Feb 2016 Chairman's Chat

I’m Kevin Poultney, your BITUG Chairman for 2016. If this is your first visit you may be surprised to hear that if you are a British Isles HP NonStop end user, then both membership and the benefits of BITUG membership to you is FREE. To keep up to date on plans for 2016 and beyond join the BITUG mailing list by simply entering and submitting your Email address on the home page below left (event update mails are typically around 6 per year).  To make sure you receive your free Newsletter in the post, please click here.

This year we have a change from our normal schedule and the BIG SIG will be held at Trinity House on 12th May. Preceding this on the 11th May there will be and Education Day at the new HPE offices in London. The little SIG location and date are yet to be decided, but will likely be held in the second week of December.

We will be posting out Spring and Autumn Newsletters to our registered members. The newsletters will provide the latest NonStop news from HPE and include details of up and coming events including subject matter of the scheduled presentations from both Users and Vendors.

EBITUG is coming to London in spring 2017. Planning is under way to run this European NonStop User event in central London, dates are tentative, but likely to be 26th and 27th April,  or 9th and 10th  May 2017.

BITUG is run by a committee of BITUG members, for British Isles HP NonStop users. All committee members are volunteers, if you are interested in joining the committee please contact me, Chairman@BITUG.COM. You do not need to be a NonStop technical guru to be a member of the committee, just willing to give up a couple of hours of your time per month to help organise events.

Free membership and benefits including attendance to the events planned for 2016 could not be achieved without the invaluable help from our Vendor Members listed to the right of this article so a big THANKYOU from BITUG for their continued support in 2016. 

Your feedback is important, without it your committee can only assume it’s doing a good job! If you do have any ideas for consideration that could help the BITUG Committee to serve you better, please let me know Chairman@BITUG.COM. Tell your colleagues about us and the various events that as a user we hope you will find invaluable.

Kevin Poultney

Chairman, BITUG.

BrightStrand International Limited

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September 2015 Chairman's Chat

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.

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New BITUG Chairman (Dec 2013)

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!!

I am writing this on the run up to the Christmas break. I must admit, I am a great fan of Christmas. I mean what is there not to like. You can’t argue with a Christmas lunch and the subsequent turkey sandwich / curry / pasta bake or salad. As those of you that know me are aware, I am partial to the odd Christmas drink. I don’t even mind the Sound of Music, the Great Escape or the X Factor finals!! But what I do mind, what absolutely blows my brain, more than any other task on the planet, is the bloody shopping!!! How do women do it? I know a great proportion of the people who will read this will be men and I am sure that like me, you get dragged round your local shopping centre, in a kind of bewildered daze, as your wife asks your opinion, on yet another red scarf and do you think it will go with your mother in laws new coat, that your brother / sister / mom / dad / cat (delete as appropriate) has already bought for her. You nod, trying to look interested enough, not to get into trouble, when really all you want to do is plunge the nearest coat hanger into your own eye, in the hope that it will transport you away from all this, even if it is in the back of an ambulance!!

So what does all of this have to do with BITUG. Well if it wasn’t for the good old (and the good new) HP NonStop, then all those queue’s in all those shops would be a hell of a lot longer and would move a hell of a lot slower. They tell us our economy is recovering, the banks apparently have loads of money to lend us and the small businesses, that surround our everyday lives. As we know a good proportion of these financial movements, at some point hit the HP NonStop and it is you folks, which help keep all of this moving.

I recently attended the Connect Bootcamp event in San Jose and while there, attended a tour of HP’s ATC. Now don’t get me wrong, a massive room full of row upon row of IT cabinets doesn’t really float my boat. But when you hear about some of the quite frankly, startling projects that the HP NonStop is involved in (I don’t know what I am allowed to say publically and what I am not, so I am going to play it safe and say nothing) it does give you that warm fuzzy feeling. I mean, I am forty two now and I have been part of the Tandem community from when I was seventeen. From day one, right up to now (some 25 years later) all I have heard about is how HP NonStop is on its way out. I am sure we have all heard stories of this ‘company’ and that ‘project’ dropping the NonStop. But do they, well we are all still here aren’t we!!

 

So here we are, and the ‘we’, to which I refer, is the good ship BITUG. 2014 will be my second stint as Chairman and with Graham Neild now stepping down from the committee; I am now the longest serving member of the committee at some seventeen years. So what does your committee have in store for you this year then? Well firstly, we have given the website a complete overhaul (please check it out at www.bitug.com and let us know your feedback). In fact we have taken the marketing side of BITUG a lot more seriously of late; I hope you have enjoyed the much better looking mailshots and the recent new style newsletter. We are sticking with our proven formula of two good events per year, focusing on user experiences and good quality, relevant training.

Now this is where you come in. I’m sure I don’t have to remind you that this is YOUR user group and like a lot of things, the quality of what you get out, is directly proportional to the quality of what you put in. So we need to hear about what you are doing. If you have a project that has just completed, is half way through, or is in the early planning stages, the chances are several other companies are in the same boat, or are very much interested in hearing about the boat that you are in. So we want to hear about it. Don’t worry about standing up in front of a room full of people you don’t know, we have ways around that. But please, please, please get involved and get in touch.

So that is it for now. I will be in touch in the not too distant future to see what you are up to. So all that leaves me to do is wish you a very prosperous 2014 and I look forward to seeing you all at this year’s BITUG events.

Regards,

Sean Bicknell

BITUG Chairman 2014

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