Blog
System crash? Well then, no cash!
June 26, 2013 by Richard Buckle — Founder and CEO, Pyalla Technologies, LLC
When does an era end? When do we definitively state, once and for all, that a product or technology has moved beyond legacy and is essentially dead? For those of us supporting payments platforms, I suspect there's not one of us without a blueprint addressing what to do next.
CIO offices can be stacked with binders of plans to migrate to other platforms; after all, that's a key part of their responsibilities. When I was more closely associated with IBM mainframes, I knew of very few CIOs who didn't have at least one plan covering a migration to something other than a mainframe.
It was only a few days ago that I was standing in the exhibition hall of HP's big tent marketing event, HP Discover 2013. This was the time of year when no matter what you had purchased from HP, it was on display with technicians only too happy to explain the benefits of some new feature or the other.
Coming into the event, news leaked that HP was backing away from the OpenVMS platform. After analysis of the business case, further ports to Itanium Poulson and Kittson chips could not be justified.
This doesn't mean that OpenVMS is going away anytime soon — you will be able to buy new systems up until 2016 (with support continuing on through 2020) — but it certainly draws a line in the sand.
The lifecycle for all products (indeed, technologies, markets, even industries) follows the bell curve we are all familiar with, and for the OpenVMS community, it looks like the once mighty DEC platform is skating down the final slope. HP will do its part to help the community delay the inevitable, but I am now certain there will be many CIOs dusting off their three-ring binders to take a look at their migration plans.
Perhaps more relevant to this community was the second part of the announcement from HP. The HP NonStop systems will be ported to Itanium Poulson, and to Kittson, and look to have a solid future ahead of them.
With so many global powerhouse banks continuing to rely on NonStop for their payments platforms, the news has many in the industry guessing where exactly NonStop systems lie on any bell curve, be it technology (fault tolerant?), market (payments?), or industry (financial services? Telco?)!
In short, four decades on, NonStop remains without peer when it comes to highly scalable, always-on, secure systems, even if it's the sole remaining member of a once elite group of systems that industry analysts at IDC have defined as Availability Level 4. That means no interruption of work, no transactions lost, no degradation in performance. Absolutely, positively, 100 percent availability.
However, there is more to this story. It's not about HP's decision to continue supporting NonStop as much as it's about the increased activity among solutions vendors. In Europe, Lusis has ported their payments platform to NonStop and has wins with NonStop in Europe, South Africa and soon, I am lead to believe, in the Americas.
OmniPayments replaced ACI Worldwide BASE24 in one of the top four banks in the US and has secured new business for NonStop in South America, electing to promote its NonStop implementation over a similar implementation on Unix.
ElectraCard Systems, likewise, has ported its payments platform to NonStop. Even AJB Canada has of late ported its POS solution to NonStop, as has ReD. And the list is getting longer with each success.
The point is that in the discussions I have had of late with the community, there's little evidence of a platform once completely proprietary (down to its disk drives and chip sets), losing relevance.
When we are standing in front of an ATM, few of us wonder where the wires lead and yet, among the CIOs responsible for oversight of payments platforms, there's a degree of comfort knowing there's NonStop in there somewhere.
Cash is still king, no matter what predictions to the contrary we may come across. And to process cash, we need something that doesn't crash — it's just that simple, no crash and we have cash; crash and we have no cash.
Amid the many presentations by HP addressing mobility, big data and the cloud, and the talk of game-changing new hardware (Project Moonshot; for more, check the post to the NonStop community blog, "At long last, disruptive innovation from HP!"), it was reassuring to see NonStop systems continuing to make their presence felt.
The news about OpenVMS wasn't well received in some quarters. The news about NonStop, on the other hand, has ensured that few CIOs will be reaching for their three ring binders anytime soon. Plans will definitely be retained and the option to migrate to alternate products will remain on the table, but for the moment, HP has communicated a level of commitment, indeed product stability, that's welcomed by all involved with payments.
Big tent marketing events have their naysayers and Las Vegas is not everyone's favorite city. Last year was HP CEO Meg Whitman's first opportunity to address the HP user community and she emphasized that there was a lot of work to be done.
Her central message, "make it matter," was an emphatic plea as much to her own troops as to the user community. At this year's event, her message resonated with something more akin to "lock and load".
It may be hard for some of us to judge the end of an era and to know when a product has run its course. The same too can be said about vendors, even those as large as HP.
However, from what I saw, HP is undergoing transformation and that certainly is good news for all involved in payments; so much depends on their continued investment in platforms, software and services.
Having access to systems that just don't crash? Well, that's certainly worthy of some of our cash, after all!
About Richard Buckle
Richard Buckle is the founder and CEO of Pyalla Technologies, LLC. He has enjoyed a long association with the Information Technology (IT) industry as a user, vendor, and more recently, as an industry commentator, thought leader, columnist and blogger. Richard participates in the HPE VIP Community where he is part of their influencer team.
