That’s a wrap on day one of BMC Exchange 2021! We hope you were able to join us for a fantastic day of exciting and enlightening discussions from your global peers, innovators, and technology leaders, but if you weren’t, no worries! We have the highlights for you, and every panel is now streaming on exchange.bmc.com.
This year’s event is all about data—customer, IT performance, Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), and more, and our panelists weighed in with guidance and real-world examples of how they’re using data efficiently to achieve the agility, customer centricity, and actionable insights required to become an Autonomous Digital Enterprise (ADE) and operationalize their most powerful asset to become a Data-Driven Business.
The event opened with a keynote from BMC Chief Executive Officer Ayman Sayed, who shared, “At BMC, we are on our own journey to becoming an ADE with DataOps…and [we have] adopted our own expansive data strategy…collecting data across all functions and streams. [We] have no shortage of data! We are so digitized that we collect and store lots of it [and] with historical analysis and predictive analytics, we can make continuous improvement while focusing on innovation!”
BMC’s Chief Product Officer, Ali Siddiqui, and Chief Technology Officer, Ram Chakravarti, also spoke. “Every organization has technology solutions in play that support the path to an ADE, and we are here to help you accelerate your journey with differentiated capabilities across our portfolio of offerings [including] enterprise service management, operational management, data services (from mainframe to the cloud), and the Control-M automation platform,” said Siddiqui.
Chakravarti added, “We are working on numerous DataOps innovations that will fulfill your aspirations to become a Data-Driven-Businesses [and] are committed to being your innovation preferred partner throughout this journey. We are also ruthlessly pursuing organic product innovations to manage cloud-native and new architectures, edge computing, areas of DevOps, automation, artificial intelligence for operations (AIOps), and observability.”
To view the full keynote, click here (it’s free to register)!
Then it was time for a lively question and answer session with Chakravarti, who gave attendees a peek inside the BMC Innovation Labs Salon before segueing to his panel, “DataOps for Value Realization in Data & Analytics Transformations,” on why traditional data and analytics approaches have fallen short and how DataOps can rapidly turn new insights into fully operationalized production deliverables that unlock maximum business value.
“Considering that DataOps is based on application of DevOps best practices, it should come as no surprise that collaboration and automation are critical to the success of DataOps,” he explained. “Multiple roles and interactions are required to successfully deploy a data analytics use case; it’s critical to get them right. Success requires extensive collaboration across the data management ecosystem between data managers (such as data owners, data stewards, data architects, and data engineers) and data consumers (who include data scientists, business owners, power users, and end users) like never before.”
To view the full panel, click here (it’s free to register)!
Here are highlights from some of the rest of today’s panels, with featured quotes from each:
Delivering Better Services through Digital Workplace Engagements
In the session, we learned how Monash University, a modern, global, research-intensive university serving Australia and the Indo-Pacific, is delivering service excellence and interactions through a modern Digital Workplace.
“The pandemic… accelerated what Monash was already doing. We have a global workforce…based at our campuses [and] in a remote city somewhere…so we really needed to make sure that our footprint was as digital as it possibly could be, so that our colleagues can be serviced from wherever they are at whatever hour they’re working.”
—Matt Carmichael, IT Director, Monash University
To view the full panel, click here (it’s free to register)!
Powering DataOps with Control-M Workflow Orchestration
This session demonstrated how data scientists and engineers can streamline the delivery of data-centric digital services by accessing Control-M’s production-ready orchestration of cloud services with Python, the preferred programming language among data professionals.
“Complex data pipelines are a challenge; making sure they get into production with all the governance and compliance required even more so. So, what we’re trying to do is provide data engineers and data scientists with a very familiar environment, which is very easy for them to use, by providing the Python client so there’s a familiar language. This will enable you to take those complex pipelines and put them into the framework of Control-M, allowing you to exploit all of Control-M’s governance and compliance capabilities in production while ensuring a friction-free experience for all your technical users.”
—Guy Eden, AVP, Product Management BMC
To view the full panel, click here (it’s free to register)!
