my way of thinking mired in the way NonStop was used in the past? Is it time we look anew at NonStop, and put some distance between how it could be used today and what it used to do in the past? And if we do not successfully identify new roles for NonStop, does this necessarily mean that NonStop is no longer needed?

Walking through the Baltic port cities, lattes in hand, and observing how not every generation was reacting in the same way or with the same levels of enthusiasm, made me wonder what will become of NonStop. There is a small cadre of supporters around the world that continue to extol the virtues of NonStop – but who among the next generation recognizes the value that comes from a server that continues to run as hardware and software components fail?

Recently, I had heard of the lengths some users go to in order to ensure key business data will be available, and how clusters of clusters are assembled to address the problem. The network interconnecting the clusters is weighed down by enormous volumes of data flooding into the network’s pipes. And the architects are really impressed with what they can achieve using low-cost commodity servers. I sense the pride these technicians have in what they have achieved for a minimal initial outlay.

And then it all breaks! One solution I was made aware of this week and that is actively marketed, simply throws away data in times of stress so that it can catch up - leaving it to later audits, I have to assume, to uncover the loss and undertake corrective measures. There’s no apparent downtime, but the integrity of the data during those times of stress has been completely compromised. And it didn’t appear to bother the architects who were relying on this solution.

Future generations of IT professionals may view technologies like NonStop as legacy, and proprietary, unless today’s IT professionals become a lot more proactive in promoting the value proposition of NonStop. In my previous posting I made the observation of how “today, the emergence of cloud computing is once again opening the doors for NonStop with its strong transactional processing characteristics.”

And since making that observation, I really do believe that the next generation of IT professionals needs to rethink the technology they select as the access point, or gateway, into the cloud. I find it rather ironic that the very server that provided so much value to financial services for so many years, as a gateway between financial devices such as ATMs and POSs, with the back end application and data base servers, is so rarely considered today as a gateway into the Cloud! And yet it is as if the stars are all aligning, once again, behind the perfect fit for NonStop in the new world.

Cloud computing, as currently proposed by the majors - HP, IBM, Sun, Oracle – is being viewed as potentially the dominant technology of the next ten to fifteen years. According to a recent InformationWeek article, IBM was quoted as saying that “the cloud market will grow to $66 billion by 2012” adding that it’s being driven by the affordability it offers. But if it becomes an unreliable technology prone to security breaches and information theft, for instance, its take-up in the commercial realm may become less than stellar. NonStop as a gateway, as an access appliance if you like, makes a lot of sense and should be a consideration by every next-generation IT professional.

As I moved down the Baltic and into Poland and the former East Germany, memorials to Solidarity and to the fall of the Berlin Wall could be easily found. The past was a constant reminder of how far these country’s citizens had come – but even as I spent time viewing some of the better-known sites (the gates to the shipyards in Gdansk, for instance) I overheard one teenager ask “what is Solidarity?” The generation-after-next appears to be even less aware of what laid the foundation for their new prosperity than the generation just coming of age.

Could we be participants in a future “Technology Event” only to hear someone ask “what is NonStop? What is Tandem?” And unless those now entering the IT profession really do see the value in using NonStop in new ways, this may become a reality! I closed my last posting to this blog with a final observation, but it’s worth repeating here “perhaps, for NonStop, a new role will develop as well, only this time the marketplace may be a lot more universal than anything encountered before.”

The final irony with change, and with what we see being embraced by newer generations of IT professionals, is that there really aren’t all that many new requirements. Even with today’s Cloud Computing, many would argue that it is just Time Sharing of the late ‘60s revisited. Or Service Bureaus, of the ‘70s and ‘80s! Or Application Service Providers, of the late ‘90s! Let’s hope that there’s sufficient “critical-mass enthusiasm” to ensure NonStop does not miss being discovered by a new generation!

From Russia, with love …

2009-07-10T08:28:00.000-07:00

Today I am in St Petersburg, Russia where the weather is inclement. And with the weather, there’s a sense of moodiness, as the dock where we berthed is unfinished, and the surrounding area in the process of being reclaimed from the sea. I have yet to leave the ship but as I view the foreshore from the deck of the ship I do not get any sense that there will be a warm reception waiting for me as I step ashore. Perhaps that will change over the course of the next few days, but for the moment it looks an unattractive place to visit!

St Petersburg lies at the eastern end of the Gulf of Finland, and we traversed it neither in daytime nor under evening skies – but rather, something in between. While the sun set around 11:00 pm, the nighttime sky didn’t make an appearance. Instead, a gray twilight will now be with us till dawn – illumination I heard referred to as “white night!”

As a Baltic seaport, there have been many attempts to make St Petersburg a major gateway into Russia. The Czars erected magnificent summer palaces and, for a time, it functioned as the country’s capital. It became the cultural soul of Russia where, the marshes were drained and channels dug that turned the city into the Venice of the north. But the depth of the Gulf is relatively shallow and during the lengthy winters, that the region routinely experiences, it often freezes over marginalizing the cities prospects for being the gateway to Russia.

The picture above is of me with a fuel tender tied-up alongside our ship, and with a small Russian coastal vessel with the distinctive prow of an ice-breaker preparing to depart berthed just alongside of us. In the background are the rows of apartments that have now pushed their way down to the docks. And the moodiness I sense is the sum of all of this – the general grayness of the day under the muted light that makes its way through the clouds, the gray buildings and wharf structures, and the pools of water reflecting the gray sky.

The moodiness I feel may also be influenced by a discussion item Sam Ayres posted to the Real Time View user group on LinkedIn. Sam lives close to the other St Petersburg, just outside of Tampa, Florida, where the weather is anything but gray and where the mood is far different to what I am observing here, half a world away. And the only chill comes from the coolers as glasses are retrieved. As much as I looked, I couldn’t see a “Bahama Breeze” bar anywhere along the foreshore here in Russia, and I sense there’s little interest in fancy umbrella drinks! And forget about coconut shrimp with spicy chili sauce!

Sam has started a discussion to promote the Advocacy group, and the value this channel represents for all NonStop users. For as long as I can remember, including my time as a Tandem Product Manager, the input that comes directly from NonStop users always makes its presence felt within NonStop Development and I see no lessening of this trend today within HP senior management. With all the changes taking place across the many constituencies that make up the HP server community, direct visibility into the pressing issues of today’s users remains as valuable as it ever has been. And once again, Sam is calling for users to provide input on the topics they believe should be pursued more vigorously with NonStop management – topics ranging from requests for new features to the support of new infrastructure and middleware.

But has the role of the NonStop server began to differ from that being supported by NonStop development? Is the message we hear repeatedly from HP executives in support of responsibilities foreign to NonStop users today? And is there technology shift in motion that could seriously benefit from a NonStop that is better aligned with user requirements? Is the pendulum swinging back once again in favor of the traditional strengths of NonStop?

