HP Discover '11
HP Discover opened with a bang – over 12,000 attendees together in the first general session. We heard Leo Apothekar’s views on mobility, WebOS, and the cloud – a recurring topic for the week. Those of us coming to the show from a NonStop background were wondering how much airplay the NonStop would get in the general sessions, and with at least four mentions in the keynotes, along with almost forty NonStop-specific sessions, most of us left feeling pretty good about the platform and its future. From my perspective, coming back to the NonStop after a few years away, I was impressed at the continuing passion and enthusiasm within the group, and levels of NonStop representation at the show from HP, ISVs and users. Of course, it’s easy to feel good about participating in such a large show when one of the side benefits is a concert by Paul McCartney, just for conference attendees!
XYPRO had an extremely positive conference, with many good meetings with our customers and our partners at HP. A number of the NonStop-focussed sessions spent time on the importance of security, auditing and compliance, and the role that the XYGATE product suite can help in these critical areas. Our VP of Sales and Marketing, Barry Forbes, is now officially famous, having been video interviewed by one of the bloggers at the show – see http://bit.ly/jgJ91L for more.
The show finished in an even bigger way than it started, with that incredible show from Sir Paul. There was hardly a single person in the MGM Grand Garden Arena remaining in their seats for the two encores that Paul and his band played. Simply awesome.
Andrew Price
Director, Product Management
ACE 2011
XYPRO Technology attended ACE, the ACI User Groups Conference at the Del Coronado Hotel (The Del) in San Diego in June. The conference boasted more than 200 attendees representing more than 70 companies. Exhibitors represented 22 companies.
The conference began with introductory presentations by the product managers of the various ACI products, followed by a Q&A session. ACI confirmed that BASE24 will be sunset in November, however only 80 customers out of approximately 300 BASE24 users have migrated or are transitioning to BASE24-eps. An interesting statistic is that out of 2,185 employees, ACI has 700 developers & 600 people dedicated to services.
The keynote speaker, Brett King, gave a very interesting presentation affirming the notion that the future of banking is mobile. He stressed that banks need to change their approach regarding checking accounts, advertising, and local branches due to younger generations' expectations of mobile transactions. Mr King also stressed the importance of social media for banks. No amount of advertising can overcome bad experiences recorded on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites.
There is a new trend to use NFC (Near Field Communication) devices in the industry. These devices are contactless and passive as their function is triggered by an Initiator sending a RF signal that powers the Target device, which does not require batteries. The Initiator can read the contents of the Target and in some cases write to it.
Nick Puetz from Fishnet Security and Gregory Rosenberg from Trustware gave an valuable presentation covering PCI Best Practices & Securing Sensitive Data, two topics of the utmost importance for the financial industry. Greg Brett from Opera Solutions explained the statistical techniques used to detect credit/debit card fraud on-line prior to a transaction’s approval. These techniques, which are used with BASE24 and BASE24-eps, are helping reduce the amount of fraud experienced by financial institutions running those solutions.
Barry Forbes
Vice President, Sales & Marketing
Posts
