>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AI ops. Virtual forum Brought to you by Broadcom >>Welcome today, I Office Virtual Forum Finally So Martin, excited to be talking with Rich Lane now senior analyst serving infrastructure and operations professionals at Forrester Rich, it's great to have you today. >>Hey, thank you for having me. I think it's gonna be a really fun conversation at today. >>It is. We're gonna be setting the stage for with Richard for the I T operations challenges and the need for a I ops. That's kind of our objective here in the next 15 minutes. So which talk to us about some of the problems that enterprise I T operations are facing now, in this year, that is 2020 that are gonna be continuing into the next year. >>Yeah. I mean, I think we've been on this path for a while. It's certainly that the last eight months has has accelerated this problem and and brought a lot of things toe light that people are, you know, they were going through the day to day firefighting as their goal way of life. It's just not sustainable anymore. New highly distributed environment or in the need for digital services. And, you know, one of them has been building for a while, really, is in the digital age. You know, we're providing so many of the interactions with customers online. We've added these layers of complexity, um, toe applications to infrastructure. You know, we're in the in the cloud where hybrid were multi cloud. You know, you name it using cloud native technologies, reason legacy stuff. We still have mainframe out there. Uh, you know, just the vast amount of things we have to keep track of now in process and look at the data and signals from It's just it's really untenable for humans to do that in silos now, Andi. And when you add to that, you know, when cos air so heavily invested in going on the digital transformation path, and it's accelerated so much the last year so that, you know, we're getting so much for our business in revenue drive from the services that they become core to the business. They're not afterthoughts anymore. It's not just about having a website presence, it's it's about to arrive in core business value from the services you're providing to York through your customers and a lot of cases customers you're never gonna meet or see at that. So it is even more important to be vigilant on top of the quality of that service that you're giving them. And then when you think about just the staffing issues we have, there's just not enough bodies to go around in operations anymore. Um, you know, we're not gonna be able to hire, you know, like we did 10 years ago. Even eso That's where we need the systems to be able to bring those operational efficiencies to bear. When we say operational insufficiencies, we don't mean, you know, lessening headcount because we can't do the other be foolish. What we mean is getting the headcount we have back to broking on higher level things, you know, working on technology refreshes and project work that that brings better digital services to customers and get them out of doing these sort of low complexity, high volume task that they're spending a tely east 20% if not more on of their day each day. So I think the more we could bring intelligence to bear on automation to take those things out of their hands, the better off we are going forward. >>And I'm sure those workers are wanting to be able to have the time to deliver more value, more strategic value to the organization, to their role. And as you're saying you know, is the demand for digital services this spiking, it's not going to go down. And its consumers, If we have another option on, we're not satisfied, we're gonna go somewhere else. So So it's really about not just surviving this time right now. It's about how do I become a business distance Gonna thrive going forward and exceeding expectations that are now just growing and growing. So let's talk about AI ops as a facilitator. Collaboration across business folks. I t folks, developers, operations. How can it facilitate collaboration, which is even more important these days? >>Yeah, So one of the great things about it is now, you know, years ago, bygone years, as they say, we would buy a tool to fit each situation and, you know, somebody that worked in networking out their school. Somebody infrastructure from a, you know, Linux standpoint have their tools. Somebody is from stores would have their tool. What we found Waas, we would have an incident overy high impacting incident occur. Everybody would get on the phone 2030 people. I'll be looking at their siloed tool. They're silent pieces of data and then we would still have to try a like link point A to B to C together, you know, just to institutional knowledge. And there was just ended up being a lot of gaps there because we couldn't understand that a certain thing happening over here was related to an event over here. Now, when we bring all that data under one umbrella one Data Lake where we wanna call it a lot of smart analytics to that data on normalize that data in a way we can contextualize it from, you know, point a to point B all the way through the application infrastructure stack. Now the conversation changes. Now the conversation changes to here is the problem. How are we going to fix it? We're getting there immediately versus 345 hours of hunting and pecking and looking at things and trying toe trying to extrapolate what we're seeing across the spirit systems. Andi, that's really valuable. And what that does is now we can change the conversation for measuring things in corrupt time and data center performance metrics is to How >>are we >>performing as a business? How are we overall in in real time? How is a business be impacted by hey, service disruption. We know how much money we're losing per minute hour. What have you on what that translates lights into brand damage and things along those lines that people are very interested in that. And you know, what is the effect of making decisions either from a product change side, You know, if we're always changing the mobile app So we're always changing the website. But do we understand what value that brings us or what negative impact that has? We could measure that now And also sales marketing, Um, they run a campaign. Here's your, you know, coupon for 12% off today only. What does that drive to us with user engagement? We can measure that now in real time. We don't know. Wait for those answers anymore, E, I think you know having all this data and understand the cause and effect of things increases and enhances thes