In more recent times, the city of St Petersburg, Russia, took on the additional burden of living up to its new place in history, as Leningrad. The era of the Czars had brought with it such a burden than no sooner were the Czars overthrown then the visible evidence of their excesses were thrown behind a veil of socialism, with many of their residences reassigned to the civil bureaucracy. The role of St Petersburg relegated to nothing more than just another industrial center within the sprawling USSR.

Under the Soviet regime, even though shipbuilding continued, playing a strong role in international trade never did develop, as the country turned in on itself and the Czarists desires for St Petersburg to become a major gateway seemed to ebb away with the tides. But today, the once-great city is beginning to regain some of its former glory slowly, mind you, as far too many gray structures remain and I must be cautious how enthusiastic I become, but along the foreshore, and very visible from the boat, is evidence of a residential architectural revival.

And this reversal of form apparent in St Petersburg, coming at the same time as I read Sam’s new discussion topic posted to the Real Time View user group, reminded me of how for many years St Petersburg pursued one role, as a result of the Soviet revolution, only to swing back to something much closer to it’s former role following the demise of the Soviet era. At a macro level, today’s Russia is far removed from the Czarist days before the Soviet Union came into being, but it’s role as a major trading port bustling with tourists anxious to see the icons of the past suggests the pendulum is indeed swinging back a little to the right of center.

And as Sam solicits feedback on what to take to NonStop management, I can’t help wondering whether the changes that began in the late ‘80s, where the focus shifted to data base implementations and away from transaction processing, has now run its course and whether the role of NonStop in the future will once again capitalize on its transaction processing capabilities. In today’s new world where industry standard and open solutions dominate, the challenge I see ahead for NonStop management is to ensure a future for NonStop where the need for 24 X 7 availability is unquestionable.

As I watch the evening sky turn ghostly gray again, and as the clouds continue to boil above the ship, it’s hard not to think about cloud computing and the messages coming from HP executives. Whether or not we will see universal support of private clouds by most IT shops – many of its characteristics will become evident. It is true that for those of us who have been in IT for many years and have seen something similar (within the capabilities of the technology available at the time), from time sharing, to service bureaus to large scale client-server deployments. The idea of hiding all the resources within a generic “box” has been with us for decades, as IT manager have wrestled with the trade-offs between a centralized and structured approach to managing equipment and the need to be as agile and adaptable as Business managers would like!

But clouds need access points – something that will always be available. Something to interrogate incoming transactions to determine the path to the required resources! Something that understands priorities and can balance the mixed workloads. Something that can work around the failure – finding different paths to the required resources should anything along the path be unavailable. And something that can secure and audit everything that passes through it

Do such processes need good data base technology? Of course they do – but the availability of a data base is just as important as that of any other resource needed. The shift of the pendulum towards data base many years ago came at a time when front-end, or gateway, processing appeared to be a declining marketplace and the need to develop new markets apart from the transaction processing being done at the time, made good business sense. Today, the emergence of cloud computing is once again opening the doors for NonStop with its strong transactional processing characteristics.

I will be very interested to see the comments and responses provide to the Advocacy group. And I will be very curious to see if there’s any early evidence of NonStop finding the role to play in being the entry point into cloud computing. Many of us who have been around NonStop for decades were unsure of a future solely dedicated to data base solutions – the numbers suggest that the market for NonStop in data base has clearly moved on – and perhaps we will see a role for NonStop emerge in a new market that calls for the type of attributes NonStop has demonstrated over all these years.

It may be all in my imagination that gateways will return. But looking over St Petersburg, and the work being done to reshape its future maritime role, it’s hard to imagine it playing any other role. The country is rich in natural resources and the need for greater participation in the international community is abundantly clear. And perhaps, for NonStop, a new role will develop as well, only this time the marketplace may be a lot more universal than anything encountered before.

Common standards, uncommon advantages!

2009-07-02T19:58:00.000-07:00

I am still catching up with work following HP’s Technology Forum and Expo (HPTF&E) in Las Vegas. I will be leaving for vacation at the end of this week and that is only adding to the pressure to make sure I meet my commitments. The picture above is of me alongside HP’s “Performance-Optimized Datacenter” (POD) that was on display in a small exhibition space beneath the main expo hall.

Seeing a “standard” container used this way really took me back to my early days in IT. Some readers may remember my post from March 28, ‘08 “The need for standardization!” where I wrote “the time I spent working in the container shipping business really reinforced for me the value that comes from standardization ... (and) when it comes to standardization, we are beginning to see the same revolutionary approach to packaging appear in the computing industry. It is already well on its way when it comes to storage, and now it’s all about blades!”

Back in the early ‘70s I saw first-hand the value that came with embracing standards and if you recall the picture I selected to introduce the post, it featured containers being incorporated in London into structures as prefabricated, fully-equipped, housing modules. I am not sure I would welcome living on such intimate terms with containers, but with housing prices the way they have been in London lately, perhaps all I could afford would be one of these container “homes.”

But the appearance of standardization is not strictly limited to houses made from containers. As I looked out from the MIX, a bar atop THE Hotel, during a vendor reception for the NonStop community, I couldn’t help but see the rows of houses stretching out to the surrounding hills. The pale ochre stucco walls, and matching red tiles of dwellings all looking identical reminded me, quite unfortunately I suspect, of the folk singer Pete Seeger who had a hit back in the ‘60s singing:

Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky-tacky,
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes all the same.

But the rows of houses tailing off into the distance did give the appearance of a city that has standardized (through zoning regulations, of course), appears to be well managed (in terms of services), and with a uniformity that keeps pricing affordable. Well, at least from the vantage point of the MIX, some forty stories above it all. Surrounding a city like Las Vegas, I have no illusions that it supports any more an idyllic lifestyle than any other cosmopolitan city, and any viewer of the TV program CSI will equate this with something more toxic!

Clearly, the POD “boxes” on display at HPTF&E weren’t of the ticky-tacky variety. No stucco visible anywhere. Quite the opposite in fact as these were containers had been the subject of additional reinforcing and bracing – after all, each forty-foot container was equipped with a complement of 22 racks of processor blades and supporting storage. Not quite the kind that blends in with everything else you would typically see at a port or rail terminal – and definitely off-limits to most container fork-lift operators. Heavy-lift cranes only, please. But I like the concept of a data center in a box – and the unique “uncommon” advantages this use of common packaging could provide.

These larger, forty feet containers pack the equivalent computing power to some pretty big data centers. In his most recent blog posting “Sir, Your Data Center Has Arrived” Ron LaPedis wrote that the “POD is HP’s answer to SUN’s Project BlackBox, originally announced in October 2006, which is now sold as the Sun Modular Datacenter S20. However, Sun’s offering is a 20 foot container compared to the HP POD which is a 40 foot container.” He also gave us more details when he described how “the 40 foot HP container can house up to 3,500 compute nodes, or 12,000 LFF (3.5” hot pluggable) hard drives … a 4,000-plus square feet equivalent of a typical data center capacity.” In other words, what may be a 40 X 100 foot data center reduced to just 40 X 8 feet!

