OmniPayments - celebrating 23 years of growth with NonStop!

Anytime a business gets to celebrate another anniversary it’s always a good opportunity to think of what is yet to come. Of course, taking a look back over your shoulder is completely understandable but in the case of OmniPayments it is the future that has the company more or less spellbound. Opportunities lie everywhere and for a payments solutions vendor focused on HPE NonStop systems, this should be occasion too where every member of the NonStop community celebrates right along with us – we’re selling NonStop systems!

OmniPayments like many of other NonStop-centric vendors had concerns as to where NonStop was headed. For the past decade the news coming from Palo Alto was anything but cause for celebration. And then it all changed. NonStop was funded by HPE to port its entire stack to the Intel x86 architecture and then shortly after  that, funding was also applied to take NonStop from reliance on physical machines to virtual machines – a complete surprise for everyone who has been associated with NonStop through the years.

Back when the fault tolerant architecture was packaged as a Tandem System, the mere whisper of separating the NonStop stack from the NonStop hardware was borderline sacrilegious, but no longer. With hybrid IT making inroads into the data center and support for cloud services growing it all makes perfect sense and for OmniPayments this simply translated into having more options to pitch to prospects and more options means there is more potential to tailor solutions that exactly fit future customers’ requirements.

Looking back to when it all started for OmniPayments, in the mid-1990s, the landscape for payments solutions on NonStop systems was dominated by just a single vendor. There were a couple of other payments solutions vendors that were good alternatives, but in time the focus of those involved became less and less committed to NonStop and OmniPayments saw a lot of opportunities for its product suite.  Initially a services company that did include developers with close ties to NonStop development, the magic all really began to happen for OmniPayments when we licensed from the NonStop organization the core message bus that was central to the pursuit of the Zero Latency Enterprise (ZLE).

The NonStop team had made a huge bet with ZLE, but as is often the case the team was ahead of its time (and the capabilities on offer from key middleware components) and with changes of management, the project came to an end. In licensing the technology, OmniPayments had the all-important framework it needed to kick-start its endeavor and with additional fine-tuning over time, this former ZLE middleware now underpins all the Business Logic Modules that OmniPayments develops – a  massive “Lego set” supporting interchangeable “blocks” that has proved to have no limits as to what can be created.   

And now, twenty three years later OmniPayments has major enterprises running OmniPayments products up and down the Western Hemisphere and on both sides of the Pacific Ocean. As we considered new banners that could be erected around OmniPayments to draw attention to the upcoming anniversary, there was plenty of material to work with when it came to the number 23. One thought was to combine a number of the better known use cases of 23 along the lines of

 “Lucky 23 – lucky for us with chromosomes and lucky for
Michael Jordan in his prime! 

… and a happy occasion for OmniPayments; let’s celebrate!” 

By now we are all familiar with the advertisements behind 23andMe and what they can do with the 23 pairs of chromosomes in our DNA and we are probably all aware too that basketball phenom, Michael Jordan, wore the number 23 on his jersey. And for the mathematicians among us, 23 is the lowest prime number that consists of consecutive digits, mind you - so there is a common thread to what we could promote in support of OmniPayments’ 23rd anniversary.

There was a lot more than DNA, basketball and prime numbers associated with the number 23 – how many of you knew of the Birthday Paradox that states “a group of 23 randomly-selected people is the smallest number where there will be a probability higher than 50 per cent that two people will share the same birthday.” Now, there is a coincidence that ties in nicely with OmniPayments anniversary as I have to believe that among 23 randomly-selected NonStop users, gathered for any NonStop user event, there is a strong likelihood that two of them will be running OmniPayments.

And then the fabled Nights Templar only had 23 grand masters – and on and on it goes. Did you know that in the science fantasy saga, Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, Luke Skywalker, Han Solo and Chewbacca sneak into detention block AA23 to rescue Princess Leia? Celebrating 23 years of being in business and supporting the NonStop community will be a time that is no less a cause célèbre. For many, making a long term business bet on NonStop may have been controversial but for the NonStop community, having such a staunch supporter of NonStop in OmniPayments – now cemented more firmly as a result of OmniPayments becoming a VAR for all of South America – is less controversial as it attracts even greater public attention.   

There will be celebrations and there will be publicity, of that you can be certain. As we look forward to what will happen next, we already know of OmniPayments support for and successful deployment of, OmniPayments on NonStop X but perhaps there is a lot more to follow. It is now secret among those closest to OmniPayments CEO, Yash, that he is drawn to the possibilities that should open up with virtualized NonStop and then too there is the tantalizing upside potential that could very well become possible with OmniPayments supporting the new Blockchain DLT built on NonStop and utilizing NonStop SQL. In other words, perhaps this first 23 years is not so much an opportunity to gain the attention of the NonStop community but rather, an opportunity to attract an even brighter spotlight on NonStop and HPE that its competitors will find it hard to dim in any significant way. Yes, light the candles! Release the balloons and bunting – OmniPayments is celebrating 23 years in business and if this comes as complete news to you, then make sure you catch the OmniPayments team at upcoming RUG events – we will likely be very hard to miss!

(Re-posted from the March, 2018, issue of NonStop Insider)