Simplify Mainframe Management with GenAI: Insights from BMC | BMC Connect 2024

Hello and welcome to another episode of the six five On the Road, coming to you from BMC Connect. My name's Steven Dickens and I'm joined by my co-host here, Mike Ard. And we've got Dave Jeffries and Priya Doty on the show.

Welcome to the show. Thank. Thank You Steve.

Thank you. Thank you, Mike. So let's get started.

Tell us a little bit about your role and what you do. We'll go to you first, Priya? Yeah, sure.

Uh, Priya Doty. I am vice President for Solutions Marketing for BMCs Amy Portfolio. So Dave Jeffries, I'm the Vice President of research and development for BMCs Amy Portfolio.

So I've gotta ask. Mm-Hmm, I hear it a lot. We've heard it this week.

Amy Priya. What does that mean from the way you are structured internally within BMC, but also what does that mean as it manifests itself for your clients? Yeah.

Well, Amy is a MI, which stands for Automated Mainframe Intelligence. And actually we created that brand back in 2019 before my time here. And, but what I love about that brand is it was, it was started around mainframe software and making it, you know, more intelligent using the latest, uh, AI ML technologies at the time.

Fast forward now, five years later to 2024, and Amy still has so much relevance, right? 'cause it's Ask Amy, ask Amy Assistant with Gen ai. So we're continuing to talk about our mainframes, our mainframe solutions, our mainframe software as BMC Amy.

So you touched on it there and I'll take you there first, Dave, Amy, as a platform, we've seen a lot of announcements this week, Amy assistance, there's the stuff going on in the DevOps space. This is stuff in the AI ops space. Can you just tell me and help the viewers with platform versus assistant and what kind of the delineation points between those Are?

Absolutely, absolutely, Steve. So a platform that we announced, uh, statement direction in in July is, is a big area. It Cap Lakes many different aspects of really treating the platform as kind of a cloud native way.

One of those features and capabilities is our generative AI services. Um, generative AI services is infusing the a e assistant. A e assistant is the gen AI capability that will assist you infused in every one of the products on your journey through operations, through security, through data, through devex, et cetera.

But a e platform itself is a whole set of services. Gen AI is just one of them. You can imagine things like discovery services, data services, feeding, restful services, et cetera.

Um, authentication services. There's a whole bunch more to come. This is really just the first piece of the entire platform starting to be delivered.

So if we think of platform as the overarching and then the assistance plugging into it, is that kind of a way to frame? Absolutely. Good way of thinking About it.

So in my mind, and I like to imagine things, but there's all these retired main framers. They're sitting on a beach having a mitie right now, but it's creating a little bit of a knowledge gap in these companies. So how do we close that with ai?

Yeah, great question, Mike. And so it is true, the market reality is what is really driving this announcement of Amy platform and Amy assistant. And the market reality is that you can no longer be a caretaker of the mainframe platform.

That's not me. That's Gartner. There are stat that basically says that by 2030 you have to make a decision and the companies that don't make a decision to start to modernize in some way will actually incur higher costs, 50% higher costs.

So what does that mean for the, that ma Thai drinking retired mainframer? Um, what that means is that person is walking out onto the beach with a lot of institutional knowledge and that institutional knowledge has to be preserved by these companies. Our customers are frequently regulated.

They are financial institutions, healthcare institutions, insurance, telecom, they require continuity of service. So I think of it as a way to hand over the keys to the next generation of the people who will really be managing the platform. So Dave, picking up on Priya's point, we've got this demographic change.

You know, I've heard anecdotally it takes five years to grow. Cis prog people are looking to collapse that down to two with some of these generative AI platforms. How do we, uh, and we talked about it earlier, this path to automation, sort of looking at some of these mundane tasks, taking out the toil.

If you've got these experts, you don't want them focused on the sort of right minutia, you want them focused on the bigger, more architectural issues. How's the platform and where you are going with some of the assistance as well gonna bring value There? Well, I think one of the first things to bring to that, the whole a platform and specifically gene AI will bring is simplicity.

Is, is kind of removal of the risk in people doing automation. Because automation is the ultimate goal. I one of the buzzwords faster than humanly possible has been used this week quite a lot.

Um, and it really is trying to take what customers are doing with application development. It they're to allow them to go at the speed of the business to be as agile as possible, as rapid as possible in the changes they're trying to make. And you take something like on the operations side, the AI ops side, you wanna be able to trap those problems within your system as rapidly as possible before they become, uh, maybe a a an issue or an inhibitor in, in production.

So taking days to minutes to seconds, et cetera, and even getting proactive beyond even having noted Sydney, you've had a problem automation to take over ultimately. So back in the day when main framers were young, there was a band called Pure Prairie League and they had a hit song called Amy and the refrain was, Hey Amy, what you wanna do? So there's my question to you.

What does Amy wanna do? What does Amy want that wins the award for Question Die. The build up to that one was fantastic.

That Was brilliant. Um, yeah. So what does Amy wanna do?

Amy wants to make teams more productive, right? So, uh, Dave mentioned days to minutes, that's reality. Um, Amy assistant that we announced with it within DevX for Code Insights, which is a visualization and code modernization tool, there is code explanation now, which means if you're looking at Cobalt code, maybe it's something you've never seen before, you can actually figure out what that code is almost instantaneously and then actually comment it back.

Uh, we're also thinking about the ops domain like Dave mentioned with uh, ops insight and how to add more explanation. But it's not just explanation, that's one piece of it, but is around, uh, sort of guiding. We're also thinking about how we can use gen AI to do creation, whether that's of code of queries, anything like that.

And we're thinking about how we can use ultimately gen AI to do automation and more and deeper automation. And as Dave mentioned, we're thinking about it across the stack. So it's all of the different pillars and and points.

So what does Amy wanna do At the end of the day, Amy wants to make the current generation of main framers be able to take their vacations and go out on the beach and hang out. Well on that, what a great way to wrap up Amy as a platform trying to get us all to sit live our best lives on the beach. You've been watching another episode of six five on the Road this time.

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