From the CEO's Desk

It’s been a while since I’ve had the time to write this column because of how busy we have been at XYPRO over the last year.  In part, this was fueled by the HP decision to bundle our XYGATE Merged Audit (XMA) software with the HP NonStop Operating System Mission-Critical Edition software package.

While we cannot speak for HP or the NonStop product group, I can tell you that we have seen tremendous growth in the market for our products.  So much so, that we outgrew our website, our staff, and even our building.

After 26 years in the same building, taking over more and more space as other tenants moved out, we finally took over the last bit of space that was available to us.  We had another challenge; because of the great range of NonStop servers we support, we were about to exceed the maximum weight that our second floor computer room could support.

So this past November, over the long American Thanksgiving weekend, we packed up our bags and our systems and moved to a 15,000 square foot ground floor suite with a larger datacenter capable of supporting our accelerated growth.  This office is twice the size of the old one, positioning us for the future.

Some old-timers may remember that Jimmy Treybig tried for years to get the city of Cupertino to rename Tantau Avenue to Tandem Avenue.  Well Jimmy, we hope we made you proud because our new office is located on Guardian Street.  Even better, our new datacenter is non-stop, with redundant power, dedicated climate control and connectivity.  Now how cool is that?

As I said earlier, we also outgrew our staff, allowing us to hire from the outside and promote from the inside.  Lisa Partridge has assumed day-to-day responsibilities for XYPRO and was named President. Barry Forbes was promoted to VP, Sales and Jim Hinsch to architect.  We hired Andrew Price as our Director of Product Management, Rob Lesan as our Manager of Professional Services, Dave Teal joined as a pre-sales support and education specialist, Gabe Alvarez joined our Sales Team in Latin America and we even welcomed our summer intern, Rayna Burgess on as a full time member of our QA staff.  Most recently, we extended a heartfelt welcome to Mr Feng Lin to represent XYPRO in Asia Pacific.

Scott Uroff is still part of the management team as our Chief Architect, and several of our employees passed the new PCI SSC Internal Security Assessor Program (ISA).  At our upcoming internal Kick-Off event, one employee will receive a plaque in recognition of 5 years of service at XYPRO and three employees will receive their 10 year plaques.  Add those milestones to the 4 of us who already have our 20 year plaques and everyone in between!  All the better to serve our rapidly enlarging number of customers.

Our website is completely new too, with easier navigation to the information that you want to see, including access to our datasheets, whitepapers, and on-demand webinars.

I would like to move to our products for a moment.  HP understood for a long time that separation of duties is important to help prevent insider attacks.  This was the main driver for the multiple levels of security administration within the Safeguard security software.  But HP couldn’t fund every possible feature that customers wanted or needed, so XYPRO stepped up our game to help keep NonStop servers secure from hacking, even by insiders.

We like to say that we wrote the book on NonStop security (twice!), because it is true.  But we could only write the books after we spent a lot of time determining the current and future product functionality required for NonStop customers to be successful in their industries. At the time we didn’t think of it as predicting the future, but of course HP is now bundling some of our products within the NonStop OS to help protect our customers from the rise in cybercrime, so I guess we were.

And the insider threat has only gotten stronger, which is why XYPRO took separation of duties to its logical conclusion within XYGATE Access Pro.  Our peerless auditing capabilities within each XYGATE module, and collectively within our Merged Audit module, allow all NonStop server audit information to be sent to off-board and Enterprise audit logging solutions, such as those from ArcSight® an HP Company and  RSA® enVision.  XYPRO’s ability to work with virtually any of the SIEM devices and enterprise audit consolidators allows companies that use these systems to manage audit records generated by their NonStop servers, and preventing the audit from being changed after the fact.

We hope that you will visit with XYPRO staff either by attending a class or by coming by our booth at the dozens of HP NonStop server and security-related events that we attend all over the world.  We love meeting our customers so that we can better understand and serve your security needs. Remember to visit our blog, and follow us on our many social media channels, such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Finally, while I cannot tell you who these companies are, or what the arrangements will entail, I am happy to announce that we are in the process of forging partnering agreements with several other vendors in the NonStop space. While Larry Ellison is trying to take out HP by dropping support for Oracle on Itanium, we know that HP has a secret weapon called NonStop SQL and we have the tools to properly secure this advanced database.  It’s certainly one of many reasons we are excited to be part of the NonStop community and intend to take full advantage of this evolving market.

No matter how you measure it, 2011 was our best year ever.  Revenue, customers, professional services, partners, products, head count - all grew at rates greater than previous years.  Important to our customers is that our expansion this year is based on executing long term growth plans.  So, as the economy continues to recover, we will have more solutions to protect your precious business information and reputation that will help grow the NonStop community beyond anything that has been seen before.

I hope that all NonStop community members join us and have as good a year as we have planned for ourselves.

Sheila Johnson
CEO, XYPRO Technology Corporation