GTUG

The 2009 German Tandem User Group (GTUG) was held November 18-20th, and the idea behind this event was a sound one: Take the traditional GTUG event and open it up to all of Europe, meaning more vendors for the end users to talk to and vice versa.

The ten different conference tracks (nine in English and one in German) ensured that there was plenty going on for the 150ish people attending. Most of the content was NonStop based, but with the Connect link, it did mean that some elements weren’t relevant to us NonStop folk. The exhibition section was somewhat of a who’s who in the NonStop vendor world, with around 15 different firms all lined up with their matching shell schemes. A visit to the XYPRO booth revealed this was the first event where XYPRO and Merlon’s new collaboration was evident (see https://www.xypro.com).

With this year being the 35th anniversary of Tandem, there was an interesting mix of content. You’d be sitting in one talk where everyone was reminiscing about the ‘good ol’ days’ when Tandem did everything very differently and how being different was best... then you’d find yourself in an HP presentation where they’d be talking about the many benefits of utilizing as much industry standard blade hardware as possible. One thing is for sure, a modern day NonStop is spectacularly smaller and more powerful than its early Tandem predecessors. The best presentation was just before the coffee break on Thursday though: XYPRO’s Audit, Alerting and Compliance slot!

I attended Karen Copeland’s NonStop Security SIG before lunch on Thursday and was a little surprised by the low number of attendees – maybe 12 of us in total? I’m thinking there could be two explanations for this, the first could be that Bernd Ullmann’s “SCRUM - Do's and Don’ts” presentation was unmissable (nothing personal, Bernd) the second could be that for many, security only really becomes a serious issue when a breach threatens to cost millions of dollars or when a regulator demands action... Whatever the catalyst, you know where to find us.

Thursday evening promised a ‘traditional beer bust at a Darmstadt brewery’. The XYPRO team was bracing ourselves for a heavy night of beer lairyness, so we made sure we’d all packed our drinking hats before we got on our respective planes. But the reality was more ‘dinner in a pub’ than ‘beer bust in a brewery’. Not that I’m complaining, because I wanted to be in good shape for the Security Workshop on Friday the 20th.

Big key-note sessions aside, Friday’s Security Workshop was one of the more heavily attended group meetings of the event, with around 20-25 people. The four vendors present, XYPRO being one of them, had all agreed to give talks which were 100% devoid of product mentions. Everyone stuck to this, but my personal opinion is that it occasionally served to confuse, as it seemed to leave a couple of people with more questions than answers. All in all though, it was a very useful session and worth staying the extra day for.

Our Friday afternoon flight back to the UK signaled the end to a busy couple of days at what was probably the biggest NonStop event in Europe. Hats off to the organizers who had clearly put a lot of time and effort into arranging a very well run show.

Dan Lewis
European Marketing Manager