On March 31, 2015, HP NonStop took the wraps of the first model of the new NonStop X family of products – the NonStop X NS7 X1. On that day, I posted Here comes NonStop X and here's to another decade or two, or four, of NonStop excitement! to the NonStop community blog, Real Time View, that can be viewed here on the IR blog site.
This could be considered the official post about the NonStop X NS7 X1 as it contained quotes and comments from HP executives and managers, but a subsequent post to Real Time View, Industry Standard Rules, OK! Included additional quotes and comments from users and vendors after they had time to look at the capabilities of this new NonStop product family.
The quotes that made up much of the content of that later post included those by IR VP of Products, John Dunne. "As I suspect with many vendors serving the NonStop community, the announcement of the General Availability (GA) of the first member of the new NonStop X family of systems strengthens our resolve to stay focused on NonStop systems – they have been a part ofIR since it first provided application monitoring solutions," said Dunne. "Perhaps more importantly (it) is HP's commitment to industry standard technologies, which we see as a necessary part of growing a community, and with the introduction of NonStop X as a complementary product family, as HP is doing, suggests that there will likely be new customers for NonStop in the near future."
Dunne rightly points out that there is anticipation that in developing a new, industry standard family of NonStop X systems, based on the Intel x86 architecture, there will be new customers. But where could these customers come from? In his post of The State of Electronic and Mobile Payments to the IR blog, Dunne gives us insight into one such possible source for growth. "I think electronic payments are definitely on the move. The volume both in terms of transactions and dollar values is going to increase," Dunne states. "Although historically there have been some declines, I think retailers are being forced to be able to take electronic payments in the way people want to make them, as a result we'll be seeing strong growth in the immediate future." With the promise of new NonStop X family members designed to be entry-level systems, better suited to tier 2 and 3 financial institutions, growth in transaction volumes (and value) will likely transition to growth in new customers.
In subsequent email exchanges with Dunne, this promise of NonStop X to appeal to new customers is going to bring into play new approaches to sales into markets being targeted by NonStop X. For the most part, these prospects will not be familiar with NonStop nor with the ecosystem of middleware solutions on offer from vendors like IR. "Across IR, we will be treating the introduction of the NonStop X family of NonStop systems as a complementary product line needing to be treated as a new business opportunity," said Dunne. "In other words, we will be looking for ways to work with HP and to assist them with each opportunity as they arise – we see this as the beginning of a whole new campaign by HP and something we will be aggressively pursuing."
But this will not be the only market for NonStop X. Already a very large retailer with a significant investment in traditional NonStop blade systems is deploying NonStop X in a distributed fashion, with the first three NonStop X systems already installed. Such a mix of NonStop technology will prove fertile ground for IR with a history of supporting multiple generations of NonStop systems. "For quite some time we have been championing the work we have done to support multiple systems under a single pane of glass," Dunne was keen to point out to me. "As we know that current NonStop Itanium blades customers have already purchased multiple NonStop x86 blades, having a single pane of glass from which to view all that is happening will be extremely beneficial to those customers who go down this path. But we expect even more – NonStop and Linux systems packaged as hybrids have us very excited, a circumstance we are already planning to address with additional features."
For more on IR capabilities today in support of a single pane of glass check out the home page for Prognosis support of Infrastructure, where you will be greeted with the simple yet powerful message of One dashboard to rule them all that highlights the value proposition that comes with having every system visible under a single pane of glass. Returning to the original quote by John Dunne, it's hard to escape the key messages. With the announcement of the NonStop X NS7 X1, it "strengthens our resolve to stay focused on NonStop systems" even as we value highly "HP's commitment to industry standard technologies" and acknowledge that "there will likely be new customers for NonStop in the near future". And this is key for any vendor staying the course with any technology is only an option if the primary vendor continues to invest, track industry trends, and attracts new customers, and with NonStop X we see all the pieces coming together, and from IR, expect even more news in the coming months.
