Director of Strategy for VMS Software, Inc.
Chris has spent over 30 years in the IT industry, including 12 years as a UK company director and 11 years working for DEC/Compaq/HP as a strategist and Director of Strategy for the DEC/Compaq/HP OpenVMS Software group.
Chris started his working life (many years ago) as an applications programmer and although he has not written any code for many years Chris still likes to think of himself as a software engineer at heart, even though much of his recent activity has been centred more around hardware technologies than software. Much of Chris' time with DEC/Compaq/HP was spent travelling the world engaging with customers, acting as an advocate for the company, a customer champion, and as a communications channel between customers and internal DEC/Compaq/HP engineering groups. Coupled with this extensive customer interaction Chris has also had numerous dealings with some of the major global IT players, including IT companies such as Oracle, EMC, Red Hat, Sun, and Microsoft, and consultancy companies such as Accenture and HP Enterprise Services (formerly EDS).
Chris has become a trusted advisor to many of the customers with whom he has interacted. The diversity of this work has helped Chris to develop a rather unique and well-balanced view of the IT industry and has also provided him with many interesting stories and fascinating encounters (some of which are even IT related).
Chris is now enjoying applying his broad experience to the development of business opportunities and the provision of strategic guidance in emerging and often poorly defined areas such as Cloud Computing and Big Data. In his spare time Chris enjoys listening to music and watching rugby.
For those of you who have not heard of Dave Cutler, let me give you a bit of background to this giant of modern day computing. He was one of the lead engineers on the first version of VMS back in the 70s, part of the legendary team founded by Gordon Bell; he was one of the original architects of VMS!
I was reading this article recently: A CIO's guide to legacy system modernization. By all means read it yourself; however a quick executive overview…
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.
When we kicked off the CLP back in 2020, our idea was to replace the HPE OpenVMS Hobbyist program. As everyone knew HPE had pulled out of the OpenVMS market some years previously, and the Hobbyist program was heading to its inexorable end.
They say timing is everything, and only last week I was talking to Brett Cameron about databases on OpenVMS; you know the dialogue: what is the future; is it proprietary or open, relational, or NoSQL, DBaaS, and so on? The usual stuff.
Back in April, I wrote an article entitled “Migrate your Alpha environment to another platform”; towards the end of the article, I talked about the Spectre virus, which hit the streets in 2018.
I was talking to a very well respected ex-colleague recently about a mutual customer, and towards the end of the conversation he said, “so what are you doing about the Alpha customers I/O problem?” My first reaction was “what problem?”, so he went on to explain that customers who have Alpha systems have potential problems with support and modern storage arrays.
In computing, virtualization (alternatively spelled virtualisation) refers to the act of creating a virtual (rather than actual) version of something, including virtual computer hardware platforms, storage devices, and computer network resources.
This article is the last in the mini-series and is probably the most contentious, not for any technical or philosophical reasons, but rather for the cultural divide which determines which side of the fence you sit on.
Usability is probably the most difficult concept to define when talking about virtualisation and particularly OpenVMS and virtualisation.
OpenVMS applications have always been smart, right? Well yes OpenVMS applications have often been ahead of their time in terms of innovation and execution, but nowadays smart means something else.
For OpenVMS users, scalability has always equated with clustering and with a maximum supported 96 nodes in a cluster. “OpenVMS is the most scalable operating system on the planet” - is that still true today? Yes and no.
As a strategist I am noticing a number of themes emerging when I talk with customers about why they are moving their applications to a virtualised infrastructure (generally within a Cloud environment). These themes are Flexibility, Scalability, Smart capabilities, Usability and Cost; from an OpenVMS perspective I can also add lack of skilled resources and proprietary hardware.