On this episode of Futurum Live! From the Show Floor, Futurum Research Senior Analyst Steven Dickens talks with BMC Software’s Principal Product Manager, Paul Spicer, and Ensono’s Expert Mainframe System Programmer, Paul Buchanan, during the SHARE Conference in Atlanta. Their conversation covered the client perspective of AIOps integration and how skills play into its adoption.

It’s a great conversation you don’t want to miss.

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Transcript:

Steven Dickens: Hello and welcome to this Futurum Tech webcast, brought to you in collaboration with BMC. I’m joined by Paul Spicer and Paul Buchanan. We’ve got BMC and Ensono on the show today. So guys, welcome to the show.

Paul Spicer: Thank you.

Paul Buchanan: Thank you.

Steven Dickens: So hearing a lot about AI, it’s the key sort of phrase in the industry. Everybody’s talking about it, huge buzzword. We’re here to talk about AIOps, but before we do that, let’s get some introductions. Paul.

Paul Spicer: Yeah, so I’m Paul Spicer. I work for BMC Software as a product manager. I’ve been at BMC for coming up to 10 years now. Been working on the monitoring side for quite some time, automation, and sort of more recently some of the AI stuff. So yeah, that’s pretty much me.

Steven Dickens: And you, Paul?

Paul Buchanan: Paul Buchanan, I come from Ensono. I’m an expert mainframe system programmer. I have focused on event management and correlation for the last several years and getting into AIOps.

Steven Dickens: So let’s frame this up. Paul, let’s go to you first. Let’s get the BMC perspective. As I say, AI as a term, lots of buzzwords, lots of hype in the market, lots of stuff around large language models, lots of stuff about ChatGPT. What does that mean from a BMC perspective?

Paul Spicer: Yeah, I mean really it’s all about using artificial intelligence and machine learning to make operations more efficient and easier basically. So we’re just leveraging that capability inside of products, purpose built products, really to take some of the expertise required out of things, I mean, less experienced people in the workforce. So trying to make things easier, more efficient, things like faster ability to detect problems, faster problem diagnosis so you can get to resolution faster. I mean that’s really what it’s all about, and just basically making things more efficient and easier for customers.

Steven Dickens: So Paul, from a client adoption perspective, you’ve probably got as good a perspective as anybody in the industry given the footprint of Ensono. Tell me a little bit about what you are hearing from an AIOps perspective.

Paul Buchanan: As a managed service provider and dealing with several hundred clients, AIOps is absolutely necessary in today’s day and age. It reduces the meantime to resolution. It lowers the learning curve for new staff and provides better and stronger data at the root cause.

Steven Dickens: So what are you seeing that translate to for those clients? Is that less issues, is that less impact of those issues? Is that more issues being resolved by a small team size? How’s that translated?

Paul Buchanan: It’s a combination. So sometimes we find new problems because we just weren’t looking for them. We can improve processes, we can eliminate some problems completely, and some problems we just kick down the road until we find a better solution tomorrow.

Steven Dickens: And how’s that sort of impacting the clients as they look to sort of improve their posture, do more with less? So we’ve seen that sort of translate to real sort of KPIs and metrics.

Paul Buchanan: Absolutely. From an infrastructure standpoint, the stronger the infrastructure is, the more uptime you have and the stronger your business is.

Steven Dickens: So Paul, I want to take you back to something you said. Great discussion there, but I think there’s something in skills. You talked about it as a sort of side benefit I think almost to AIOps. I think it’s probably a little bit more fundamental than that. Where do you see skills in the equation?

Paul Spicer: Well, that’s actually a very key question. We do a BMC survey every year, which you perhaps know about, and one of the questions we ask is about length of experience in mainframe and things like that. We’ve been asking the same question essentially for years. So we have some sort of idea of trending and stuff like that. And one of the key things we’re seeing, I mean in the most recent one in particular, the number of people with 20 plus years is going significantly down and the people with one to five years of experience is going significantly up. So you’ve got by definition, a less skilled workforce. So it takes a long time for everyone to learn the skills of those people. So the more you can put in the product, building domain expertise into the products and the actual technology, you can kind of speed up that learning skill and not make it so required in fact. Because the products are doing more of it. They’re taking the intelligence, they’re guiding people, they’re taking that next step.

Steven Dickens: So you’ve seen the same Paul from, I mean obviously Ensono, huge footprint of clients. So that sort of microcosm that might be within one client, you’re seeing that spread across 2 or 300 clients?

Paul Buchanan: Yes.

Steven Dickens: Are you seeing that same trend?

Paul Buchanan: Absolutely. It’s like your custom car. You have one mechanic that works on it for years and years and then that mechanic retires. So what are you going to do? There is not that strong skillset, especially for the kind of languages that are used in the mainframe. And with Python coming in and with AI coming in, it reduces that learning curve. It makes it a lot more robust. It allows people to work unsiloed.

Steven Dickens: So from that perspective we’ve got a great snapshot right now. Lots going on from an AI perspective, fusing that with the operational things that we’ve talked about. Where do you see that over the next two to three years?

Paul Spicer: I mean, it’s going to continue to evolve and it’s going to get more powerful and it’s going to get easier to use. I mean, some of the earlier AIOps based products, you had to have months worth of data before you could do anything useful with it. I mean, now less is required before you can start to see results, all these kinds of things. And like anything, I mean as more people start to adopt it, it’s going to grow and it’s going to become way more powerful than [inaudible 00:05:49].

Paul Buchanan: Absolutely. And I see the industry coming together and building better industry standards.

Steven Dickens: And how do you see those sort of moving forward and evolving over maybe the next two or three years?

Paul Buchanan: It’s just going to take off. It already has. I mean, AIOps in the mainframe has been talked about for a few years. Now BMC’s producing, other vendors are producing AIOps. There’s actual practices. We’re seeing it in the news with Gmail’s ChatGPT and other options out there, and people are actually seeing the benefits.

Steven Dickens: So if we start to bring us home here, Paul, if you were to summarize up BMCs perspective to AIOps in maybe two or three sentences, what would those be?

Paul Spicer: Well, I mean we are huge believers in it. I mean, it is the future. We want to be part of it, we are part of it. And we’re going to continue to look at ways of leveraging it in more of our products. We have to because the market needs it, I mean, basically.

Steven Dickens: So great perspective from you, Paul. What are you seeing from the client perspective?

Paul Buchanan: From a client perspective, we can’t stay quiet. We have to reach out, we have to work with the vendors because we’re the ones putting it into practical application. They have great experts that know the industry, but as a user, as someone who’s applying this day in and day out, we have to be very vocal about what’s working and what’s not working today.

Steven Dickens: I think that’s a great way to summarize up, I think. Thank you very much for that, guys. It’s been great to get your perspective on this really emerging trend and how it’s going to impact the industry. You’ve been listening to the Futurum Tech webcast, brought you in collaboration with BMC. Thanks very much for listening. Please click and subscribe and we’ll catch you on the other side.