feedback loops of we're making decisions as a business as a whole to make bring better value to our customers. You know? How does that tie into Office and Dev initiatives? How does everything that we do if I make a change, the underlying architectures that help move the needle forward is that hinder things? All these things factor into it in factor into customer experience, which is what we're trying to do with the end of the day, whether operations people like it or not. We are all in the customer experience business now, and we have to realize that and work closer than ever with our business and Dev partners to make sure we're delivering the highest level of customer experience we can >>now. Customer experience is absolutely critical for a number of reasons, always kind of think it's it's inextricably linked with employee experience. But let's talk about long term value because as organizations and every industry have pivoted multiple times this year and will probably continue to do so for the foreseeable future, for them to be able to get immediate value that let's let's not just stop the bleeding, but let's allow them to get, you know, a competitive advantage and we really become resilient. What are some of the applications that AI ops can deliver with respect to long term value for an organization? >>Yeah, I think that it's, you know, and you touched upon this very important point that there is a set of short term goals you want to achieve. But they're really gonna be looking towards 12, 18 months down the road. What is it gonna have done for you? And I think this helps framing out for you. What's most important? Because it be different for every enterprise. Um, and it also shows the arrow I of doing this because there is some, you know, change is gonna be involved in things you're gonna have to do. But when you look at the longer time horizon, what it brings to your business is the whole, uh to me, at least it all seems it seems like a no brainer to not do it. Um, you're thinking about the basic things, like, you know, faster re mediation of client impacting incidents, or maybe maybe even predictive, sort of detection of these incidents that will affect clients. So now you're getting, you know, at scale, you know, it's very hard to do when you have hundreds of thousands of objects on the management that relate to each other. But now you're having letting the machines and intelligence layer find out where that problem is. You know, it's it's not the red thing, it's the yellow thing. Go look at that. Um, it's reducing the amount of finger pointing. And what have you like? It was on between teens. Now everybody's looking at the same day to the same sort of symptoms and like, Oh, yeah, okay, this is telling us, you know, here's the root cause you should investigate this huge, huge thing on. Does something we never thought we'd get. Thio, where decisions. We smart enough to tell us these things, But this again, this is the power of having all the data under one umbrella and smart analytics. Andi, I think, really, You know, it's about if you look at where infrastructure in operations people are today and especially, you know, eight months and nine months, whatever it is into the pandemic. Ah, lot of them getting really burnt out with doing the same repetitive tasks over and over again. Just trying to keep the lights on, you know, we need we need to extract those things for those people just because it just makes no sense to do something over and over again. The same remediation step. Just we should automate those things. So getting that sort of, you know, drudgery off their hands, if you will, and get them into into other important things they should be doing, you know, they're really hard to solve problems. That's where the human shine on. And that's where you know, having ah, you know, really high level engineers. That's what they should be doing, you know, and just being able to do things I think in a much faster, in more efficient manner. When you think about an incident occurring right in a level, one technician picks that up and he goes in triage that maybe run some tests. He has a script or she, uh and you know, they over a ticket. They enrich the ticket, they call some lock files, they go look up for the service on you're in an hour and a half into an incident before anyone's even looked at it. If we could automate all of that, why wouldn't we? That makes it easier for everyone on guy. And I really think that's where the future is. Is bringing this intelligent automation to bear to take knocked down all the little things that consume the really the most amount of time when you think about it? If you aggregated over the course of, like, a quarter or year Ah, great deal of your time is spent just doing that menu Sha again. Why don't we automate that? We should So I really think that's that's where you gonna look long term, I think also the sense of we're going to be able to measure everything in the sense of business. KP eyes versus just I t Central KP eyes. That's really where we gonna get to in a digital age. And I think we waited too long to do that. I think our operations models were all voted. I think, uh, you know, a lot of ah, a lot of the KPs we look at today are completely outmoded. They don't really change if you think about it. We look at the monthly reports over the course of a year s, so let's do something different. And now, having all this data and a smart analytics. We can do something different. >>Absolutely. I'm glad that you brought up kind of looking at the impact that AI ops can make on on minutia and burn up. That's a really huge problem that so many of us are facing in any industry, and we know that there's some amount of this that's going to continue for a while longer. So let's get our let's let leverage intelligent automation present your point because we can to be able to allow our people to not just be more efficient but to be making a bigger impact. And there's that mental component there that I think is absolutely critical. I do want to ask you, what are some of these? So for those folks going all right, we've We've got to do this. It makes sense. We see some short term things that we need. We need short term value. We need long term value, as you've just walked us through. What are some of the obstacles that you to hate be on the lookout for this toe? Wipe it out of >>the way? Yeah, I think there's, You know, when you think about the obstacles I think people don't think about what are big. Changes this for their organization, right? You know, they're they're going