Driving Innovation: DataOps, Cloud, and AI – How We Empower Our Customers | BMC Connect 2024

Hello, I'm Mike Vizard, and we're back with six five on the road, and we're at the BMC Connect event in Las Vegas. And we're talking to Ger here who runs the Digital Business Automation Unit for BMC. And we're gonna talk a little bit about, well, everything, gen ai, digital transformation, a little data ops, throwing in there.

Um, I guess the first question I would have to you, we've been talking about digital business and transformation for a while now. What impact is AI having on that whole process and equation? Well, a lot, but, uh, but when you think about it, uh, automation is one of the areas where AI can have a very significant impact, both in being able to leverage AI to automate more things, and in the ability to use AI to understand what automation is actually doing.

And the, the work we're doing with customers is actually around both of those. And it's fascinating because, I mean, AI is one of those things that you have to talk about, right? Uh, uh, you can go to a boardroom and not have something to say about, uh, AI because that just means you failed an IQ test.

But, uh, the, the reality is that customers are really keen to leverage ai. They're really keen to find ways to help them run their business better with ai. And the marriage of AI and automation is just a match made in heaven for that.

Right. And just recently, you guys were named in one of the magic quadrants for Gartner. What was that about and where does it fit in this conversation?

It's always great to be recognized, uh, uh, as leaders. Uh, uh, I really think, I really believe that, uh, uh, more important than that is the validation that we got from customers, right? The, the, the way the market in general, not just analysts, the way the market in general, uh, uh, values or judges.

What you do is based on what customers say about you. And the fact that, uh, uh, we have worked hand in hand with our customers, right? Uh, I, I often, often joke that 99% of the good ideas we have come from customers.

Uh, I don't wake up in the middle of the night with a brilliant idea. Customers do. Uh, and, and so by working closely with our customers, by being focused on understanding where they are taking their business and how we can help them accomplish that business is where we drive value.

Um, I mentioned some of those earlier today, but, uh, I mean, we talked about how, uh, and Navistar, uh, leveraged that to improve vehicle downtime, to reduce vehicle downtime, how Domino's uses it to drive, uh, dashboards to their manager, to the management and to their franchisees to understand what's happening in the business, how Embraer reduces the amount of cable that gets wasted when they build an airplane. And we're talking about miles of cable. Uh, those are all tangible business val business examples, right?

Tangible business value that customers get by leveraging automation in a smart way. And to me, that's the best validation we can get. So When you talk to customers, what challenges are they running into?

Are there some common themes here that people should take away and start thinking about now before they become a bigger issue later? Absolutely. I mean, customers always look for, uh, to improve their business.

And two areas that customers are doubling down heavily. One is everything new goes in the cloud, right? So a lot of our customers have existing infrastructure and existing on-premises systems.

A lot of times those are very valuable systems of record that has a lot of data stored there. Uh, those are on-prem, but all the new applications they're building, all the systems of en systems of engagement, systems of innovation all go in the cloud. And being able to connect those so that you could move the data around so that you could leverage insights from one into the other so that you could really analyze this, is very, very valuable.

So everything that has to do with cloud adoption and expand turning into cloud is something that our customers are dealing with. Uh, because if you only solve a problem in the cloud and that has nothing to do with how you solve it on-prem, then you have islands of automation, which is not where you want to be. You wanna have a holistic automation approach.

Uh, another area, uh, we talked a little bit about data, but another important area is the whole area around data ops, right? This is, uh, basically taking DevOps concepts of, of big agile and moving quickly and applying them to the world of data and how we analyze data, how we, uh, drive insights from data. And that's an area that customers spend a lot of time and a lot of focus on.

Uh, because again, you, you have a lot of different data sources, some are very structured, some are unstructured, and you're trying to leverage all that and come into insights and, and come, come up with insights that you could then use to drive the business. Uh, and, and that is another area that customers are leveraging automation to accomplish at high speed, high reliability. Do you think maybe we're on the cusp of some sort of renaissance period in data management?

'cause we've been doing it forever, maybe not all that well, but, and with AI, it seems like there's a lot more focus. Definitely there's a lot more focus. And in some hand, on some hand, absolutely.

The, the value of data has never been greater. At the same time it just becomes more and more complex because there's more and more data, right? And so really automation is the key to how to manage and make sense out of all this data in, in a quick way.

Uh, one example of an an innovation that we're working on right now with customers is all about a, a data observability or data quality or data assurance. Uh, when, when you take a piece of data and you get some insight and you're going to start propagating this, right? It's not just, Hey, now I know something.

Now you want to make sure that this data gets propagated to multiple databases, multiple places. Well, if the data was bad to begin with, you're now propagating bad data to a whole bunch of different places. And there is no easy undo, right?

Because now if you pushed it into 300 databases, you can't just go and say, oops, it's not as simple as clicking undo. So being able to validate early on that the data is good, that the data passes a bunch of sanity checks before you start processing it, and driving insights based on it is something very valuable and very important to our customers. That's one of the innovations that we're working on right now based on, as I said, customer feedback.

Right? What's that really short one piece of advice you give customers as you kind of, as you talk to a bunch of them, what's that one thing you've seen that you wish that they all knew? That's It.

It's always a good question, right? What's the one thing? And the the short answer is there's no magic.

So, uh, let's, if you think about a bank, right? You have, uh, different groups. You have the groups that wanna go say, I wanna move really quickly.

I wanna be agile, I wanna fail forward, I wanna innovate as fast as I can. And you have the other group that goes, are you crazy? We're a bank.

We have to be reliable. Everything has to be perfect. And the reality is you've gotta find the balance, right?

Uh, we use the term of freedom within the framework. Uh, there's a framework of rules that you have to play within, because that has to do with compliance, that has to do with regulatory requirement requirements, that has to do with everything else. But within those, this framework, you have freedom that allows the different business units, the different business users to innovate and, and, and drive success for their business.

So it's really about balance. And, and it's not easy, but when you see this, it's just a beautiful thing. All right, folks, you're heard in here, even in the age of ai, there's, you still gotta do the work, right?

'cause it's just not gonna do itself. Hey, ger, thanks for being on the show. Thank You so much.

Thank you all for watching the latest episode here of the six five on the road at BMC Connect in Las Vegas. We'll be back in a minute.