Solving the Service Paradox: Quality Innovations while Being “Fast and Furious”
BMC’s David Schmidt spoke with Videotron’s Trung Quach about the impact intelligent automation can have on creating and deploying innovative services.
“[With more people] doing technology automation, we focus back on, ‘If you would do it manually, how would you do it in your process?’ And we would automate that process…We can open all the tickets. We can close the tickets, we can double check whatever a human can double check, like you would do it manually. And that’s how now we don’t have incidents on those things.”
—Trung Quach, Senior Director of IT Infrastructure and Operations, Videotron
To view the full panel, click here (it’s free to register)!
Unleash Employee Success Through Self-Service
Featuring Maple Leaf Foods, this session explored how to establish knowledge management strategies to help provide employees with great self-service and eliminate the time and effort wasted searching for the right answers.
“We’re lucky to have a UX team. We invested heavily in that. We started with the [knowledge] articles. They used to proofread it for us, ensure their simple design is simple. The colors are inviting, friendly, and straight to the point…You can’t have a knowledge article that is eight pages long and expect the user to go through it, or even the agent…And we started to build this culture where more teams have those individuals [who] can create those knowledge articles. We still hold the last button to publish [and] it seems to be working very well for us.”
—Ali Beeai, Director IS Technical Services and Support, Maple Leaf Foods
To view the full panel, click here (it’s free to register)!
AISM: Deliver Agile Service Experiences to Speed Innovation
During this presentation by Martin Johansson, strategic product manager at Ericsson, we learned how Ericsson has evolved and re-invented its enterprise service management practices, leveraging platform thinking, convergence of service management and operations, and artificial intelligence and automation technology.
“We have over 17 million page views so far this year, and we’re processing over 1.7 million cases…We’ve processed over 1.2 median service requests and work orders. And half of them are actually automated today.”
—Martin Johansson, Strategic Product Manager, Ericsson
To view the full panel, click here (it’s free to register)!
Enabling SREs with AIOps and AISM
In this panel, BMC’s Craig Sisson, Greg Bukowski, and Jeremy Hamilton shared insights into how AIOps and artificial intelligence for service management (AISM) can help site reliability engineers (SREs) succeed.
“If you think about an embedded SRE, [they] span, the entire business service, all the different platforms, all the different pieces. And they may not have extensive mainframe knowledge, at least not from a developmental perspective. And then they’re right in the middle of the problem solving…so it’s important to have…easy-to-use, modern tools…to enable that SRE to take a look at what did happen and why did it happen? And are there ways [to] make sure this doesn’t happen again?”
—Jeremy Hamilton, Technology Solutions Director, BMC
“Intelligent automation is leveraging artificial intelligence to determine what’s the best automation or where are there automation opportunities, where else can they automatically trigger automation…a big first step is elevating your thought process into a policy approach. If you can get people thinking about business KPIs and observability into your service level objective, it’s the first step of moving into a more intelligent automation space of having policy-driven automation based on business visibility and observability metrics.”
—Greg Bukowski, Technology Solutions Director, BMC
To view the full panel, click here (it’s free to register)!
Prioritizing Inclusion, Driving Innovation
During this session, BMC’s Wendy Rentschler and Allison Cramer discussed the importance of building an innovative company culture that is centered on fostering inclusion and collaboration.
“People that are in dominant groups or have not experienced microaggressions [don’t] realize the full-time job it is to mask what you’re saying [or] think about how you might be perceived when you say something. It is exhausting and it does take away some of that mental capacity that could be used towards helping build a product line or a go-to-market strategy.”
—Wendy Rentschler, Director of Corporate Social Responsibility, BMC
“[An employee candidate] liked the idea that if she were to come to the table as a female leader [at BMC], she wouldn’t be by herself. And that she wouldn’t always be in a room where she was the only woman or the woman checking a box in that way.”
—Allison Cramer, VP of Solutions Marketing Management, BMC
To view the full panel, click here (it’s free to register)!
To see more of today’s panels, visit exchange.bmc.com, where every panel is streaming live—and for free. We’d also love to have you join us on Thursday for another day of exciting insights!