to change process. They're gonna change the way teams interact there. They're going to change a lot of things, but the off of the better. So what were traditionally really bad in infrastructure operations is communication marketing a new initiative, right? We don't go out and get our peers agreement to it over the product owner is, you know, and say Okay, this is what gets you. This is what it changes. People just here. I'm losing something. I'm losing control over something. You're going to get rid of the tools that I have, but I love I've spent years building out perfecting Andi That's threatening to people, and understandably so, because people think if I start losing tools, I start losing head count. Then where's my department at that point? But that's not what this is all about. This this isn't a replacement for people. This is a replacement for teams. This is an augmentation. This is getting them back to doing the things they should be doing in less of the stuff they shouldn't be doing. And frankly, it's a it's about providing better services. So when they in the end it's counterintuitive, be against it because it's gonna make I t operations look better. He's gonna make a show us that we are the thought leaders and delivering digital services that we can constantly being perfected the way we're doing it. And, oh, by the way, we can help the business be better. Also, at the same time, I think some of the mistakes people really don't make really do make, uh is not looking at their processes today, trying to figure out what they're gonna look like tomorrow when we bring in advanced automation and intelligence, but also being prepared, prepared for what the future state is, you know, in talking toe one company they were like, Yeah, we're so excited for this. We we got rid of our 15 year old monitoring system on the same day we step the new system. One problem we had So it waas We weren't ready for the amount of incidents that had generated on day one, and it wasn't because we did anything wrong or the system was wrong or what have you? It did the right thing actually almost too well. What it did is it uncovered a lot of really small incidents through advanced correlations. We didn't know we had. So there was things lying out there. They're always like how that's where the system acts strange sometimes that we could never pin it down. We found all those things, which is good, because but it kind of made us all kind of sit back and think. And then our readership, these guys doing their job right Then we had to go through evolution of just explaining. We were 15 years behind from invisibility standpoint into our environment. But technologies that we deployed applications had moved ahead, modernized. So this is like a cautionary tale of falling too far behind from a sort of monitoring and intelligence and automation standpoint. Eso I thought that was a really good story for something like think about as you go to deploy these modern systems. But I think if you really you know the marketing to people, so they're not threatened, I think thinking about your process and then what's what's your day one and then look like And then what's your six and 12 months after that looks like I think settling all that stuff up front just sets you up for success. >>Alright, Rich. Take us home here. Let's summarize. How can clients build a business case for AI ops? What do you recommend? >>Yeah, you know, I actually get that question a lot. It's usually almost always the number one question and you know, webinars like this and conversations that that the audience puts in. So I wouldn't be surprised if that was true going forward from this one. Um, yeah. People are like, you know, Hey, we're all in. We want to do this. We know this is the way forward. But the guy who writes the checks, the CEO, the VP of ops is like, you know, I've signed lots of checks over the years for tools wise is different on, but I got people to do is to sit back and start doing some hard math, right? One of the things that that resonates with the leadership is dollars and cents. It's not percentages. So saying, you know, it's brings us a 63% reduction and empty TR is not going to resonate. Oh, even though it's a really good number, you know. I think what it is you have to put it in terms of of if we could avoid that 63% right? You know, what does that mean for our digital services as faras revenue? Right. We know that every our system down, I think, you know, typically in the market, you see, is about $500,000 an hour for enterprise. We'll add that up over the course of the year. What are you losing in revenue? Add to that brand damage loss of customers. You know, Forrester puts out a really big casino, uh, customer experience in next every year. That measures that if you're delivering digital services, bad digital services, if you could raise that up, what is that return to you in revenue on? That's a key thing. And then you just look at the hours of lost productivity. I call it I call it something else. I think it's catching name meaning if if a core internal system is down, say, you know, you have ah customer service desk of 1000 customer service people and they can't do that, look up or fix that problem for clients for an hour. How much money. Does that lose you and you multiply it? Oh, you know, average customer service desk. You know, person makes X amount in our times, this amount of time, this many times it happens. Then you start seeing the rial sort of power of a layoffs for this, this incident avoidance or be least lowering the impact of these incidents. And people have put out in graphs and spreadsheets and all this. And then I'm doing some research around this, actually to toe put out something that people can use to say The project funds itself in 6 to 12 months. It's paid for itself. And then after that, it's returning money to the business. Why would you not do that? And we start framing of the conversation that way, little lightbulbs turned on for the people who signed the checks For sure. >>That's great advice for folks to be thinking about. I love how you talked about 63% reduction in something you think that's great. What is it? Impact. How does it impact the revenue for the organization? If we're avoiding costs here, how do we drive up revenue? So having that laser focus on revenue is great advice for folks in any industry looking to build a business case for AI ops. I think you set the stage for that rich beautifully. And you are right. This was a fun conversation. Thank you for your time. Thank you. And thanks for watching.