(upbeat electro music) >> Hi and welcome to another CUBE Conversation. This one from BMC Helix's Immersion Days, Santa Clara Marriott in Santa Clara, California. I'm Peter Burris. As we think about what organizations have to do over the next few years, imagine a world in which technology's being applied to generating revenue where customer experience is dependent upon technology, where your overall operational fabric and framework and likelihood of staying in business is tied to how well your technology plant works. That's where we're going and bringing an IT capability that's capable of supporting and sustaining those demands on business is an absolutely essential thing for businesses of all side. Fundamental, we have to think about how digital services that's delivering those new sources of revenue, new experiences and operations management which is ensuring that the predictability and certainty of how operations work is at the heart of many of the changes within IT today. Got a great guest to talk about that. Vidya Srinivasan is the Product Strategy and Marketing Executive at BMC Software. Vidya, welcome back to the CUBE. >> Pleasure to be here. >> So I said a lot upfront but lets start by getting the simple update. Where is BMC Helix today? >> Yeah, so Peter you were there for our first launch last year. I think about a year and a half ago. So since then obviously we've come a long way. We've onboarded a lot of customers, existing customers as well as new logos. So we are at a point where our customers are happy with Helix. They want to see more. They're working with us to roll out chat bots, really implementing a lot of our AI automation technologies. And as you heard today, eighteen months in, we now have Helix kind of expanded into the ITOM world. So we are actually bringing together the conversions of ITSM and ITOM with our Helix platform. So now officially, Helix is able to support a lot of the IT operations management functions that include monitoring , that include remediation, that include capacity and cost optimization. So it's really bringing together the two worlds of IT. That's really a foundation for a lot of our IT organizations. So we are very happy to announce it today at the Immersion Day Events and we are looking forward to a great update probably in the next six months. Back with you. >> Well one of the many challenges that an IT organization faces is that the nature of the assess that they're trying to generate returns on or changing away from hardware up into often software defining for structure and software and data as well. And that's one of the catalysts for why this ITOM/ITSM conversions is starting to happen. So we have had these people in silos. What kind of tensions is that generating as businesses try to deploy and utilize their IT in new and expressive and innovative ways? >> Yeah that's a great question. When we talk about the foundation of anything to do with IT, right, is knowing what you have. And as people heard in the keynote today, it's turning your unknowns to knowns, right? A big part of the challenge with IT is not knowing what you have. So discovery, as you said, is one of the foundational solutions we have within the Helix Suite that helps customers discover what they have whether it's as assets, it could be software, especially in a software world. So really understanding what you have and then being able to proactively and predictively monitor those assets, knowing what vulnerabilities you have, being able to automatically remediate those, and ultimately it's delivering the ultimate service experience to the end customer. So that's where Helix as a whole with Discover, Monitor, Service, Re Media and Optimize gives you the whole good handle on what you have and be able to ultimately provide the service of the future that we all as consumers in our day to day lives expect, we'll start expecting in our work lives. >> Well there has historically been some tension between the ITOM people and the ITSM people. They've been very strong siloed, each intent on optimizing their own capabilities. That has undermined business in many respects and certainly undermined the IT mission because a lot of people look at IT as being the problem in large measure because they have been throwing information back over the fence and sometimes at each other. So in your experience, now Helix has been out there for a year and a half. In your experience, how are ITOM and ITSM groups starting to work better together? Utilizing tooling that's not built for just one but is actually built for the idea, the promise of a greater more converged set of functions? >> Yeah so I think the tug of ITSM and ITOM organizations continue to exist and the convergence starts happening when the organization starts starting to mature in their life cycles. So let's take a simple example of a ticket. You as an end user open a service request, it goes to a service desk, somebody picks it up, and ultimately if that ticket is associated with an asset or a service that's running somewhere and the actual Cloud instance or something is broken, that's a perfect example of an end user, an agent in an ITSM scenario and an IT operations person having to all work together to make the customer happy. So that is a typical scenario in every organization and every organization has multiple service desks and multiple lines of business, not