Eliminate the Fear of Change with GenAI-Driven Automation | BMC Connect 2024

Hello, and welcome to another episode of six five on the road at BMC Connect. I'm your host, Steven Dickens. I'm John Ben, mark, and Anthony from BMC.

Hey guys, welcome to the show. Thanks For having us, Steve. Thank you.

So tell the listeners and viewers what you do for BMC. Let's get started. Let's start with you, Antonette.

So, I'm a DevOps architect and evangelist for BMC. So my role is I go and talk to companies about what's the art of the possible, what can they do with the BMC suite of tools and how can they, how can they make working a delight? That's, that's really what I do.

I guess I'm a, a seller of happiness, Steve. A seller of happiness. I love that.

And you mo you've got a lot to follow up with. I try To A seller of happiness. Come on.

You gotta tell that. Well, I'm a lead, uh, product manager and I work with Code Pipeline, um, code Insights and abate, and I'm focused on the developer experience. Anything I can do, well, a seller of happiness, but to work towards making their lives better and things easier for those developers.

So, topic of the session today, we're talking about it a little about a off camera. These are systems of record. Mm-Hmm.

They're vital to the business. They typically are the business for most of the shops that we're talking about. So what challenges do you see those teams having?

The fear of change, we're talking about it off camera, A lot of this code's critical, mission critical running the business. How are you seeing that manifested? Is it cobols fault?

Is that just the way the system's structured? We'll go to you first, Anthony. Yeah, I, I think, well, so to start on the COBOL part, I think COBOL gets a bad rap.

I'm with you there. I think that COBOL is a fine language. I think everybody wants to put all the sins of the past into cobol.

For me it's French versus German versus English. Right? It's a language, right?

Yeah. You learn if as long as you understand your patterns and how to basically engineer a system, whether I'm in Go or I'm in COBOL or I'm in Node or I'm in whatever, it, it, you're, you're creating something, right? Yeah.

The choice of Clay shouldn't matter. So I'm like, I've not heard that one. I'm gonna steal that one.

The, uh, you, You, I give you rights to it. The, uh, but I think the fear of change thing, you know, a a lot of companies, these are their critical systems. These are the core of their business.

This is where the money's at. And they're scared to make changes because the people that used to understand these systems backwards and forwards are leaving. And frankly, it's no way to live it.

You can't be scared of your system and your technology. You need to dictate to your technology, don't have the technology dictate to you how you do things. And I think that's, you know, just frankly, I think that's where BMC comes in and helps companies bridge that skills gap that they have between the next generation of people coming in and the ones that left.

So, you know, what I'm hearing a lot is, you know, how do I manage this? Because companies can't stay pat because these systems are too important. Mm-Hmm.

But they can't just blindly make changes and, you know, hope it works. They have to be, uh, cognizant of what they're doing. So coming to you, mark, if that's the vision and that's where customers are, how are you engineering the BMC products to kind of address that vision?

Right. As I said, I look at that developer experience and I live with that and that fear they have, and I understand it because I was a developer. Yeah.

So we look at ways that I could basically do magic. Could I run the application and have it magically just chart it out and it showed exactly all the database calls and program calls, all that. Could I have the code charted out so I can take a complex section of code and chart it out and say, oh, this does this and this does this.

It's taking what could be hundreds of thousands of lines of code for millions and making it clear and concrete in a visual way. And now with text, because some people are visual like myself and other people have to have it described. So You've gotta have a UI that adapts, Right?

And we do it many different ways to work with how that developer likes to understand the code. So guys, it's 2024. We're four minutes in and we've not talked about ai.

It's, yeah, I mean this, I'm shocked. Be a record somewhere. I'm, it's gotta be.

So all joking aside, we're starting to see gen AI come across the entire developer landscape code assistance. We're seeing that come holistically across. How are you seeing that coming particularly into the main f I'll go to you first, Anthony.

How are you seeing that with some of the customers? And then we'll go to you Mark, around how you're embedding it into some of the solutions. Sure.

So I think the mainframe is leaning into AI even more. Um, uh, even more than you're seeing on some of your distributed and cloud systems. I think the mainframe is really looking at AI as a tool that can be used in the future to help with what Mark was just describing, which is I have millions of lines of code that I need to understand, that I need to parse.

And even if the guy who wrote it back in the day is still there, it's now become so complex and had so many layers put on top of it that even they probably don't understand. And Mark, that's the key point. We've seen the B-M-C-A-E assistant announcements while we're here at the show.

I think from a product point of view, and Anthony touched on it, that explanation of code, maybe that original developer's not there, maybe it's coming to a news team. Talk to me a little bit about how you've seen that from a product point of view. Right.

And that's something where, like I said, we've had the charting and we would have tables and we'd have ways to explain it, which we've had great success, but for the last like 20 years, I've had developers say, could you explain to me what it does? Yeah. And I would kind of laugh at that because that's impossible.

How could you go in and explain it? But in the last And lines of cobol, pull apart that and understand and Tell me the business, you know, logic, what it is and how it works. Impossible.

And those people have typically left the organization. Yeah, yeah. The people who wrote the code 30 years ago have gone, I need that quick summary of what it does, and then it's over the last two years, last year, it was like AI was the solution.

So we didn't take AI and say, oh, what can it do? We started with that problem and that was the one remaining problem I had. And AI magically can deliver what they've asked for.

Well, I think, mark, that's a fantastic way for us to wrap up. I'm magically doing what customers are for. I've not got a better way to wrap up this.

Guys, it's been great, haven't you on the show as always. As always, very much Steve, thank you. You've been watching another episode of six five on the Road, coming to you from BMC Connect.

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