Margaret Lee, BMC | BMC Exchange VIP

This is texturong TV. Hey folks, welcome to BMC exchange. We're going to be talking about itsm itops devops in a little AI Ops thrown in on top.

Welcome to the show Hello. Thank you for being here. We here in these buzzwords all the time and they all seem to represent something slightly different is this some sort of Continuum that we're on or will all these things converge into something else at some point and what is our journey look like from here.

Yeah, so so my role at BMC and the general manager for the digital service and operations management business. So what does that mean is within the portfolio? We have it service management, right?

That's some a domain. They mean customers know. Well, there's also operations management.

So that's monitoring taking actions alerts Etc. Right. So talk about it operations it service management really both domains are being impacted greatly by emergency emergence of devops in terms of Rapid releases.

Lots of changes impacting the environment which into introducing a lot of tickets some service management into itsm and also a lot of alerts alarms into operations management. So the devops adoption particularly Enterprise companies, I really impacting the practitioners and how itsm and it operations are being being run and and impacting obviously the tools that'll be used. So it's a gonna be a combination of things.

It almost seems like it's a cultural clash as well because we have devops folks who are very programming minded and then we have itsm folks who tend to be more of the it administrators and they tend to have graphical tools that they use to manage things. So what are the cultural challenges that you're seeing customers deal with? Right.

You're right. When you say devops tend to be more Dev Thanos. Typically when people are organizing those teams that they actually have one distinct culture and their culture usually around speed right incremental small changes and role in the quickly versus traditionally it change, you know, the cab change advisory boards or a lot more when things UI oriented but also processed aren't you and I told process Etc.

And then the third group have a slightly different culture again is operations teams there. They want to control them environment. If you are releases the continuous changes impacting, you know, they feel a little bit lose of control sense of control.

Those three different groups are have distinct kind of way of operating and what's important to them. The first one is speed. The second one is understand that customer user experience and change management and third with operational stability of the environment, right?

So these three coming together Really is compelled by business need because at the end the companies that can roll out functionalities. Well application updating the website faster are the ones that's going to be competitive. So all three teams now are working adjusting getting used to each other right to make sure ultimately that they can roll out things quickly but manage risk and manage, you know, all these changes going through into this complex environment.

It's a lot to adjust it's not uncommon for Speed and reliability to have some tension here trying one. Sometimes they're a trade-offs there. Yeah you guys at the show we're talking about a new release of Helix the SAS platform and at least as I understand that there's some new visualization capabilities that make it easier for people to kind of see what's going across these cultures.

So is that part of the mission statement going forward? Absolutely. So we're very excited to talk about helix.

Apostrophe 22, right? We actually want to use a word release Loosely because we're adopting continuous delivery. We have monthly pushes into our clients environments right in terms of new capabilities rapidly rolling them out.

So we really talk about helixes in aggregate all the capability with made available to customers in last, you know, six to 12 months. So in terms of a key capabilities one is a platform. We absolutely approaching Helix in the platform manner in terms of single layer of data, whether it's ticketing data change management kind of data.

Combine them in the same accessibility to the applications on top with log data metrics data modeling of your applications modern learning infrastructure, right all of that into the Helix platform using a lot of common services. So on top of that we're very excited to announce a lot of the ai-driven service management capabilities where there's things like clustering problems incidents together to make the jobs of the service desk will be easier. We have done a significant amount of capabilities in AI Ops World right things like a nominal detection clustering of events coming in to create individual situations to be able to recommend automation to be built to be proactive addressing those issues and most importantly connecting service management and operations management what we are calling service Ops.

So what that means is that sending the data as I mentioned a common platform from operations into the service management side of the house. So if you have an incident, you can create an incident and service management and if the incidents relate to issues outages or resources lacking on infrastructure, we give that recommendation recommendation to the team addressing the incident. We give a sense of where do you start?

What we think is causing the issue just get a bridge immediately to go to a Root cause can save customers a lot of time and make that you know triaging resolution of incident much much faster so that end to end and to heal its platform. So that's we've been very busy building this out in the last 12 to 18 months. What should people expect from AI because you know, there's always a lot of Fear and Loathing anytime you mention AI anywhere.

So are we going to see? Yeah jobs that exist today are going to be eliminated or are they going to change over time? Maybe it's gonna be more fun to be in it at the end of the day because maybe I'm not gonna be doing as much low level drudgery is we kind of see today?

But what do you think that the Outlook looks like? Well, yeah, so challenging with Staffing is is a universal problem at this point, right and interestingly. You mentioned the devops since More Death than Ops so challenging Staffing on operations team or service dusting.

Is it more so compared to Darcy development team sometimes right? So how do you make the lives of the people in those teams better? The first thing we can do to help them is reduce toil right and there's many different forms tutorial.

