Valverde

Computing

 The Open Source/ Systems Mainframe Solution

It is in the nature of hedging, optimally, that the size of the integral sum of the hedges against a risk should be comparable at the time that the misfortune occurs.

The value that gets moved about (shares, futures and options traded, M&A deals settled, funds transferred on ATMs and worldwide FTS, patient records managed, cell phone calls billed, credit extended and verified) every business day on Nonstop™ systems is in the many trillions of dollars. That comes to quadrillions of dollars a year of economic activity depending on the continued quality of Nonstop™ hardware and software.

The risk of placing all of that value on the Nonstop™ platform has in the past been widely deemed as extremely low, because of the amazing quality of NSK systems. That collective view has warranted the vast amount of trust placed in the product and its development staff.

However, after the many cycles of transformation in management, most informed observers would assess that the risk has escalated significantly.

Customers are betting their business on a platform that as it is shipped to them, has the least aggressive future in its history. One can argue that they could not be doing less innovation on the Nonstop™ product line, as it exists in a form that will ever run on the exchanges and other critical systems, than they are currently doing.

When there is little product activity a product is (by definition) dying. Software products are like a shark, they need to be constantly in motion to survive (to require the top developers to stay together in teams).

The heartbeat of a product line is in the roadmap. How does the roadmap for Nonstop™ look today? Compare it to the era of Jim Gray and SQL MP in the eighties, or to the transformation from the CISC Cyclone to the native mode RISC Himalaya from the late eighties to the late nineties, or transforming the heart of the database (TMF and DP2) into mainframe products from the middle eighties until the turn of the century, or to embed a Unix clustered system inside Nonstop™ at that very same time (and under the very same 2nd line manager), and then to embed a Java system inside that, or to the successful effort to port the fully functional product stack to NT clusters just before the turn of the century.

These projects were all impossible to do, on their face, and yet they were accomplished with élan. Sufficient élan to pound straight from one impossibility to the next, and on to the next and sometimes simultaneously ... with a development team that was miniscule when compared to the mighty IBM mainframe DP2 and Sysplex development team. Where are they all now? Where is all that élan?

The lack of an aggressive roadmap, the lack of a tangible future for the Nonstop™ critical systems product line that the exchanges use (and I don't mean Neoview) constitutes a risk that cannot be properly assessed to the critical computing customers that depend upon that product. Any risk that cannot be assessed is (also by definition) intolerable.

The Valverde Computing roadmap is the hedge against this risk, and Nonstop™ customers and those depending on the critical systems running on that platform need to hedge their enormous bet on the continued stability of NSK hardware and software, by partnering with Valverde Computing and paving the way to a future of critical computing on completely open source and open systems.