The tech world is focused on generative AI (GenAI) and achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI) in just a few years via the evolution of large language models (LLMs) and other GenAI models. Most organizations are running proofs of concept (POCs) to determine how GenAI can augment their current tech stacks, processes, and employee experience to gain business and mission advantage. However, GenAI is still nascent, and large-scale success has been elusive. There isn’t time to waste as enterprises and agencies continue research and POCs as models mature. There is too much work to do to prepare for production AI applications that create business differentiation.
Many large shifts in the tech industry over the past decade—moving private data center workloads to a public cloud, rewriting monolithic applications into microservices, leveraging public cloud services, and defending against ransomware—have now become table stakes But these major trends don’t account for the stops and starts of intermittent advancements in IoT, blockchain, Web3, AR/VR, and more. Any IT organization has a highly complex and disparate environment to run, manage, and secure.
Being able to define, map, and understand the relationship between every server, network device, container, application, public cloud service, data source, business service, mainframe, and everything in between is the first and most important step for success in all IT modernization and innovation projects. There are very few enterprises that have been fully successful in cloud migration, app modernization, or zero-trust projects. And if they start from a place of not knowing what the current state across their technology portfolio is, or are unsure where they should begin to realize the most value, then they also don’t know what will break with a move or change.
If organizations have a configuration management database (CMDB), it is likely that the one-time mapping is no longer accurate. If the CMDB must be updated manually when making changes in the environment, it will be untenable for teams to maintain 100 percent accuracy and completion.
Over the past few years, I asked executives at companies around the globe, “Do you know which of your systems, applications, and services map directly to your revenue streams?” This is an important question because businesses and agencies should be investing in modernizing the highest revenue-generating and mission-critical systems. If an organization has a committed spend of $50M to a public cloud provider and $20M to private cloud, but mission-critical systems exist and will continue to run on premises, their investments are out of synch with their IT priorities. The answer I almost always receive to my question is “No.” If your answer is also “No,” that’s OK. This is a solvable problem!
How BMC can help
The first step to laying the groundwork for the next evolution of your IT is understanding which of your current technology platforms are most critical to your business. BMC Helix Discovery is the foundational component that provides the data and insight to understand what you have, and help you solve the other challenges that occur while modernizing your IT environment.
While there are competitors in this space, BMC Helix Discovery is the best-in-class, and most complete, asset discovery and business service mapping solution available today. You can’t settle for “good enough” when you’re managing and securing your environment for future innovation.
Addressing your challenges
Any solution you choose will need to address a broad spectrum of essential questions, such as:
- If there is an outage that needs to be resolved with AI for IT operations (AIOps), can that be done if your AIOps platform doesn’t know about every component in the application and data flow?
- If you’re providing IT asset information to auditors, is it OK to provide an incomplete report?
- When you deploy modern container-based applications, is it OK for your asset management and observability systems not to know the containers exist and what their relationships are because they are ephemeral?
- Are you able to create a solid plan of when to move specific workloads to public cloud if you don’t know their dependencies across all virtual machines, containers, cloud services, and physical systems?
The answer to all of these questions, is of course, “No.” The good news is that BMC Helix Discovery ensures that there are zero gaps in the record of your technology landscape, whether the system or application was deployed twenty years ago or five minutes ago, regardless of the technology platform it runs on and where it is located. It is a true multi-cloud solution.
BMC Helix Discovery also provides optionality and choice so you can align your deployment to your organization’s best practices and environment. It is available as a SaaS solution, or provided as an appliance for your private cloud or another location according to your technology strategy.
As technology teams around the world tackle more complexity and work than ever, while also juggling priorities that span running a stable business to implementing GenAI, BMC has a portfolio of solutions ready to assist throughout the journey. With BMC Helix Discovery, you can spend far less time planning migrations, troubleshooting issues—and wondering whether you have exposed attack vectors, fulfilling audit requests, and prioritizing modernization investments so you can instead focus on innovation and implementing new technologies.
Over the coming weeks, the BMC Office of the CTO will be sharing more content that dives into the details of BMC Helix Discovery for all the techies who want to know how it works and the executives who want to understand the business cases and the return on investment. You’ll learn more about the competitive landscape and BMC Helix Discovery use cases that align to the projects in your pipeline. We’d like to hear from you on how you want to us to share this information. Blogs? Videos? Podcasts? Another format? And let us know which use cases you’d like us to cover! Reach out to me on LinkedIn.
Bringing New Ideas to Life
These postings are my own and do not necessarily represent BMC's position, strategies, or opinion.
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