You can service desk people are faced with hundreds and thousands of lower Priority tickets and trying to figure out like which is more important which I go where do I go? First or you have operations team faced with tons of alarms and alerts right makes sense of them pulling them together. So AI first is making some of those repetitive toil kind of Type of tasks easier just by clustering removing them and the second piece is highlighting the things that really really important.

So for example, service management clustering proactive problem management or say here are all the 50 tickets coming in 25 of them is really around one issue highlighting them to so draw the eyes draw the priority of the people to the most important issues or in the in the situation of AI Ops to say, okay. Here's a alert along his impact level. This one's really important right that helps reduce so much cognitive sort of processing that's needed today just to get to the realize what is most important.

So by you know, reducing the toil of repetitive tasks and putting the most important things in front of the operators eyes really can help them. Do you think that we'll have a material impact on reducing the meantime the remediation because there's always going to be incidents there. The issue is Quickly, can I fix them, right?

Right. Well, the first step is hopefully you can prevent things from happening. So you have a zero meantime to radiation, right?

So the idea of preventative, you know set alert and you know different customers have different Comfort levels with pre-built automation. Right? Some customers say I can let pre-built admitted automation do things like adding memory to Containers or you know adding resources to database.

There's sort of like No lose. I can't I can't you know majorly cause problems. I'll just have pre-build automation to go with sort of AI Ops insights right that kind of thing can prevent issues.

Now when there are issues the most if you aren't any bridge and being on Bridges and past myself as well the first questions what happened right when did happen what changed at that time? Right. So if you can pinpoint to the customer When to something happened because all you know is oh there's an outage but the grew cause probably happened an hour 30 minutes, maybe even 24 hours ago, right?

So what changed what was what patch got chance what got updated what new application capabilities wrote out what happened. When did that thing happen? And you can associate it with incident that will get your resolution so much faster because a lot of time just trying to figure out what changed.

And just like a crime the last person who saw the victim alive is probably the Killer. As we go along and we think about all this do you think that it people will be able to manage much more at a higher level of scale? Because one of the things that we are challenged with is not only we shorthanded but it seems like we now have monolithic applications Cloud native applications.

There's other stuff coming down the pike and it's the environment's more distributed than ever, but we're not adding more people. So it seems like the equation has to give somewhere. Yeah.

I was just talking about the last night with a couple other analysts, right? I don't think it's not a choice the lives of the it operations or service that's people is getting complicated because especially with the kind of clients that beans you work with right? It's it's just the fact is there's multi generation of technology in environment.

They continue to have being free many of our customers, you know at the end of the day the system record is the They have built over the last multiple decades client server applications multi-tier applications. I myself were to you know, 10 20 years ago worked with clients on Java based operations against rdbms with a UI and those applications not necessarily going away even as customer want to refactor them. Right?

And then of course, the the newer generation of applications are being built either on premises on public cloud in microservices architecture running containers, right? So the fact is all of these multiple generation applications our coexisting for the 4cub future right very few companies can say, oh we're gonna completely go into, you know Cloud that's just not going to happen. So From operations perspective the complexities you may have product teams back to the devops teams who are doing rapid releases into the latest technology, but those contain our microservices application in Cloud inevitably are touching or calling data or functionality from the rdbms from the Mainframe in multiple, you know in the end-to-end use cases.

so the the staff which is not growing right of ID monitoring running operating and Dev into this environment is faced with task. How do I Manage and run this complicated multi-generational system if you will, right and how do I have to get smarter and more efficient? Right?

This is why we are seeing the the domains of observability in AI Ops coming to be very very popular in our customers because the you know, if you if you are in a leadership role, the only path is to get technology to help you right to help your team. We saw a shift to the cloud and for it management tools driven at the beginning of covid kind of accelerated that process but I wonder as we go along here the amount of data that we're trying to collect to train. These Ami models is significant.

So, you know, does that also force the issue where we're going to put these tools in the cloud because we need the aggregate a massive amount of data to train the AI models and then create the inference engine that automates the process on the other side of it. So is that becoming a major reason why we're seeing all these tools starting to shift up into the cloud? Well, I think data is part of it a big part of Shifting tools in the cloud is related, which you said earlier about it staffs not growing right?

So if you are a leader of it you say okay. With my staff how much can I use SAS offering because with the SAS offering I don't have it, but worry about Hardware or maintenance and an upgrades and all of that the vendor takes care of that for me. So a lot of the pushing to the cloud is that relates to the staff shortage the data piece is important as well.

Right? Because now if you have a lot of tools the data is already in the cloud, right? So for example, BMC Helix and officer Drive area Ops, we need data from your monitoring system.

