Author: Mark Whitfield

Welcome to my site! After graduating in Computing in 1990, I accepted a position as a programmer at a Runcorn based software house specialising in electronic banking software, namely sp/ARCHITECT-BANK on Tandem Computers (now HPE NonStop). This was before the internet became more prevalent and so the notion of enabling desktop access to company accounts for inter-account transfers and book keeping was still quite a cutting edge idea (and smartphones only ever hinted at in Space 1999). The company was called The Software Partnership (which was taken over by Deluxe Data in 1994). I spent 5 years in Runcorn developing code for SP/ARCHITECT for various banks like TSB, Bank of Scotland, Rabobank and Girofon (Denmark) to name but a few. I then moved onto a software house in Salford Quays for further bank facing projects. After a further 23 years in the IT industry and now a Senior IT Project Manager (both Agile and Waterfall delivery), I thought I would echo out my Career Profile in this corner of the internet for quick and easy access.

Some HPE NonStop (Tandem) related groups on LinkedIn…

HPE NonStop Tandem | Guardian OSS Performance Monitoring Management Integrity Blade Itanium ServerNet
https://www.linkedin.com/groups/165816/
332 members currently

BASE24 BASE24-eps – HP NonStop Tandem IBM SUN – Open System Services OSS RealTime – Experts Users
https://www.linkedin.com/groups/150095/
1,514 members currently

PCI DSS Compliant Payments Transactions Compliance Monitoring Alerting Querying Archiving Reporting
https://www.linkedin.com/groups/146595/
472 members currently

SATUG Southern African HP NonStop Tandem NSK Server User Group – SATUG
https://www.linkedin.com/groups/81881/
57 members currently

Payment Engine Applications Forum | Retail and Wholesale | HP NonStop NSK Tandem SUN IBM Windows
https://www.linkedin.com/groups/80773/
343 members currently

HPE NonStop Tandem NSK OSS Open System Services Monitoring – Users, Experts and Technical Authorities 
https://www.linkedin.com/groups/80740/
840 members currently

Job Batch Scheduling | HP NonStop Tandem Guardian Open System Services OSS Servernet Integrity Blade  
https://www.linkedin.com/groups/78111/
371 members currently

BASE24 BASE24-eps User Group Forum | HP NonStop Tandem NSK IBM SUN Windows – News Events Discussion
https://www.linkedin.com/groups/51296/
910 members currently

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Golf at St Andrews, Scotland – September 2018

As part of my 50th birthday celebrations and a yearly, informal golf competition amongst friends, I visited St Andrews and played a number of courses including the Eden Golf Course adjacent to the Old Course. We also stopped off at Penrith Gold Course and played 18 just before Storm Helene arrived. Helene travelled across the Atlantic and weakened from a tropical storm to an ex- tropical storm but could be felt on the drive back to Preston.

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My Top 100+ Movies so far…

My 100 plus clips from some of my favourite over the years I will add to the over the coming weeks and months

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My Aston Martin V8 Vantage Driving Experience

Three Sisters, Wigan – My Aston Martin V8 Vantage Driving Experience

Activity: ASTON MARTIN THRILL @ THREE SISTERS RACE CIRCUIT

Aston Martin V8 Vantage Car: Aston Martin V8 Vantage Max Speed: 180 mph 0-60mph: 4.7 secs BHP: 380 bhp Transmission: 6 Speed Manual Engine: 4.2 litres

MediaCityUK – Photographic Timeline Journal – 2007 to 2010 reprise…

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During my time working in Salford Quays as an IT Project Manager, I took a good number of photos (and movies) of the @MediaCityUK build (literally from the ground up). The pictures were taken from 2007 when the dockland was flat and unused, through to 2010. MediaCity UK is now home to the BBC and ITV in the north west and the University of Salford.

