In last month’s NSI post ‘London Calling‘ we were looking forward to the upcoming eBITUG event at the Doubletree Hilton in London. Having had a hand in the preparations (through our eBITUG Committee Member and TCM Technical Director, Collin Yates), we were aware of all the behind the scenes efforts being made to make this year’s event a real stand-out on the NonStop calendar. And despite knowing all of this, we were still blown away. Massive plaudits must be paid to the organisers for pulling together a truly memorable event, including the rather special night at the aqua shard.

As always TCM came fully stocked – not only with the whisky, but also staff-members, and it’s a good thing too, as the Hilton was quite literally packed with attendees, giving all of the seven-strong TCM team a good grilling on the NonStop services we provide. Indeed, it was exactly this topic which seemed to be at the forefront of a lot of peoples thinking – customers, vendors and HPE alike, all wanted to talk about services. We simply cannot ignore the sudden surge of activity hitting the NonStop world right now. It seems that Andrew Bergholz and his team are enjoying their time in the unshackled creative space they have been afforded, and now the rest of us in the NonStop community are following suit. As a result we’re seeing vendors throwing themselves into new developments, and customers are eagerly anticipating new and exciting products, toolsets and applications for their shiny new NonStop machines. Or Vitualized NonStop. Or hybrid machine. Or NonStop-on-demand …

What we’re saying is: NonStop is open for business.

For TCM of course, our focus is on the support services that will be required to keep this business open, and for a long time. For almost a year, we have discussed how we are tackling the NonStop skills gap, though our centralised cloud/remote based service offerings. Our big take away from eBITUG was how our offerings may have to grow to cover more than just pure NonStop services, and instead extend into the products, tools and applications that run on NonStop. Just as HPE has turned its focus onto the the development of the platform, so too are the vendors actively investing in the development of their software/middleware. Again, this focus opens doors for other organisations to work with these vendors in taking on some of the service element involved in integrating their developments into live systems.

All of the above promotes the idea of being able to combine systems, application and various middleware/products/toolsets with a wrap-around service and offer this to customers as a fully-fledged business solution. Effectively, NonStop-as-a Service (NaaS): everything you need to run the service you require, in a manner that ensures 99.99% availability – and that’s on a bad day! NonStop doesn’t even need to be mentioned – you’re not buying a NonStop, you’re simply buying guaranteed availability. Period.

Having talked to numerous vendors and to HPE themselves, this idea of NaaS is precisely the space TCM would like to explore in greater depth. We’ll be working hard with our counterparts to develop something to this effect in there near future, so watch this space.

In the meantime, if you require advice, help or support for your NonStop, you know who to speak to. And if you like the idea of working with TCM to develop new solutions in the ever-changing NonStop landscape, give TCM a call.

Daniel Craig | Operations Director | daniel.craig@tcm.uk.com |