Perhaps it was Rackable Systems of Fremont, California, that started all of this when they introduced IT executives to their product MobiRack, an “all-in-one data center (with) capabilities for field deployments.” On the web site, they described how “data center deployments should no longer be limited to the physical confines of fixed, ‘brick and mortar’ facilities.”

While the MobiRack just had wheels underneath the racks, it wasn’t quite what we see today with HP’s POD. However, as Ron pointed out in his blog posting, when Sun introduced its Modular Datacenter all wrapped within an industry-standard twenty foot container, it did raise the ante. But HP’s forty foot container, supporting racks of Blades, is something else again, and really could meet the computing and storage needs of many industries.

Throughout HPTF&E, the message I heard on numerous occasions from NonStop product managers was “common standards, uncommon advantages!” And in reality, nothing reinforced this message more than seeing a data center in a box. A common industry-standard, general-purpose, container offering uncommon advantages with Blades. And in case anyone was wondering – yes, even NonStop is supported!

Capable of being easily and rapidly transported to any corner of the globe, the advantages of the POD should be quickly recognized. Whether part of an emergency response in a time of disaster, or in support of a new branch office in some technology-hostile region of the world, or even playing a role in the support of increasingly more sophisticated military applications. There was a time not that long ago when, worried about loosing its missile launch capabilities, the thought was to have them moving around the countryside on trains. However, with today’s missiles now a commodity item, should we expect to see the control systems charged with their oversight hidden in plain sight on a regular freight train? Just another blue container, right?

Blades are developing into a major success story and the rapidity with which they are finding a home in today’s data centers is creating problems for some IT managers. As one CIO I know posted to the LinkedIn Real Time View user group discussion “Sun-rise? or Sun-set! The latest according to Larry ...” there’s a concern over how “the weight is really a significant problem for more and more people. The floor loading on a fully populated rack of blades can exceed a mainframe's floor loading”

So now we can call our friendly HP sales rep, option up a couple of containers, and have these PODs dropped off in the car park. Maybe better if they were left under cover – whatever. Just bring the power to the PODs, or opt for the separate PowerHouse container from Active Power that provides the complementary power and cooling system to your POD (again, check out Ron’s post for more info), and you have none of the concerns about weight. Haven’t Telco’s been bolting servers to concrete floors for years? Running the cabling overhead in gantries rather than underneath below false floors? Obviously they knew something all those years ago as they “championed” primarily a rack packaging model.

Whether HP’s POD develops any major traction in the marketplace or not – and within my company Goldengate, there are views about PODs that suggests this could be a very limited market – what it visibly reinforces for me is how the march to greater miniaturization continues. Unabated! When I first walked into a data center, the mainframe’s “channels” (selector, and multiplexor) were stand-alone boxes. I even heard of one manager who had a plaque on his desk that simply read “it’s not a computer unless I can walk through its channels!”

But today, the power contained within that data center is barely a fraction of a single Blade package. With common standards becoming even more dominant, will we see today’s POD nothing more that a board we insert into a desk? Or perhaps, a simple package populating future mobile devices? If you had suggested to me in the late ‘60s that everything I could see, within a huge sprawling data center of the day, would shrink to fit inside a game module, and kids everywhere on the planet would be connected, I would have viewed it as ludicrous. So why would it be far-fetched to think of what we see today in a forty-foot container as technology that, in perhaps ten years or thereabouts, occupy nothing more than a drawer?

In the opening session of this year’s HPTF&E, where HP talked so much about a future in which everything in IT is delivered as a service, Ann Livermore, Vice President of HP’s Technology Solutions Group (TSG), and Prith Banerjee, Senior Vice President and Research Director of HP Labs, both talked about the POD. And they were pretty excited by the potential of this usage of a common transportation packaging standard. But I have to believe it’s just one more milestone on the technology lifecycle curve. With miniaturization shrinking the real estate needed for computers and storage to about a quarter or a fifth of what was required a few years ago, as is so often quoted these days, shouldn’t we all be marveling about what’s to come?

One thing is for sure however, like the words Pete Seeger sang, in a decade or so, we will see “little boxes all the same.” Common standards, uncommon advantages, indeed!

HPTF - picking up good vibrations!

2009-06-24T07:39:00.000-07:00

I arrived for this year’s HP Technology Forum and Expo (HPTF) Sunday afternoon – well before the official start of the program - to get my first look at the expo. For me, the signs that a major event is about to happen is best reinforced with the activity on the exhibition floor and amid the rubble and chaos, I came across the stand of QLogic Corporation that stopped me dead in my tracks. The picture above shows the prize, a Ducati 1198 sports bike that attendees registering at their stand could win! And Mike Geroche of QLogic assured me that I would be the winner – so I spent a little time making sure no one scratched “my bike!”

Early Sunday evening, as I had walked towards the hotel elevators, I ran into Daryl Ragan standing in the lobby of the Mandalay Bay. For as long as I have been involved with NonStop user events, Daryl had been extremely helpful to me when I was Summit chair from 2000 to 2002. Shortly after exchanging pleasantries, Daryl was joined by Janice Reeder-Highleyman, ITUG’s Chairman in 2001, and the two of them were off for an evening on the town.

It was Janice who strongly encouraged me to get involved with Regional User Groups (RUGs) and who suggested that I participate in one of the early SATUG meetings in South Africa – a commitment that was to lead to many more trips to South Africa over the following years. Leaving the hotel a few hours later, I headed up to my now-favorite “balcony” bar at the Bellagio, the Fontana, to enjoy its view of the hotel’s famous fountains. Margo joined me and we caught up with Stan Prushik. During the time I was on the ITUG board, Stan was the Finance Chair and later, the Vice Chairman and it was good to see him again

And for me, these early encounters with colleagues and friends reminded me of why I keep returning to the “big tent” event each year. Networking, and having eye-to-eye contact with community members is just so important to me and the only way, that I know of, to check the pulse of all those with a passion for NonStop. It was Chris Palombi, VP of Sales and Service at Modius, who made the observation in a post to a discussion on the Real Time View user group (on LinkedIn), of after “having checked-out from the NonStop community for the last 20 years until recently, (but now returned) with a new NonStop application, I was impressed at how much of a community it still is … my observation is that it's these human connections more than anything else that have kept NonStop so durable.”

