Looking at the recent announcements from both HP and BITUG reminded me a dialog between the Red Queen and Alice in Lewis Carrol’s novel, Through the Looking Glass.

“Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else — if you run very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.”

“A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”

HP have running on the NonStop platform for years making sure their competitors don’t catch up, this year they have made two announcements which means they are now running twice as fast. The first that they are splitting into two companies, the PC and Printing is separating from the Enterprise part of the company. Those who can remember when Tandem was merged with Compaq, the PC business and Mainframe business needed to be handled differently and the issues that occurred. HP has been good at their management of these diverged entities but the split will help even more. Not just one new range of computers have been announced by HP for the NonStop but two have been announced by HP, the HP Integrity NonStop X NS7 X1 and the HP Integrity entry level NonStop X.

BITUG have not also been jogging along, in the last we have tried two new venues one Great George Street and HMS Belfast both were a success from the comments we have had back, next year we plan to move the BigSIG to May and the little SIG to December, this will allow us in 2017 to host the European NonStop regional user group meeting. Continuing with the metaphor, we are your user group and we do need to know if we are running in the right direction for you.

We are hoping to have one of the new HP Integrity NonStop X at Trinity House; this is under discussion as it will be at HP Discover on the Tuesday to Thursday 1st- 3rd December. For the latest information about BITUG and it community see WWW.BITUG.COM.

Hope to see you on the 3rd or 4th December.

Neil Barnes

Chairman BITUG.

British isles tandem user group