just IT issues. So making sure that through our solutions, making sure that we can minimize the existence of IT silos is a big part of what Helix brings to the table. And as we rule out the capabilities, whether you call them Discover, you know, the five capabilities that we outlined or whatever you might be referring to within the organization. It is important to make sure that the ultimate platform that brings them together is seamlessly integrated, whether it's all on one physical platform or through integration strategies across other tools in the industry, but that's kind of the intent of bringing together these two worlds. >> But at least the data is working together. >> Exactly. >> So I want to highlight one of the things you said and why it's so important we start thinking about this differently. You noted the idea of a user, an ITSM or a Service Management professional and then someone who's on the operations side doing configurations or provisioning of resources. When that person that started that off, who generated that ticket, is an employee we have certain degree of control over how fast we can service them. When we start talking about that user being a customer, now we're really talking about service experience. We're really talking about the brand. We're really talking about revenue. How is the emergence of a new class of users, being customers and increasingly using things like Robotic Process Automation, other forms of software, that are generating these kinds of requirements, altering the demand for some of these advanced tools? >> Yeah there's quite a bit of things you touched in that question so from an end user standpoint, automation comes in various forms and obviously from an end user standpoint it's this channel of preference and that's where leveraging technologies like chat bots from an end user experience standpoint, being able to use your phone, it could be your tablet, whatever it might be or your voice assistance through your phone, all of those are things that customers are expecting because you know, that's how I communicate on a day to day basis so it's nothing new. On the RPA and the automation side on the back end of things there's definitely this notion of augmented, I know a lot of our speakers spoke about this earlier, this notion of augmented intelligence that we all need to kind of embrace in order for us to deliver that end user experience and end user doesn't have to be B2B. It can be B2E, B2C, whatever it might be. At some point at least in this world we are kind of getting to a point where it doesn't matter whether it's a B2B, B2C, or B2E. It's everybody is an end user and there is no delineation in terms of the experience that anybody expects. So that's kind of what we expect to transcend into the back office whether it's IT service desk or if it's the IT operation's persona. Being able to discover or scan things from your chat bot, from your tablet, instead of having a honking machine that you normally think of when you think of a knock. So those are all things I think are sort of going to be erased in terms of what we think of IT ops. as we look into the next three to five years. So that's the experience that I think, it's not just limited to an end user but across the IT organization. What does that experience look like for all the various personas to coexist and collaborate within the construct of an enterprise. >> So, you again, have been out with customers. Either taking remedy customers and bringing them to Helix or brand new customers and bringing them to Helix. What are some of the patterns of success that you're starting to see? Where does it tend to start? What kinds of outcomes are they achieving? Where do you see your happiest customers being? >> I think it's spectrum of customers right, so it's a range. There are customers who are at an early stage in terms of just thinking about how to move to Cloud so those customers are simply thinking about okay I've been using your OnPrem Solution Remedy for a while and we are at a point where we need to move it to in to a SaaS model. So there are customers who are just looking to lift and shift and move to a SaaS model. There are other customers who, it's a no-brainer, they started with us in a SaaS model and then now they're looking to leverage more of the NextGen experience, so they are looking at chat bots, they're looking at RPA bots and working with us on that. And then there are customers who are just looking to integrate with us on different fronts. They might be using other tools and then they're looking at leveraging our integration capabilities or whatever it might be so there's a variety of different customers in different stages but obviously a big part of this shift we are seeing that's common across these is the move to SaaS and the fact that they don't want to worry about running their operations as much as they want to reinvent and innovative and grow. So that's the common theme that we're seeing across the variety of customers that we're helping today. >> Vidya Srinivasan, Product Strategy, Marketing Executive, BMC Software, once again thanks for being on the CUBE. >> Thank you very much for having me. >> And from the BMC Helix Immersion Days at Santa Clara Marriott in Santa Clara, California, I'm Peter Burris. Once again this has been a CUBE Conversation. Until next time. (upbeat electro music)