Driving the Speed of Innovation while Reducing Risk through ServiceOps | BMC Connect 2024

Hello, I'm Mike Ard, and we're back at six five on the road at BMC Connect in Las Vegas. And we're with Margaret, and we're gonna be talking about service ops, which is kind of a newish term in some ways. And, um, I personally feel like I'm living in a world where my ops have ops.

So what exactly is service ops these days? Well, hello Mike. Thank you for being here at BMC Connect.

Uh, service ops is something that we, BMC really have thought about what customer needs and how we can help them. If you think about a particular incident that comes from change, so on service management side incident management, change management is something that service management team know well, and the changes are becoming more and more frequent driven by DevOps, which in terms driven by the desire to do digital transformation, more applications, more releases, and therefore more changes. But as we all not know that DevOps continuous change development is easy, operations is difficult, right?

To run in a complex environment, to be able to internalize all these changes and to make sure there's minimal amount of incidents and, uh, when there is incident, get a root cause to get services restored is not easy. So we recognize that customers have a entire, uh, uh, set of practices and, uh, uh, processes for service management incident and change. But we provide a platform to link all of that incident management, change management, release management into operations.

So we help customers break down a lot of data as well as business process silos today. So on the single platform where all the data your changes, your incident, your tickets, and your monitoring logs and events and metrics are the same platform. And all your service people, uh, change management, people, operations people, bridges, all share the same data, all share the same visibility that get you to first, uh, release and make changes with more confidence, right?

So you know the risk you're taking and will can help you prevent that. And if there's an incident, right? All these people looking same data or people looking to see origin of the change to get the root cause the initial impact much, much faster.

So this is what we believe service ops is a necessary capability, um, for companies, especially large and complex ones to drive faster innovation. This sounds pretty ambitious and there are a lot of platforms in the enterprise, so I assume you're working with some partners on this. Yeah, we have, uh, uh, quite a few partners from a strategy perspective, implementation perspective, and certainly we have partners, uh, hyperscalers and cloud leaders that help us in terms of providing SaaS offering.

And in the last, uh, year or two, uh, with the, um, uh, growing popularity of AI and Gen ai, we're also partnering with quite a few, uh, partners who are leading in this area. We believe from BMC. There's still certainly early days in the ai, gen AI sort of overall, uh, uh, evolution.

And, uh, we believe choosing one is we want the customers to have the ability to choose, right? We support, um, language models from, from Google and from other providers. Customer have the choice.

And right now Google is investing heavily into this area, so you wanna make sure that we provide that option for customers. Um, second is use case driven, right? We do not want gen AI for gene ai, uh, sake.

So across service management and across operations, whether it's, uh, risk assessment or uh, bridge incident summaries or recommending remediation, the very concrete use cases that we can leverage the language models from partners such as Google and deliver concrete, concrete sort of insights and recommendations and business benefits to our customers. As I listened to you describe this, I almost feel like, um, service ops is kind of a super set of DevOps and ITSM and we have all these different things that we've been using over the years to manage. It doesn't sound like we're gonna replace those things as much as we're just gonna integrate them together in a way that, um, lets people manage this thing at scale.

Yeah, uh, absolutely. I think that it can be complex, right? And over time, different practices and different applications have grown up with a complexity.

The Gold Service OP is recognizing that in the DevOps world because the speed with which you are run to release people release weekly, daily, and then when you put a release out, it impacts not just the application, but all the associated application that's connected by APIs should blast radius is bigger, right? So in order to be able to release changes quickly, frequently into complex environment, you have to break down silos. And service cells really, uh, is try to help you to break down the silos and data silos in process, you know, change into operations and also silos and communication.

So you can look at everybody, look at the same set of, uh, uh, service model, this application, everybody can see the, uh, root cause and everybody can see what our automation is being. Uh, In a lot of ways this has always been our dream, right, to, to kind of accomplishes, is AI gonna kind of like make this a reality? Yes.

So, uh, the environments are so complex, you know, people easily have hundreds, not thousands of applications if their microservice is ordered magnitude more, right? And then people, the companies that BMC work with have thousands of changes going through and tens of thousands alarms alerts coming in, right? So the deployments are way beyond what a even very, very smart L three operations architect can grasp in his or her mind, right?

You need the math, you need the ai, the pattern recognition. You need the, uh, for example, uh, using gene AI to help you, uh, do things like situation summaries so you can communicate more broadly. There's a lot of use cases that, um, AI can help in this complex environment.

All right, folks, you heard it here and the way we manage it is changing for the better. I want to thank everybody for sharing their knowledge and their insights, and I wanna thank you all for watching this edition. I'm six five on the road here at the BMC Connect event.

We have an awesome number of other episodes we want you to check out, and we'll be back in a minute.