Improved Uptime

Evidence and data. Interviewees discussed how their high‑volume, low‑latency workloads required uninterrupted throughput and predictable latency. With the adoption of HPE Nonstop Systems, interviewees reported fewer service‑impacting incidents across contexts. Additional interviewee-reported benefits included:

• Broad-based improvements in uptime and availability. Interviewees reported that HPE Nonstop Systems’ platform increased total processing efficiency by improving transaction throughput, reducing latency, and strengthening system responsiveness, even at peak load. The data environment also became more consistent, as parallel processing and fault‑tolerant database structures reduced corruption risk and supported reliable real‑time analytics. As a result, overall uptime increased into the 99.99% to near-100% range, and once-common unplanned outages were effectively eliminated.
  The director of industrial automation at a smart manufacturing conglomerate shared how their organization significantly reduced downtime for mission-critical systems with the investment in HPE Nonstop: “[Now, our downtime is] approaching zero. It’s at >99.999%. … The reality is [that Nonstop] has massive parallel processing capabilities such that before, when we had to update 43 locations, it would take us a week, and now it takes us a couple of hours. That’s part of the whole availability equation. … The latency of the system itself is near zero, [and] these particular systems can handle up to 8 TB throughput, so that’s a lot.”

• Faster and more seamless failover capabilities. Nonstop’s fault‑tolerant architecture enabled instantaneous failover between system components, which reduced and removed transaction bottlenecks and operational delays.

  • The director of industrial automation at a smart manufacturing conglomerate shared that the platform’s built‑in fault tolerance allowed instantaneous, seamless failover and ensured uninterrupted operations compared to the prior environment, which required up to an hour.
  • The technology leader at the financial services company noted faster switching time with HPE. They said, “From one failure server to another server, Nonstop Systems was 8% better compared to [our prior environment, and] for a bank, that makes a huge, huge difference.”

• Improved system performance. These gains in uptime and failover also contributed to better performance, lower variability during high‑demand periods, and a more predictable user experience.
  The technology leader at a financial services company noted that system performance improved by 7%. They shared, “When it comes to the TPS (total transaction per second), HPE Nonstop was 7% better as compared to [our prior environment].”

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• Each year in the prior environment, the composite had an average of 99.5% availability of 24/7 mission-critical systems, resulting in 43.8 hours of downtime for tier one high-criticality workloads.

• The average total cost of 1 hour of downtime for tier one high-criticality workloads is $1,500,000 for the composite, based on varying customer, regulatory, and operational impacts.

• With HPE Nonstop Systems, the composite organization reduces unplanned downtime frequency and duration for 24/7 mission-critical systems by 90% over the three-year period.

• In Year 1, 50% of the composite organization’s tier one high-criticality workloads are supported by HPE Nonstop Systems; that rises to 75% in Year 2 and 100% in Year 3.

Risks. The following factors could impact this benefit for organizations:

• An organization’s availability requirements for 24/7 services, including the number and nature of an organization’s tier one high-criticality workloads that are migrated to the Nonstop environment.

• The frequency, redundancy, nature, and severity of network downtime and performance issues or severe performance degradation for 24/7 services fielded in the prior environment, and the amount of time it took to resolve them before.

• The average cost of downtime as it relates to the revenue, regulatory, operational/supply chain, customer satisfaction, or other costs of downtime for tier one high-criticality workloads.

• The skill sets available for managing mission-critical workloads, infrastructure, and site reliability

• A company’s operating margin.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 20%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $86.3 million.

Enhanced Security

Evidence and data. HPE Nonstop Systems created a more secure, resilient, and manageable operating environment across diverse technology landscapes. Financial services environments benefited most from reduced disruption during high‑volume periods and more manageable monitoring demands, while manufacturing environments gained from stronger protection across device‑to‑enterprise data flows and earlier detection of operational anomalies. The platform architecture enabled consistent protection across both transactional and data‑intensive workflows and led to:

• Proactive security optimizations. Security patching and update cycles became faster, reducing downtime windows by 18% to 20% and minimizing operational vulnerability during maintenance. The consolidated security stack reduced the need for multiple third-party security tools, lowering operational overhead while maintaining protection.
  The technology leader at the financial services company shared how HPE Nonstop reduced downtime related to security patching and strengthening by up to 20%, from 120 to 100 minutes on average: “Security is not just about the attack. Security is all about how much time you take for assessment, for monitoring, for implementation. … You have to regularly do updates and patching. … [With HPE Nonstop], time for updating, upgrading, and patching in terms of security has come down drastically, [and] that 18% to 20% time savings is crucial. It’s very important because whenever you are applying the patches and updates, your main system gets down. You cannot run the business; you have your system down for some time because at the back end, you are running the patches, you are running the update, so that is another significant improvement.”