When it comes to durability and the value from human connections, what was planned as a small reception for NonStop users, organized by the NonStop vendor community, quickly mushroomed into one of the better-attended NonStop gatherings of the week. And the picture above is of Alan Dick “networking” with Margo Holen and myself, engaging us in a discussion on the NonStop community and on the value of face-to-face meetings. I have known Alan for many years and our paths had first crossed back in Lisbon (or was it Vienna?) when the ITUG Board met with the former Chapter heads of Digital’s user community. And through the years I have always enjoyed talking with Alan – his even-handedness, and awareness of the needs of the NonStop community, is something I have always appreciated and it is encouraging to see leaders like Alan on the board of Connect.

But more importantly, the question that came up most often at the reception was what do NonStop business users themselves consider a community to be? Is it really all about the need to meet face-to-face, and to have at least one major event? In a comment that Sam Ayres, a NonStop user and very active in the SIGs and Advocacy, posted to the same discussion on the Real Time View user group as had Chris, he observed how, “nothing replaces a face-to-face meeting … of experts gathered from around the entire world!”

It has been my own observation that one of the key ingredients for the success of the events across the decades has in fact been the opportunity to meet with experts. At a vendor reception on the Expo floor, GoldenGate Software, the company I work for, had a bar set up within the booth and very quickly, a number of bar stools appeared. No sooner had I sat down than I was joined by Fred Laccabue, VP of NSD at HP, and then by Wendy Bartlett and Daryl Ragan. The picture here is of all four of us enjoying the hospitality being provided by GoldenGate Software that evening.

In the lead-up to the reception on the Expo floor, there had been a number of keynote presentations involving HP executives and where we heard Paul Miller talk of blade architectures and of “where others see a form factor, we see convergence to deliver everything as a service.” This was followed by a NonStop “general session” the following morning. Winston Prather, who heads the NonStop team, did a great job kicking it off and then introducing Product Management as well as NonStop users – more of that will follow in a later blog posting.

However, it was the final Q&A session that caught my attention as one attendant asked the panel “what was being done to educate a new generation of participants in NonStop” as he swept his hand across the audience and pointed out how old we had all become. Randy Meyer jumped right in on this topic and in a few short sentences summarized the fundamental shift in the focus of NonStop development.

“One day, I want to be able to walk into a data center and ask the CIO where are the NonStop servers? Only to be told by the CIO, as he points to rows of blades ‘there here somewhere!’ And one day,” Randy continued, “I want to be able to talk to project managers and ask their leaders where are the NonStop programmers? Only to be told that they too are ‘in one of the teams!’ One day, too I want to be able to enter an operations center and ask the manager where are the NonStop operators? Only to be told as he looks down rows of administrative console attendants that he’s not sure ‘but the business solutions on NonStop are totally integrated into the system and network management tools!’”

While it may be impressive to read of vendors giving financial support to a University program, what Randy suggested was that it’s not a case anymore of equipping the students to work with the technology as much as evolving the technology in support of the students! And for me, this is absolutely the right answer and all the work being done in support of “develop open; deploy NonStop!” But Randy also implies we may face a potential paradox in time - should HP be successful in making NonStop transparent to those developing open and deploying NonStop, will users continue to flock to events on products and technology that are no longer visible?

As the event wound down the attendees were treated to a party that included a performance from the Beach Boys – Brian Wilson, Mike Love, together with John Stamos of the TV Sitcom Full House – by the wave pool at Mandalay Bay that draw a large crowd. And the picture here is of the band continuing to perform late into the evening as attendees waded into the pool for a closer look at the aging stars!

It was back at the 1993 ITUG event in Orlando where I first did booth duty on the Tandem stand – I was covering the unveiling of Tandem’s fault-tolerant LAN connection support, an undertaking that included Ungermann-Bass (UB) engineers, and a convergence of sorts between Tandem and UB products. Later that week, I joined a group that included Michael Ladam of UB that went shopping and in a store, with western attire, we came across a rack of belts with fancy buckles each engraved with a message. Suddenly, Michael pulled one from the rack and to the amusement of the group he exclaimed “look, I have found a buckle that says nothing at all!”

“Convergence, to deliver everything as a service” and “develop open; deploy NonStop” suggests a future landscape foreign to most of us tasked with looking after NonStop today. However, from everything I heard at HPTF&E this year, the need for community ties is as strong as it has ever been and shows no signs of lessening. “Big tent” events that anchor the NonStop community and that give us the opportunity to meet with developers, to spend time face-to-face with other users, and where networking opportunities are endless, will continue to play an important role for all who share in the passion of NonStop.

Scott Healy, a past Chair of ITUG and now a member of the Connect board, recently posted to the Real Time View user group of how “you absolutely can't replace meeting in person, whether it be with colleagues, customers, partners, or with HP engineers and product managers. The community is very interdependent and at the center is the person that employs technology to conduct their business, the business user. Where those people are, other IT professionals will gather around to exchange ideas; HP will be there to educate, learn, and market; partners will be there to meet with their customers, HP engineers, and each other.”

And whether symbolic or not, I have come away from HPTF&E with mild, flu-like symptoms that have given me laryngitis and I am finding it difficult to talk. But perhaps that is as it should be, given that for most of us invested in the support of the NonStop community, it is more important now to hear the views of NonStop business users themselves!

HPTF - Heading for Vegas!

2009-06-11T08:18:00.001-07:00

Whenever I return from spending time in Boulder, there’s a serious pile of magazines waiting for me. As I empty the mail box it feels a lot like Christmas, as the mix of business, motorcycle, and automobile literature spills into my hands. Glancing at the covers can often stop me dead in my tracks, forcing me to pull one of two of them out for a quick spot check. Anything new always gets my attention!

Boulder weather was a little unseasonable last week. I had to check the calendar to make sure it was late May as the weather was more like late fall or even early winter – chilly, with light rain. The mountains were shrouded in mist from the low clouds, reminiscent of a Led Zeppelin song, or a page from Lord of the Rings. I took the opportunity to blow the cobwebs out of the Boulder coupe, and the picture above is of me by the side of Carter Lake, a popular boating destination nestled into the front ranges, a little to the North of Boulder.

For the moment, sports are very much in the news and television commentary is falling over itself describing the mounting tension. In America we are watching Ice Hockey finals that are going down to the very last game, and the momentum that Los Angeles Lakers took into the Basketball finals ebbed away last night, ensuring that there will be a real struggle for the trophy after all, and reminding the television audience that it’s too soon to count out Orlando.

In England, the ICC World Twenty 20 Cricket championship that, I am sad to say, has seen the Australian juggernaut derailed in the first round, departing without a single win. Summer hasn’t truly arrived and with “the Ashes” to be contested, it’s too soon to count the Aussies out either! Unlike their cricket counterparts, and as the Rugby as the international fixtures commence in earnest, the Australian Wallabies tore apart the Barbarian Rugby side – although, that team’s name bothers me a tad as surely barbarian rugby sounds a lot like tautology.