We need a different service desk same within monitoring your logs events and metrics all of that. It's a lot easier this data is born in the cloud just stay in the cloud and do algorithms. Right?

Occasionally. We see very large companies who would actually prefer data being piped back to the data Lake on premise because they want to do a lot of collaboration of data across so many different sources, but I'll say that the movement towards us move into Cloud a lot. To do with with the efficiency of the staff.

And once those tools in the cloud data is Born the cloud then people's and why do we need to pipe back unless you know, I need to build gigantic data Lake for some reason and as a fine line between a data lake and a data swamp, but that's Culturally, we have some issues because you know, we've been doing this a long time and people get attached to tools and there's a certain amount of inertia that exists. So how do we get people to kind of give up their comfort zone to go do something new and different here what forces that issue? You are using like the monitoring tools, or you can move to the cloud in general and the notion that we're going to move the control plane from it essentially into the class.

Well we have seen is as long as the new tools easier to use and provide more information right and make people's daily lives a little bit better. There's not a lot of resistance per second. Oh this tool gives you more information easier to to use in more intuitive UI or better apis for me to code against people generally are very quickly adaptable.

You can see that just in the last three to five years this even more SAS based holes that that are being used, you know going really really rapidly. So it's not I think that the technology domain that our customers are very open actually to you to use new tools as long as it is easier to use and make their daily life better. Yeah.

What is your sense of what's that one thing that you see organizations doing from an IT management perspective. That just makes you shake your head and go I can't believe we're still having this conversation. Is there something you feel like we got to move forward.

I think a lot of it is a bit of a maybe more a process thing then then tooling thing the there's a different. I think there's a Customers want to move fast and they're buying tools to move fast. But a lot of times they realize the internal business process from requirements to making changes and just It is it's a human element as supposed to technology oftentimes.

It's harder to change right there. They see it great demo from BMC or from other vendors say we want to use that tool, but then they the business processes have not. Changed enough.

Do you think people get that? It seems to me every business process has a corollary it process and vice versa. So do you think people understand that these things are really now joined at the hip in this age of digital transformation?

Yeah. I think it's evolving right many companies. Now form the product teams, right?

So on a product team you have the business owner right? Sometimes you have the product manager writing requirements development and release them all of that. Right?

So as these product teams becoming more popular there is Almost inevitable sort of recognition that because there's representative representation by development team release and you know operations all the way into into deep into the Ops aspect of it, but also have linkage into the business whether it's someone coming from marketing from Finance, you know, whatever needs to be built then just the organic conversation with them within those teams people realize. Oh, okay. I want to do this this quickly.

I want to you know, and then they the technical side of those teams. Wait wait we need to Get this checklist and change management. We need to set up a monitoring.

We need to have Disaster Recovery plan performance, testing all of that the business people are starting to realize some of the the processes that that just to roll out functionalities quickly. So those product teams are really making a change they're from a cultural perspective. So we're having the conversation early because I've been in these conversations with the big business plan gets built and we have the whole thing and then we get the it guys and they're like, yeah and we'll be ready nine months.

Everybody goes we got revenue in three exactly. And then and then you have the conversation. Let's break it down.

Right what can be accomplished than three and that's you know the agile and all of that because do you think that the relationship between it and business is getting better? Because we've been arguing about this for four decades now where there's been this divide and the culture class that goes with that but do you think we are getting the point now where? It in the business are more closely joined at the hip and maybe they'll even come a day when it moves faster than the business can absorb.

Oh, absolutely. I think a lot of a lot of companies that is the case. It's becoming a case right especially is certain part of it is adopting agile, if they're adopting successfully, they can go features and capabilities in faster than you know, sometimes end users.

You know, let's say an application end user facing and users who used to certain features laid out screens and they're like, okay what new capability can be can be absorbed whether by internal employees or customers, but I do think that As as newer Generations work into the workforce. They're much more. Both demanding and adapting faster, right the demanding, for example, what I call consumer elevated level of use experience, right?

They want for example adoption of chatbot adoption of self-service right people. Just don't pick up phones anymore. They're both they would do is chat someone and you if you are a generation that grew up, let's say in Alexa, you're much more comfortable dealing with chatbots or go up and I am then you perfectly fine getting services communication with slack and teams versus in person.

So all of that they're more demanding experience, but also much more adaptable. So they're they get applications. They get you know, the continuous new features coming in.

So I'm hopeful that that as the general population just becoming more technology Savvy then then the alignment of get better and they're more likely to self-service their own requirements. Absolutely. Exactly.

Yeah. All right folks the old adage is, you know lead follower get out of the way. So pick one.

Alright. Hey, thanks for coming by the show. Thank you.

Yeah, that's right.