• Reactive security improvements. Interviewees described how the Nonstop platform reduced exposure to threats, improved incident stability, and supported more efficient oversight of large‑scale environments.
  The technology leader at the financial services company shared how HPE Nonstop helped streamline proactive security monitoring efforts: “My security monitoring has now become very easy. Previously, close to 70 people were required for monitoring, just monitoring. Now, irrespective of the fact that I have [increased transaction volumes] by 40%, that [staffing requirement] has come down by 50%.”

• Fewer external attacks. The platform reduced platform level security alerts by 40% to 60%, which lowered operational noise and improved the signal-to-risk ratio for security teams. Unauthorized access attempts declined by 30% to 40%, as stronger process isolation and integrated access controls reduced exposure at system boundaries. The rate of severe attacks decreased significantly, with overall attack volume dropping even as transactional workloads increased, which demonstrated better defense at scale.
  The technology leader at the financial services company shared that their organization effectively blocked 75% of potential attacks by extrapolating the security impact of Nonstop compared to the prior environment, even while increasing transaction volume by 40%: “Previously, I was witness to 250 severe attacks in a year. … When we upgraded to HPE Nonstop, that 250 has come down to 180. … Now, my transactions have gone up by 40%, but still, attacks have gone down by 80. [Had] we gone with the same [legacy] system and [increased] the number of transactions, those 250 [attacks] could have increased to up to 400, [for an effective] 75% improvement. This is not assumption. This is a well-documented figure.”

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• In the prior environment, the composite organization had a 39% likelihood of one or more breaches originating from external attacks, with annual risk exposure of $4,912,000. In addition, 53% of breaches originated from external attacks and internal incidents targeting the composite. Of those attacks, 20% were directed at high-criticality systems and addressable with HPE Nonstop Systems, for a total annual risk exposure of $650,840 in the prior environment.⁴

• With HPE Nonstop Systems, the composite reduces attack surfaces, increases visibility, and improves patching and update consistency. This reduces the risk of exposure to breach costs from addressable attacks with HPE Nonstop Systems by 75%.

• In Year 1, 50% of the composite organization’s tier one high-criticality workloads are supported by HPE Nonstop Systems; that rises to 75% in Year 2 and 100% in Year 3.

Risks. The following factors could impact this benefit for organizations:

• An organization’s availability requirements for 24/7 services, including the number and nature of an organization’s tier one high-criticality workloads that are migrated to the Nonstop environment.

• The region, industry, and organization size, which can affect the threat type; sophistication of attacks; and the ability to prevent, detect, and remediate them.

• An organization’s security culture and maturity, the breadth of security tools, the integration and functional capabilities of other cybersecurity software, and the likelihood and associated costs of security breaches each year, which may impact an organization’s cost of a breach.

• The skill sets and salaries available for FTEs in security operations, infrastructure, and site reliability.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 15%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $758,000.

Increased Scalability

Evidence and data. Interviewees shared how HPE Nonstop Systems provided their organizations with stable data foundations, centralized control, and repeatable software-defined infrastructure that enabled rapid expansion without proportionate cost growth. The platform supported pay‑as‑you‑go capacity models that scaled system costs with actual utilization, eliminating the barriers of large capital expenditure for launching new revenue streams, as well as:

• Augmented operational agility. Interviewees noted that Nonstop’s elastic clustering scaled capacity on demand, allowing their teams to direct resources to hot spots without long procurement cycles. Provisioning, regression testing, and post‑scale normalization completed in less time, which reduced the window between scale‑up and revenue realization. Software‑defined architectures rapidly replicated validated patterns, while pay‑as‑you‑go models aligned cost with utilization, supporting profitable scale.

  • The director of industrial automation at a smart manufacturing conglomerate described the dynamic scalability of their organization’s HPE Nonstop environment: “Right now, we are provisioned at about 25%, [so] we would have to scale up to 160 locations before we would even need to talk to HPE to increase our hardware capacity. But the great part about that scalability is that we’re only being charged for pay-as-you-go. So, yes, we have the scalability, but we’re only paying for what we’re using.”
  • The technology leader at the financial services company shared how HPE Nonstop Systems helps their organization provision and test 50% faster than in their prior environment and helps to normalize their system far faster and with one-third of the staffing requirement: “HPE Nonstop supports very [fast] integration testing or regression testing. I can do it probably in an hour’s time or less, [while] the competitors are now taking 2 hours. … Sometimes it takes 3 hours to come back to the system at the normal speed when you scale up. … [Now], with the help of HPE, [we] can normalize the system in real time [even though] we scaled [the requirement] roughly down to 10 FTEs.”
    Overall, the technology leader at the financial services company highlighted how, when compared to their prior systems or to a competitive solution, the HPE Nonstop platform was able to support their organization’s 40% increase in transaction volume at a 4.5% reduction in cost per transaction, all while maintaining the same performance for the same latency.