When it comes to language, I have to give the editors of this month’s car magazines a pat on the back as they simply outdid themselves in these most recent issues. When it came to describing the new Bentley Continental GTC Speed, the reporter began with “(it) utters an ominous bass rumble, like the first slab of an avalanche cracking off a mountain, and then the muffler bypass flaps kick in to unleash the sound track of a World War II dogfight over the English Channel.” Warming to his subject, he then adds “birds scatter and OPEC sheiks smile as 5500 pounds of Bentley hurtles down the road with the unrelenting force that only a truly bonkers motor can provide.”

Putting it to one side, I flipped quickly through another magazine before stopping at an article on the new Maserati Granturismo Sport (or, GT-S). The reporter had just finished comparing the car to a BMW M3, a Mitsubishi Evo MR, and the new Nissan GT-R and declared that the GT-S provided the most satisfaction. He explains how “plainly put, the GT-S possesses the intangibles the others can’t begin to grasp. Like a Ferrari-built wet-sump 4.7 liter V-8 whose wail under wide-open throttle fills the sumptuous cabin as if Pavarotti were in the back seat belting out ‘Turandot’ and swigging grappa.” Later, and after he had turned off the electronic assists and started to really drive the GT-S hard, the reporter exclaims “and Pavarotti suddenly appears in the rearview, belting and swigging with every beat of your right foot …. (as you go) finger dancing with the large, biscotti-shaped shift paddles!”

All week I have been thinking about this year’s user event in Las Vegas, the HP Technology Forum and Expo (HPTF&E) and it’s hard not to be swept up in the excitement and anticipation as the week approaches. After all, this is the HP event we wait for all year. But after watching the sporting events, and reading the magazines, I am not sure anything I post here can match what’s already been said.

HPTF&E 2009 will no doubt feature a number of NonStop configurations at the Expo that will demonstrate how open the solution has become, and how easy it is to run modern applications. The support for Java, and the ease with which the NonStop server participates in Java and .NET frameworks and while inheriting the traditional Tandem properties of Availability, Scalability and Data Integrity, has sealed the deal with many CIO’s!

Last year, NonStop on Blades was the highlight of the show and this year I am expecting to hear a lot more from the user side about the stability, ease of conversion, and performance gains as they now have the experience with the new NonStop Blades packaging. However, given the current economic circumstances, and the obvious impact it’s had on many of our travel budgets, I remain a little concerned about who will actually show up for the occasion. But hey, after Train and Matchbox 20 – we have the Beach Boys! Now that’s more like it.

Before I leave the magazines, there was one editorial that did catch my eye. The reporter, Arthur St. Antoine has been a source for quotes in many of my presentations and in this latest issue he talks about the sacrifices some car enthusiasts are prepared to make for their cars, observing how “if you had to, you’d sell your house and put a doorbell on your Corvette … (and) are the new high-performance summer tires worth a sacrifice elsewhere (yes)?” And then he concludes with an observation on one popular car of how it “is simply a nice transport appliance.”

Only a small minority of drivers fall into the category of car enthusiasts, and consider every car as an engineering work of art, while the rest view cars as nothing more than a tool that gets them from point A to B. And for many of us in technology, there is a minority that values a computer’s attributes, and recognizes its value proposition to them, while others remain unaware of what’s inside the box and consider the computer nothing more than a tool. Every problem we encounter in today’s business world can be addressed with a cluster of Windows boxes and, if we can add enough redundancy, the configuration should be able to address all of our requirements after a fashion.

But the tide is turning – the need to use energy more efficiently, the need to protect and secure confidential customer information, and the need to seamlessly scale as the business grows, all contribute to the type of technology we select. Can we view technology solely as a computing appliance any longer? Can we simply shrug our shoulders and ignore the potential downside risks that come with ignoring the choice of platforms?

Now, I don’t want to discourage the use of appliances – in the data warehouse marketplace there has been a considerable success by vendors selling data warehouse appliances. By packaging servers, storage, operating systems, and the data base software as a single, well-integrated solution that can be easily deployed, these appliances are helping many companies and vendors like Netezza and Greenplum enjoy considerable success.

But in general, and apart from these special cases, computing appliances have gained little traction with most companies. Just as in any major sporting contest however, no one wants to count out these appliances. And while the number of different platforms available today is way down from what it used to be, and declining with each merger and acquisition and changing business model, it remains a strong testament to the original designers of NonStop that, after 35 years, the platform no one would ever mistake for an appliance is still with us today.

Nice computer appliances, just as nice transport appliances, may appeal to the mass consumer marketplace – but when has solving business problems for Global 1000 companies ever been considered a part of this market segment? When did we ever think the vendors in this space would provide the type of global support (and investment in the future) that purveyors of today’s top-end servers routinely deliver? None of us really expect to provoke the same degree of excitement with a server that a Bentley or a Maserati may engender, but within most big companies the value that comes from systems like NonStop is just as real, and “driver’s commitment” often no less enthusiastic. Just talk to the folks who run these servers!

It would be remiss of me not to pass on the communities thanks to Scott Stallard who only recently has decided to retire as head of HP’s Enterprise Storage and Servers (ESS) division. I once thought I had seen Scott driving a Bentley Continental GT along California’s Pacific Coast Highway but no, he told me that it wasn’t him. Scott has been a huge support of user groups while I have known him and I will always remember the time I shared the stage with him at the European ITUG event in Madrid. Speaking on behalf of the community I wish him all the best – and now the rumor has it that while it wasn’t him in the Bentley, he may be seen in something perhaps not as comfortable but easily just as quick!

There will always be a thriving marketplace for the type of servers HP provides today in NonStop. And never have I seen times when competition has been tougher. There will be those who view the market as one for the computer enthusiasts – but what really separates enthusiasts from those that are content with appliances is the knowledge that today’s 24 X 7 business needs to be served with the best tools. And at this year’s HPTF&E, for those of us attending, better tools will be on display and they will be NonStop.

Opinions and Fragmentation Aplenty!

2009-06-04T19:27:00.000-07:00

Last weekend we drove through Las Vegas on our way home to Boulder and I couldn’t help but think of this year’s upcoming HPTF event – now only two weeks away. And I couldn’t help thinking how quickly a year has passed. And the picture here is of the old town hall in Prague and its astronomical clock; a clock that has been keeping time since the early 15th century!

Yes, time “passes more quickly these days” is a cliché – but it seems only a short time ago when we first heard the news at last year’s event of NonStop supporting HP’s Blades. In the latest issue (May – June, ’09) of the Connection magazine Winston Prather, VP and GM of the NonStop Enterprise Division, reflects on the theme of Blades. Sounding very much like a NASCAR driver in the winner’s circle, Winston manages to thank all the parties contributing to the success of NonStop on Blades and admits “it’s hard to believe that it was just one year ago that we launched the Integrity NonStop BladeSystem, leveraging HP’s industry-leading blades portfolio and multi-core Intel Itanium processors.”

