Feeling Good About OpenVMS
Part of my job is to read publications, articles & blogs on technology and the directions it is going in. I recently came across this article On premises vs. cloud: The major similarities and differences and it got me thinking.
The article does not come up with a recommendation, suggesting instead that there is no “one size fits all” solution and your selection depends on your requirements and selection criteria. As OpenVMS moves closer to a production X86 deployment, these particular discussions become more relevant to us, and we see issues faced by the Linux and Windows community are actually now our issues as well.
This is actually rather a smug position to be in! I left HP and OpenVMS in 2009 and the death knell was being sounded for the operating system then. I remember the final management meeting hosted at Ann McQuaid's house, where we said our goodbyes, and to all intents and purposes said goodbye to OpenVMS as well.
Yet, here we are, 12 years later, different company, some different people and some the same, but a lot of customers whose names I recognise and an operating system that keeps on going. We have the same old “issues” we've always had, but now we have some new ones as well – on-premise versus cloud, which hypervisor to use, is AWS better than Azure? Our customers are now thinking about the same problems as the IT people at Uber or Reddit; isn't that a wonderful position to be in?
Finally, I just carried out a Google search for “on-premise v cloud” and there were 20,100,000 results (results may vary depending on geographical location). It feels great to be part of a world that is worried about how and where I should deploy my application, rather than am I using the right technology.
P.S. One area this article doesn't really address is the dearth of OpenVMS resources; I have some ideas about that which I'll share in a separate article, so watch out for that.
Director of Strategy for VMS Software, Inc.