• Improved profit margin with scaled transaction volumes. Interviewees described how HPE Nonstop Systems helped expand throughput and materially increased transaction counts, which supported revenue growth under higher transaction loads. Stable, real‑time data across production and transactional flows reduced cancellations, rework, and leakage, which reinforced both top‑line and margin outcomes. By removing IT bottlenecks, the platform enabled continuous availability and predictable performance at higher volumes.

  • The technology leader at the financial services company shared that, with the 40% increase in transaction volumes that HPE Nonstop enabled and with the added capabilities for product innovation with AI, their organization saw significant improvement in revenue and profitability. The new data foundation improved production efficiency, increasing profit by over 20%, with 0.23% of growth from initiatives related to HPE. The Nonstop platform enabled business objectives around AI/ML capabilities, as well as real-time insights on increased productivity, energy efficiency, and sustainability. They said: “We actually increased the number of transactions [by 40%], which definitely will have impact, not only on revenue but [also on] your profitability. … My revenue has increased by 22% in last three years. My profitability actually has shot up by 26%. … I would say around 0.23% of the complete growth is coming from these Nonstop-enabled initiatives: the data foundation, AI/ML capabilities, the governance of data, and how actually we are utilizing it [for] good, real-time insights.”
  • The technology leader at a financial services company noted: “Compared to [our legacy system], our transaction volumes have doubled [due to] market volatility, the growth in the business, and payments processing enhancements [more broadly. Now], we can scale up the cluster a lot faster, almost like a cloud deployment, by adding more nodes and more capacity, and then [we can] take down nodes and capacity when not required and allocate them elsewhere.”
  • The business leader at the smart manufacturing company discussed how data latency issues in the prior environment prevented their organization from gathering real-time insights into equipment efficiency, which in turn impacted manufacturing productivity. With the real-time data insights and predictions enabled by HPE Nonstop, they reported that their organization was able to improve efficiency and reduce losses by 10% to 12% compared to their prior environment, bringing equipment efficiency to a range of 92% to 93%. They shared: “From a cloud perspective, we are actually utilizing it in terms of AI/ML, in terms of predictive, prescriptive kinds of insights. And that has given us 10% to 12% of the overall equipment efficiency for each and every manufacturing site wherever we have deployed the complete HPE X-generation software.”

• New AI-developed product and operational innovations informed by Nonstop’s real-time data analytics. HPE Nonstop delivered low latency, live data pipelines that supported preparation of high-quality data layers and consistent, scalable integration across enterprise and industrial systems. These capabilities enabled AI/ML, agentic AI, and analytics to run reliably and at scale. Interviewees noted how the Nonstop environment sustained real-time data quality, which expanded AI use cases across process, quality, engineering, and maintenance functions. Continuous connectivity supported anomaly detection and operational analytics, which strengthened decision accuracy during demand growth.
  The director of industrial automation at a smart manufacturing conglomerate shared that, prior to the HPE investment, their organization was decentralized, and their database structures were not standardized. After the HPE investment, their organization was able to leverage the platform’s capabilities to standardize data and provide the ongoing transactional accuracy needed to be consumed by large language models. They shared, “From the standpoint of fault tolerance of our databases — since these databases are running on multiple copies of systems simultaneously — these databases are flawlessly updated, and the potential for data corruption within those particular instances is near zero.”

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• The composite organization has $50 billion in annual revenue and an 11% operating margin.

• In Year 1, 50% of the composite’s tier one high-criticality workloads are supported by HPE Nonstop Systems; that rises to 75% in Year 2 and 100% in Year 3.

• The composite organization improves scalability with HPE Nonstop Systems by delivering a stable, always‑on data foundation with software‑defined replication that enables rapid expansion without linear cost growth. Elastic clustering and pay‑as‑you‑go capacity with GreenLake allow systems to scale on demand, align costs with utilization, and accelerate time to value. Faster provisioning, testing, and normalization convert capacity into revenue more quickly while maintaining predictable performance and low latency. Real‑time, high‑quality data at scale supports higher transaction volumes, improved margins, and continuous availability, enabling profitable growth without operational bottlenecks. Taken together, these scalability improvements help the composite organization develop new products that increase the operating margin by 0.2%.

Risks. The following factors could impact this benefit for organizations:

• An organization’s availability requirements for 24/7 services, including the number and nature of an organization’s tier one high-criticality workloads that are migrated to the Nonstop environment.

• The extent to which an organization invests in data analytics and data infrastructure as it integrates HPE Nonstop Systems as part of the organization’s data layer to identify opportunities to reduce overhead from processes and infrastructure, as well as to increase revenue from new products and other innovations.