I have already posted a blog on the week spent in Prague, but as I was sitting in United’s lounge at Los Angeles airport, waiting for the flight to Europe, I saw a poster for the Intercontinental Hotel chain that asked "do you live an Intercontinental life?" And my first thought was of how I am an Australian, married to a US citizen, but of Polish origin, I’m a resident of Colorado but living in California, and I’m about to depart for Prague. Living an intercontinental life - oh yeah? Well dah!

For most of the ‘80s and ‘90s, and into the early part of this century, airline timetables governed many of my actions and swamped my calendar. Checking airline upgrade lists become a constant distraction. And for those of us who pursue careers in marketing, product management, or business development there had been little choice other than to embrace the intercontinental life. After all, networking and building ties with companies and individuals, is a very critical aspect of these jobs. Or so it used to be!

These days, and with time appearing to accelerate as each year passes, networking is fast moving to the electronic medium, and social networking is playing a greater role in how we continue to network. The picture here is of me taking in Prague with the old town hall and clock behind me, soaking up the late afternoon sun. These days I am spending my time on the road participating in user events where I get a chance to meet with many who read this blog, and to speak on the material I cover here. And that’s about it – I have cut way back on my travel and on my time away from the office.

Can social networking in the electronic world, whether blogs, online forums, e-“user groups”, and the like really substitute for time well spent on the road? Can I readily let go of living the intercontinental life? And can sitting at a screen and banging away at a keyboard, as I do regularly most nights, provide the same experience as face to face meetings? In most respects I am not yet at the point where I can say any of these communication channels completely eliminate the need to meet and to “network” in the real world, but they are certainly cutting down on any justifiable need to travel. Yet I am reminded that there are issues with social networking, and caution is still required. It’s far from being the perfect solution for all of us.

Perhaps the most obvious issue with social networking is that what we read is simply opinions. And what we also find is that there is a wealth of opinions on just about every topic. Back on April 21st, ’08 I posted “We all have opinions!” where I observed how “social networking has made enormous inroads to the way most of us maintain our awareness of what’s happening across the industry. There’s no shortage of writers willing to express their opinion on a wide variety of topics.”

I also remarked on an exchange that I had with an industry analyst from the Gartner Group, who I was travelling with, after suggesting that the explosion in social networking might have an impact on companies like Gartner. The analyst responded “companies like Gartner are not really in the opinion business as much as they are in the analysis business.” I then added in that post of how “I have to agree with him on this point – opinions can be pretty easy to provide but good analysis is always a premium commodity.” And then I followed with “but does that make the information exchanged in social networks any less important? Can the opinions expressed be discounted because they are made in a social setting?

For the past two months I have been actively engaged in a new user group I started on LinkedIn – the Real Time View user group. Readers with LinkedIn profiles may want to take a look at the discussions taking place on this site. In one discussion the exchanges between readers developed rapidly, and there was more than one reader who emailed me privately saying these were just opinions – and we know that everyone has one! However, I was reminded of the comments from the Gartner analyst who added that “there will always be a need for companies like Gartner when we need to see more detail analysis of a market segment or a developing technology … opinions can be pretty easy to provide but good analysis is always a premium commodity.”

And then there is the other problem – given that there are so many opinions, it’s not that easy to find them all. The ease with which a global audience can be addressed has lead to a rapid increase in the number of places you can turn to for opinions – and there’s no certainty that any of us has a handle on them all (for any specific topic). I was reminded of this when comments were posted to the Real Time View user group, as well as to the Connect online community that lamented, possibly out of frustration from it all, of how perhaps now “we need to do a moderate amount of consolidation of our discussion channels, so the discussions do not become so fragmented as to be useless.”

This last comment was provided in a discussion that followed me asking the question: “User Groups and Social Networking - too much of a good thing?” What followed from one community leader really struck home as he made the observation “the ease with which anyone can start anything - a blog for example - can be / is a direct cause of the fragmentation (it's not meeting my requirements, I can do it better by doing it this way). I guess I would argue that whilst I don't want to constrain anyone, I value the ability to network, the ability to meet face to face and explore the nuances (and go down rat-holes) of how products are used.”

So perhaps social networking is far from being the perfect channel for communication. Perhaps it does suffer from being “just opinions, not analysis” and is leading to fragmentation with no certainty that any of the opinions expressed are anything more than those of a vocal minority and far removed from the sentiments of the majority. But my own experience is suggesting that, for many of us, this is becoming a valuable tool for checking current information about the platforms and vendors we so depend on. It is also confirmation that, in the end, we vote with our keyboard and mouse – we simply do not return to those sites where there’s little activity and likewise, are drawn back to those that are frequently updated. After all, poor judgment and badly expressed opinions will not hold our attention for long, and there are always many other sites we can visit.

The community leader I referenced above went on to add “and with that, I accept that a user group is our best way of doing it to date. That means there will be some programs I use, some that I don't, and many that I will work to improve and evolve. I'll try new methods, dump them if they are not working, grab the good things from programs that have failed and put them into others etc.”

This I fully agree with – even as time flies past us, and continues to surprise us with the rapidity of its progress, there are a couple of times a year where getting together remains very valuable. But am I eager to get back on the plane? Am I eager to leave the keyboard and the access it provides to those in the community that do not have the same opportunities? I don’t think so …

Social networking may not completely eliminate our need to travel, and there will always be situations best handled face to face, but the paths between the real and electronic worlds are very much on a collision course and the only question that remains is when those paths will collide. As for me, I have already begun gravitating to the electronic world and anticipate seeing many more of you taking up residence.

For those of you making plans to participate in this year’s HPTF event in Las Vegas, I will be only too happy to find time to have coffee or to share a drink … unlike in previous years where my duties compelled me to be away from the exhibition floor, this year you should be able to easily find me in and around the GoldenGate booth. But in the meantime, there are a couple of new postings I need to respond to, a few more opinions to share, and I look forward to reading your comments, as always! See you soon!

Happy 35th, Tandem!

2009-05-28T17:57:00.000-07:00

Anniversaries have been on my mind of late – last week I wrote the 125th posting to this blog. A total I didn’t think I would ever reach, and each time I go to the blog and see it displayed, I am surprised. And the readership has continued to climb with every posting. In a few weeks time we will be participating in HPTF&E and I am sure I will run into many of you – I am planning to drive up to Las Vegas from Simi Valley and that shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone.

Lately, I have been drawing material from the car magazine Motor Trend as often as I have done in the past from Road and Track, as I find the editorial content addressing issues other than just cars. And with what is happening in the car industry, the heads of these car companies are certainly doing their best to generate material for them. But in this latest issue of Motor Trend, writer Arthur St. Antoine talks about the loss Formula One (F1) suffered with the passing of Graham Hill, on November 30th, ‘75.