The 200 or so pictures represent an abridged timeline of the build selected from a few thousand starting with the most current picture first…

On Monday, will have been in Professional IT for 28 years…

Deluxe Data International Operations (formally The Software Partnership)

Deluxe Data International Operations, Wingate House, Northway, RUNCORNthesoftwarepartnershipwingatehousenorthwaysmall

I started work at 12pm, September 3rd 1990. The Runcorn office started life as The Software Partnership (first at Wingate Drive in Timperley and then Norton House in Crowngate and subsequently Wingate House in 1992 on Northway) in the mid-eighties (co-founded by Nigel Walsh) but was purchased in 1994 by the American company Deluxe Electronic Payment Systems. This in turn is part of Deluxe Corporation which is one of the largest cheque printers and debit transaction processors in the US, and a major supplier of secure card management systems. The company changed to EFD eFunds in 2000 and is now Fidelity National Information Services (FIS) (at 2007) based in Daresbury, Warrington. The Software Partnership started out developing on-line banking systems for Tandem and UNIX systems.

 

Some great and free Agile Scrum online videos for those looking for good insight…

Some great and free Agile SCRUM online videos for those looking for good insight…

http://scrumtrainingseries.com/

http://www.scrumstudy.com/scrum-free-videos.asp?course=sdc#

August 14th 1995 – 12pm, Arriving at Insider Technologies Limited (ITL)

Exactly 23 years ago, I left Deluxe Data International Operations in August 1995 and then as a Senior Programmer joined a software house in Salford Quays, Manchester called Insider Technologies Limited (ITL). The company was founded in 1989 by Steve Tanham and Jim Chapman. Insider specialised in HPE NonStop software for both monitoring (Reflex) and batch scheduling (MultiBatch) on this this mainframe platform. Insider also provided software (RTLX, Sentra) to enable the monitoring, querying and reporting on the ACI BASE24 Classic ATM / POS application using the transaction log files.

1995 – 2004:

insidertechnologieslimited
Insider Technologies, Spinnaker Court, Chandlers Point, Salford Quays

As a Senior Programmer, I co-developed a number of platform health, diagnostic plug-in modules for Reflex (also known as Reflex 80:20). These included ‘Console’ for HPE NonStop EMS event viewing and filtering, ‘Status Monitor’ for monitoring HPE NonStop platform components (CPU, Disk, Process, File, MQ, XPNET, TCP/IP to name but a few) and ‘Service Monitor’ for building multi-line, rule based analysis of grouped HPE NonStop components to ascertain overall application / service health. Read more…

Project Management Forum | PRINCE2 Agile SCRUM Kanban ITIL Lean | Manchester Liverpool Lancashire UK

A few years ago I set-up a Project Management group on LinkedIn for the North West area of the UK. We now have nearly 2,500 members and growing. Here is the link.

Globally published HP NonStop journal – ‘The Connection’

A HPE NonStop article I wrote in 2013 while I was working for Insider Technologies Limited in Salford Quays. I was working with a bank client in Saudi Arabia at the time who required a browser based solution for querying terabytes of transaction log data downloaded from a HPE NonStop mainframe. I themed the article on sci-fi movies. PDF version – page 12.

Episode IV – A New Hope
(…for both Archived Legacy and Real-Time Transactions and NonStop EMS Alerts)

connection_Logs_on_HP_NonStop_Platform_Fig_1A long time ago (well, 2010) at an EBUG conference far, far away (I guess it depends on where you’re coming from but anyway, Madrid)… Cue anthemic signature music and then, as the strings slowly fade away, pan left to a NonStop hand held aloft on the back row of a technical track presentation and an Insider speaker raising his eyebrows to acknowledge… ‘Yes, at the back’… a qualified voice is heard and a question is raised… ‘Can I store and query on 10 to 15 years’ worth of legacy, tape archived BASE24 TLF and PTLF transaction log data?’… the qualified voice continues… ‘I would also like to query on related EMS messages, POS and ATM administration data’…slight pause… ‘Oh yes, and display appropriate standard and custom tokens for EMS alerts, TLF and PTLF transaction data’… and one last volley of questioning tone ‘with consideration towards on-site directives for PCI DSS compliance?’… read on…

 

First Post…

cropped-markwhitfield_logo.pngHaving had a DotNetNuke OCM website for some years gathering dust, I decided to nuke it as it was too time seductive to maintain. Some months later I decided to try my hand at WordPress and low and behold, within 48’ish hours, I have managed to transpose most of my original career profile content into WordPress pages. Over time I will annotate up the content with some more images but for the moment, I think there is enough for Google to get its teeth into…