• An organization’s operating margin.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 15%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $23.3 million.

Unquantified Benefits

Interviewees mentioned the following additional benefits that their organizations experienced but were not able to quantify:

• Improved product quality and related customer satisfaction. HPE Nonstop provided real‑time data availability and significantly reduced latency, which allowed operational teams to identify issues more quickly and address them with greater precision. This stability supported more reliable processes and improved overall product performance. Automated insights replaced manual investigation, reducing delays and enhancing the speed and accuracy of quality‑related decisions. As a result, customers experienced more consistent service levels, faster resolution of issues, and improved satisfaction driven by operational transparency and responsiveness.
  The data and AI product manager at a manufacturing firm shared: “HPE Nonstop has connectivity features and leverages telemetry data live, [which helps] us address some of the quality issues quicker and much more robustly. Previously, a customer would have had to call someone from our central team who would have just referred them to a local retailer, who then would have had to run some analytics manually. Now, in some cases, we can get these insights live just based on the event.”

• Compliance. HPE Nonstop offered interviewees’ organizations integrated security, auditing, and resilient architectural controls that strengthened compliance adherence across complex environments. These built‑in capabilities reduced the need for extensive supplemental tooling and supported more consistent enforcement of policies and processes.

  • The director of industrial automation at a smart manufacturing conglomerate shared: “Security is always complex; however, I would say our overall cybersecurity posture has improved significantly. With the more standardized and more centralized HPE Nonstop, we were able to achieve Zero Trust access control. It helped us to simplify our compliance for both our customers and our insurance carrier [and] helps us to manage all that along with governance and compliance. These systems … centralize that function versus a decentralized 43-location approach.”
  • The technology leader at a financial services company noted: “We use it for compliance purposes for PCI DSS [Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard] and SOC 2 [System and Organization Controls 2], as well having that security built in, which provides a level of compliance requirements that we otherwise would have to deploy ourselves.”

• Cyber insurance. The HPE Nonstop environment reduced systemic exposure and strengthened the consistency of controls, which helped lower cyber insurance costs. Organizations benefited from a more stable risk profile as insurers recognized the reduced likelihood of downtime, breach‑related escalation, or systemwide failures. The platform’s reliability and governance reinforced customers’ confidence in the operational environment and contributed to more favorable insurance terms over time.
  The director of industrial automation at a smart manufacturing conglomerate shared: “Our insurance carrier bases how much we pay in premiums for cybersecurity insurance based on our ability to achieve a Zero Trust Access Control environment and to integrate our identity management systems, and also at the same time, ensuring the highest availability with sensitive types of transactional data.”

• Enterprisewide labor savings. The platform enabled faster access to governed data, integrating seamlessly with modern data lake and reporting environments. Activities that previously required substantial time — such as regulatory reporting, operational reviews, or change‑driven data extraction — benefited from automation and reduced dependence on specialized resources. Regression testing and environment normalization completed more quickly, supporting shorter verification cycles and helping teams return systems to steady state with limited disruption.
  The technology leader at the financial services company shared, “You will be truly amazed to hear how we could lower administrative labor and overtime optimization.”

Flexibility

The value of flexibility is unique to each customer. There are multiple scenarios in which a customer might implement Nonstop Systems and later realize additional uses and business opportunities, including:

• Quantum safe cryptography. HPE Nonstop supported public key infrastructure (PKI)-anchored controls and accommodated workloads that required quantum safe cryptographic readiness. Interviewees noted that HPE Nonstop supported their organizations’ journeys towards a public-key infrastructure (PKI) to accommodate workloads that required quantum safe cryptographic readiness. The technology CCO leader at a financial services company noted: “We have a lot of environments that require post-quantum cryptography (PQC). Once you have PKI infrastructure, any of your certificates can be vulnerable and we are glad to see PQC support in HPE Nonstop roadmap.”

• Sustainability. HPE Nonstop enabled digital workflows that decreased reliance on manual, paper‑based processes, which supported improvements in carbon performance and sustainability metrics. The availability of real‑time operational insights allowed interviewees’ organizations to better identify inefficiencies, optimize resource use, and reduce energy consumption. In production settings, these insights supported targeted interventions that lowered energy waste and delivered measurable sustainability gains.
  The technology leader at the financial services company shared: “When it comes to sustainability [with HPE Nonstop systems], everything is correlated. [As] my digital footprint increases, my digital transformation increases, [so] my number of transactions in digital channels has increased. As a result, we had a significant reduction in our carbon [emissions], with a 30% improvement in our carbon footprint.”

Flexibility would also be quantified when evaluated as part of a specific project (described in more detail in Total Economic Impact Approach).