And it took me back to the time when I lived in London. In a previous posting I have talked of my time working for the shipping company Overseas Containers Limited, but after working in Sydney for a couple of years, I moved to the head office in London for the winter of ’75 – ’76. While watching television one evening I saw the news item that told of Graham Hill being killed in an air crash. With him were members of his small F1 team – Embassy Racing – a very short-lived program. Earlier in his career Graham Hill had scaled the heights of F1 driving and had twice been crowned world champion.

While I never met Graham Hill, for a couple of weeks in the late ‘80s I was reminded of him on a regular basis. Whether it’s the same Graham Hill I’m not sure, but the highway between San Jose and Santa Cruz has an exit to Graham Hill Rd. I was in Cupertino for three weeks of sales training and every chance he had, Jim Miller rounded up a couple of us for a game of golf somewhere in Monterey, and we always seemed to drive past that exit.

It was at the end of this sales training program that Jimmy Treybig stopped by to meet us. I have never been backstage at a rock concert, and have never had the opportunity to meet the cast of a musical or film, but when Jimmy walked into the classroom it was quite an emotional experience. We had been with Tandem only a few months, but already we were aware of the presence Jimmy created whenever he greeted an audience. And the photo at the top of the page dates back to those early days and is of Jimmy presenting my wife Margo with her second TOP’s award.

Tandem Computers Incorporated received the number C0727003, following its filing to be incorporated as a business in California, on November 29th, 1974 – the year before Graham Hill died. Exactly thirty five years ago, this coming November. When ITUG celebrated it’s 25th anniversary in 2003, Jimmy, Jerry Peterson, Larry Laurich, Don Fowler, and a couple of other former Tandem executives all participated. Pauline Nist was extremely gracious in supporting the community’s interest in catching up with these folks one last time – and there are many of us with a small notebooks, on a silver chains, draped over a chair or door covered with these executives autographs.

Over the past few days I have enjoyed a brief email exchange with Jimmy who was very gracious in responding to my questions. As for his early days with HP, Jimmy told me how he has “very fond memories of HP and I am very proud to have been part of its early computers day (1967-1973).” But it was his early days at Tandem that interested me more and when I followed up with a question about those early times Jimmy simply responded “with regard to Tandem in the first year … I was amazed at the capability and drive of our people and very proud of how they met our very aggressive goals while we had great fun.”

From its earliest days, Tandem set out writing the book on Silicon Valley corporate culture. Yes, much of what Tandem did had ties back to HP, but Tandem integrated it into the way it did business unlike any other company had ever done before. And it was mostly about streamlining communication – whether with doughnuts on payday, over beer and popcorn on Friday’s, watching the monthly First Friday entertainment, whatever needed to be said was done so in a way where everyone knew immediately what it was all about. And the people of Tandem kept on delivering.

When I asked Jimmy about the business plan that was developed for Tandem and what markets they viewed as key for their success, Jimmy came back very quickly with “the original business plan was for many years presented at the Stanford Business School. The market focus was financial institutions (electronic money / ATM), manufacturing (like shop floor control), hospitality, printing and publishing … there was a list of where “turnkey” systems had penetrated … and it was very well defined. If we can design it…for sure we can sell it! The definition of the product came from the market.”

By the time I joined Tandem in the late ‘80s, Tandem computers had major presence in nearly all of these market segments. And the fundamentals of Availability, Scalability, and Data Integrity were burnt into the memories of every employee. If an opportunity could be turned to where combinations of these fundamentals were viewed as mandatory, then the business quickly came Tandem’s way. Across all these years, despite the efforts undertaken by companies large and small who tried really hard, the same levels of availability have never been reached.

However, back in those early days, it still required a lot of field attention to make sure newly-delivered Tandem computers were running properly-architected applications. In talking with Chris Palombi of Modius, who had joined Tandem in ’79, in his first meeting with the VP of a local bank Chris told me how “he informed me that he was planning on tossing the NonStop system out because it wasn’t living up to the claims of linear scalability! They had added a processor, after pushing 90%+ CPU usage, and there was little performance gain!” Turned out the applications architect was “schooled on building DEC VMS applications and had taken the same proven monolithic application structure to the Tandem system.”

In an email exchange with HP’s Martin Fink, Senior VP and General Manager, Business Critical Systems, I asked him about the role of NonStop within BCS and he replied "looking back at my time as the head of the NonStop unit for HP and now as the Sr. VP and General Manger of the Business Critical Systems, I can say that I'm excited about how much has been accomplished over the past 35 years and the future that we have in front of us. From the introduction of NonStop up until today, NonStop has represented the pinnacle of high availability. As such, NonStop is a cornerstone for financial institutions and healthcare providers. Availability and scalability are critical success factors for more and more organizations today with the trend growing stronger as we look toward the future.”

In the coming months there will be a couple of occasions where longtime Tandem supporters will get together to reminisce over a couple of adult beverages. It’s no longer cool to call it a Tandem, as today it’s the HP NonStop server. But even so, there’s a new cadre that knows of nothing other than NonStop but the spirit of Tandem lives on. I will be curious to see how many “anecdotal” comments are made to this post but I have to believe there are many stories out there. Just as I am curious about how well the name NonStop translates into other languages – I have heard some stories already that unlike Tandem, that required no translation, NonStop has proved a little more difficult.

Martin also emailed me about the future of NonStop, adding how in recent times, “the NonStop solution began an evolution based on blending three decades of proven architecture with standards-based modern hardware components and software. For example, last year we announced the Integrity NonStop BladeSystem which utilizes HP Integrity Blades powered by Intel Itanium Microprocessors. This solution provides customers with superior total cost of ownership, greater flexibility and scalability while preserving the availability level that they have come to depend on."

And it’s clear to me that the “essence of Tandem” continues to percolate within HP. Will there be another 35 years of history? Will some of us be around for the 50th anniversary? None of us that follow IT feel comfortable with making predictions for the next year to year and a half, let alone 15 or 20 or 35 years out. But when it comes to the NonStop of today, there’s probably very few of us who would bet against it. After all it remains, as Martin wrote “the pinnacle of high availability,” and you only ever reach a pinnacle’s summit, you can never progress beyond it!

The wheel in the sky keeps on turning …

2009-05-22T10:47:00.000-07:00

It’s not as though cars dominate my private life, just as it’s not computers and information technology that dominate my public life. My colleagues, however, may argue that this is indeed the case, and that many conversations quickly turn to these subjects, but there’s been times when I was happy talking about sailing, or fine wines, or music. Readers will have seen the lines from songs, and even movies, routinely appear in these postings.

