Driving the Speed of Innovation while Reducing Risk through ServiceOps
ServiceOps takes center stage. Six Five Media host Mike Vizard is joined at BMC Connect by BMC’s Margaret Lee, SVP and General Manager of Digital Service and Operations Management Business, to share how BMC and partners are joining forces to drive the future of ServiceOps to accelerate growth while minimizing risks.
Their discussion covers:
- The evolving landscape of service operations and its impact on business innovation
- Strategies for managing digital risk in a fast-paced technology environment
- The role of AI and machine learning in streamlining service operations
- The collaboration between BMC and partners to empower organizations in their digital transformation journeys
- Best practices for businesses to integrate ServiceOps into their processes to accelerate growth while minimizing risks
Learn more at BMC.
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Transcript
Mike Vizard: Hello, I’m Mike Vizard, and we’re back at Six Five On The Road at BMC Connect in Las Vegas, and we’re with Margaret. And we’re going to be talking about ServiceOps, which is kind of a newish term in some ways. And I personally feel like I’m living in a world where my ops have ops. So what exactly is ServiceOps these days?
Margaret Lee: Well, hello, Mike. Thank you for being here at BMC Connect. ServiceOps is something that we, BMC, really have thought about what customers need and how we can help them. If you think about a particular incident that comes from change, so on the service management side, incident management, change management is something that the service management team knows well. And the changes are becoming more and more frequent driven by DevOps, which in turn is 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’s easy, operation is difficult. 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 when there is an incident, getting a root cause to get services restored is not easy. We recognize that customers have an entire set of practices and 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 siloes today. On the single platform where all the data, your changes, your incident, your tickets, and your monitoring logs, and the events and metrics are on the same platform.
And all your service people are change management people, operations people, bridges, all share the same data, all share the same visibility that get you to first release and make changes with more confidence. You know the risk you’re taking, and we can help you prevent that. And if there’s an incident, all these people looking at the same data, all these people looking to see the origin of the change to get the root cause, the initial impact much, much faster. This is what we believe ServiceOps is a necessary capability for companies, especially large and complex ones to drive faster innovation.
Mike Vizard: 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.
Margaret Lee: Yeah, we have quite a few partners from a perspective implementation perspective, and certainly we have partners, hyperscalers and cloud leaders that help us in terms of providing SaaS offering. And in the last year or two with the growing popularity of AI and gen AI, we are also partnering with quite a few partners who are leading in this area. We believe, from BMC, there’s still certainly early days in the AI, gen AI overall evolution. And we believe a few things. One is we want the customers to have the ability to choose. We support language models from Google and from other providers. Customer have the choice. And right now Google is investing heavily into this area, so we want to make sure that we provide that option for customers. Second is use case driven. We do not want gen AI for gen AI’s sake. Across service management and across operations, whether it’s risk assessment or 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 insights and recommendations and business benefits to our customers.
Mike Vizard: As I listen to you describe this, I almost feel like ServiceOps is a superset of DevOps and ITSM and we have all these different things that we’ve been using over the years to manage IT. It doesn’t sound like we’re going to replace those things as much as we’re just going to integrate them together in a way that lets people manage this thing at scale.
Margaret Lee: Yeah, absolutely. I think that IT can be complex. And over time, different practices and different applications have grown up with complexity. The Golden ServiceOps is recognizing that in the DevOps world, because of the speed with which you are running the release, people release weekly, daily. And then when you put a release out, it impacts not just the application, but all the associated applications that’s connected by APIs, so your blast radius is bigger. In order to be able to release changes quickly, frequently into complex environment, you have to break down silos. And Service House really is trying to help you to break down the silos and data silos in process, change into operations. And also silos in communication. You can look at everybody, look at the same set of service models, this application. Everybody can see the root cause, and everybody can see what our automation has been.
Mike Vizard: In a lot of ways, this has always been our dream, to accomplish this. Is AI going to make this a reality?
Margaret Lee: Yes. The environments are so complex. People easily have hundreds, not thousands of applications. If their microservice is orders of magnitude more. And then people… The companies that BMC work with have thousands of changes going through and tens of thousands alarms, alerts coming in. The deployments are way beyond what a even very, very smart L3 operations architect can grasp in his or her mind. You need the math, you need the AI, the pattern recognition. You need the, for example, using gen AI to help you do things like situation summaries so you can communicate more broadly. There’s a lot of use cases that AI can help in this complex environment.
Mike Vizard: 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 want to thank you all for watching this edition of 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.