However, the association between cars and computers provides me with a wealth of content with which to work. None more so than when I read about cars in a computer publication this week shortly after I had finished reading a commentary on computers in a car magazine. The picture above was taken of Margo, under the tutelage of instructor Tom Paule, on a cool-down lap at Buttonwillow race track.

It was captured by an entrepreneur who makes a living from photographing the stream of cars and motorcycles that attend track days. And perhaps we need to enjoy driving cars on tracks like this while we can, as the future of high performance cars seems to be up in the air. The mood within governments and across the auto industry appears to be steering us back to smaller, more fuel efficient, cars but with Ford barely afloat, GM headed for the rocks, and Chrysler below the waves, these domestic manufacturers are anxiously trying to get the government to save them so that they get the chance to build these more efficient cars.

It was against this background that I recently ran across an editorial in the computer publication, InformationWeek. Rob Preston, the magazine’s editor, asked “maybe the bigger question is this: are the likes of Chrysler … even worth ‘saving,’ or are they reaching the end of their commercial viability, much as former tech titans Data General, DEC, and Prime once did?”

Ouch … it’s hard to remember how strong these computer companies were in the late ‘80s and how quickly they foundered. And yet, the fate of car companies today looks to be following a similar pattern. In a recent posting to the discussion Fast Lane in the Real Time View user group on LinkedIn, I remarked “so, how much overlap is there? As we try to ‘save the car industry’ do we also need to save the computer industry? Did anyone step in to save Wang? Prime? Data General? Nixdorf? ICL? and so forth – did we appeal to government bodies? There were some murmurings and some guidance / advice – but little else! Computer companies were simply left to collapse. And I wonder, are we quick to recognize the natural order of technology.”

In other words, businesses, no less so than technologies and products, have well defined bell-curve lifecycles and it’s as if the very foundation for the success that propelled them to fortune and fame is proving to be the engine of their demise. These bell-curves provide plenty of excitement as companies charge up the front side slope, but without navigating through technology and product opportunities and jumping onto another bell curve early, there will always be the back side slope to face, so to say. Few technology companies can develop (and adhere to) roadmaps that span more than a decade or so. And fewer still manage to reinvent themselves and to enjoy the rewards that come with the rush up a new front side slope!

Consider all the companies with which IBM competed for the hearts and minds of data center managers, back in the ‘70s – where are they today? Affectionately known as the BUNCH (for Burroughs, Univac, NCR, Control Data, and Honeywell) all were capable companies with product lines that stretched up to the mainframe class. For many years, Control Data provided the most powerful computers available, while Burroughs became world-beaters with their formable transactional / online computers. But they proved to be poor visionaries and failed to execute well in a marketplace where IBM flourished. While they all tried to reinvent their business model, even when it meant leaving behind the products that drove their early success, they simply couldn’t save themselves.

When Burroughs and Univac merged to form Unisys, they talked of the merger with references to “the power of two” but quickly, the rest of the industry suggested it was something much less – perhaps “the power of ½!” And this happened as Honeywell refocused on a smaller subset of clients – aerospace, transportation, and automation and control solutions – but only a year ago, it was dropped from the Dow Jones Industrial Average index. NCR faded badly and simply reverted to it’s originally business model based around specialized client devices, while Control Data today is largely forgotten. Slow to react, or perhaps still reluctant to commit, meant that even after accepting the need to change their business models, they couldn’t pull out of the ride down the back side slope of the business lifecycle bell curve.

Moody’s investor services are now promoting a “Bottom Rung” list of companies. Also referred to by one financial analyst as Moody’s “Bucket List” it highlights those companies with debts they will probably not be able to repay by early 2010 – and consequently, will fail. It’s a list that covers many market segments including some that are well known these days (media, automotive, retail, manufacturing, gaming and consumer products) but what caught my attention was the presence of Unisys. While the company has refocused on services and a line of windows servers, it still supports a large population of legacy systems that date back more than a decade and that are in wide use in government agencies around the world.

The Gartner Group quickly produced a research note on Unisys making Moody’s bottom rung that suggested Unisys customers should “devise a plan to mitigate risk … calculate any potential associated exit costs (and) assess the marketplace for potential replacement service providers …” The CEO of the software company Erudine, Martin Rice, was reported to have said “events like this will force the hand of CIOs who would otherwise prefer to leave legacy systems untouched.” Of course, Erudine offers its behavior engine as a good way to exit and Rice was quick to add “this will not be the last time CIOs need to escape a burning platform!” And should Unisys founder, as Moody’s is predicting, there will be many more software vendors relishing the opportunities that will develop.

There is a second reason why I included the photo above and not just because it features a high performance car laying down fast laps on a private track. For me, the more important reason has to do with how the picture came into my hands. The photographer spends weekends at the track and sets up a kiosk at the tracks only food and beverage stand. If you like any of his pictures, he provides them immediately on disk for a small fee. A very simple business model, yet working well for the young entrepreneur!

I had mentioned of how I read commentary on the computer industry in a car magazine. In a commentary on design in the magazine Automobile, columnist Robert Cumberford writes “programming guru Sir Charles Antony Richard Hoare talked (of how) … ‘there are two ways of constructing a (software) design. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make is so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult.”

And this took me back to the April 20, ’09 email Jonathan Schwartz circulated to everyone at Sun, as the acquisition of Sun by Oracle was announced, and that was released to the press. In it he said “we’ve never walked away from the wholesale reinvention of business models … we’ve never walked away form a challenge – or an opportunity … by acquiring Sun, Oracle will be well positioned to help customers solve the most complex technology problems related to running a business.” And I was struck by how, once again, a company that in the ended up failing to reinvent its own business model now sees itself as a player in helping others with “running a business.”

I have been a strong advocateof keeping things simple and many of the posting found here reinforce this message. With simplicity comes the chance to minimize defects and to have “obviously, no deficiencies!” History is littered with computer companies that have failed to remain competitive and whether they move to new markets, revert to old practices, or merge, without a simple easy-to-communicate business model, it hasn’t halted their slide down the back side slope. And Sun doesn’t have history on its side, this time.

Following the creation of Unisys after the merger between Burroughs and Univac, there was a story doing the rounds that suggested Honeywell would be buying Fairchild Semiconductor and that the new company would be called Farewell Honeychild – what then is the likelihood Ellison will rename the new company Sunacle (rhymes with Cynical)? Which, I have to admit is a little more preferable, to Oracsun (unless you’re Swedish, of course). Probably not – but it was worth a thought!

For me, the relationship between Oracle and Sun will, almost by design, be complicated and several quarters may go by before we see the “obvious deficiencies” that Hoare spoke of. Will we see another rush to “escape (the) burning platform,” as data center managers consider their options? And will we be adding Sun to the steadily lengthening list of former technology titans? Or, has that time passed and there’s already a place reserved for them?