(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)

(dynamic music) >> Hi, I'm Peter Burris, and welcome to another CUBEConversation. This is another very special CUBEConversation in that it's part of a product launch. Today, BMC has come on to theCUBE to launch Helix, a new approach to thinking about cognitive services management. And we're, over the course of the next 20 minutes or so, gonna present some of the salient features of Helix and how it solves critical business problems. And at the end of the segment, at the end of this video segment, we're gonna then go into a CrowdChat and give you, the community, an opportunity to express your thoughts, ask your questions, and get the information that you need from us analysts, from BMC, and also from your peers about what you need to do to exploit cognitive systems management in your business. Now this is a very real problem, this is not something that's being made up. The reality is we're looking at a lot of data-first technologies that are transforming the way business works. Technologies like AI, and machine learning, and deep learning, technologies like big data, having an enormous impact about how businesses behave. These technologies invoke much greater complexity at the application at the systems level and Wikibon strongly believes that we do not understand how businesses can pursue these technologies and these richer applications without finding ways to apply elements of them directly into the IT service management stack. And the reason why is if you don't have high-quality, lower-cost, speedy automation inside how you run your service management overall platform, then it's going to create uncertainty up hiring stack and that's awful for digital business. So to better understand and take us through this launch today, we've got some great guests. And it starts, obviously, with the esteemed Nayaki Nayyar who is the President of the Digital Services Management business unit at BMC, CUBE alum. Nayaki, thanks very much for being here. >> Thank you, Peter, really excited to be here and look forward to our conversation. We are too excited about the launch of BMC Helix and happy to share the details with you. >> So let's start with the why. Obviously, there's a... You know, I've articulated kind of a generalization of some of the challenges that businesses face but it goes deeper than that. Take us through some of the key issues that your customers are facing as they think about this transition to a new way of running their business. >> So, let's put ourselves in the customers' shoes. Then you look at what their journey looks like. Customers are evolving from the online world into the digital world and what we see is, what we call, cognitive world. And the way their journey looks like, especially as customers are entering into the digital world, there are proliferation of clouds. They don't have just one cloud, they have private clouds, hybrid clouds, managed clouds, we call it multi-cloud. So they're entering into a multi-cloud world. In addition, there's also proliferation of devices. It's not just phones that we have to worry about now. As IoT's getting more and more relevant and prevalent, how you help customers manage all the devices and how you provide the service through not just one channel but channel of our customers' or consumers' preference. It could be a Slack as a channel, SMS as a channel, Skype as a channel. So across this multi-cloud, multi-device, and multi-channel, this explosion of technology that is happening in every customer's landscape, and to address this explosion, is where AIML, chatbots, and virtual agents really play a role for them to handle the complexities. So the automation that AIML, chatbots, and virtual agents bring to help customers address these multi-cloud, multi-channel, multi-device world is what we call how we have them evolve from ITSM to cognitive services management. >> Let's talk about that a little bit. We'll get into exactly what you're announcing in a second but historically when we thought about service management we thought about devices. What you're really describing, this transition is, again that notion of how all of these different elements come together in, sometimes, very unique ways and that's what's driving the need for the cognitive. It's not just, you can do multiple clouds, multi-devices, multiple channels, it's your business can put them together in ways that serve your business' needs the best. And now we need a service management capability that can attend to those resources. >> Absolutely. So if you go 10, 15 years back, BMC had a great portfolio. We had Remedy Service Management Suite. We also had Discovery to help customers discover the on-prem assets and provide its service to remedy service management. That's what we had, we were very successful. ITSM, as a category, was created for that whole space. But in this new world of multi-cloud, right, where customers have private clouds, managed clouds, hybrid clouds, multi-devices where IoT is becoming more and more relevant, and multi-channel, customers now have to discover these assets. We call it Discovery as-a-Service but now they can discover the assets across AWS, Azure, OpenStack, and Cloud Foundry and evolve into providing service from reactive to proactive service, and that's what we call Remedy as-a-Service, and then extend that service beyond IT to also lines of business. Now you wanna also provide that service to HR, and procurement, and also various lines of business. And the most important thing is how you provide that experience to your end-users and your end-customers is what we call Digital Workplace-as-a-Service where now customers can consume that service in channel of their preference. They can consume that service through mobile device, of course through web, but also Slack, SMS, chatbots, and virtual agents. So that's what we are combining all of that, that entire suite, we are containerizing that suite using Dockers and Kubernetes so that now customers can run in their choice of cloud. They can run it in AWS cloud, Azure cloud, or in BMC cloud. This whole suite is what we call BMC Helix and helps our customers evolve from ITSM to what we call cognitive services management. >> So that's what BMC's announcing today. >> Yes. >> It's this notion of BMC Helix. >> Yes. >> And it's predicated on the idea, if I can, also of, not only you're going to use these technologies to manage new stuff, we have to bring the old stuff forward. Additionally, we're gonna see a mix of labor, or people, and automation as companies find the right mix for them. >> Right. >> And so we wanna bring and sustain these practices and these approaches forward. Nobody likes a forced migration, especially not in an IT organization. >> Right. >> So that's how we see Helix. if I got this right. >> Yes. >> Helix is gonna help customers bring their existing assets, existing practices, modernize them using some of the new technologies and that's how we get to this new cognitive vision. >> Absolutely. The investments customers have already made in their on-prem assets, in their managing their IT assets, that same concepts come into this new multi-cloud, multi-device, and multi-channel world but now it extends beyond that. It extends beyond just IT to also lines of business and also all these, what we call, omni-channel experiences that you can provide. And this whole suite is, what we call, 3 C's, Helix stands for 3 C's. Everything as a service, Remedy as-a-Service, Discovery as-a-Service, Business Workplace as-a-Service, containerized so that customers can run this in the choice of their cloud, they can run in AWS cloud, Azure cloud, or our cloud with cognitive capabilities, with AIML, and chatbots. And that's how we help them evolve from that existing implementations to this whole new world as they enter into the cognitive world. >> Exciting stuff. >> Absolutely. We are very excited about it. We've been working with a lot of customers already, and we have made really, really good traction. >> So let's do this, Nayaki, let's take a look at a product video that kinda describes how this all comes together in a relatively simple, straightforward way. >> Absolutely. (upbeat music) >> Hi, Peter Burris again, welcome back. We're talking more about BMC's Helix announcement. Great product video. Once again, we're here with Nayaki Nayyar, but we're also being joined by Vidhya Srinivasan who's in Marketing within the Digital Services Management unit at BMC. Thank you very much for joining us in theCUBE. >> Great to be here, thank you. >> So we've heard a lot about the problems, we've heard a lot about BMC Helix as a solution, but obviously it's more than just the technology. There's things that customers have to think about, about how these technologies, how service management, cognitive service management's going to be impacting the business. As businesses become more digital, technology and related services get dragged more deeply into functions. So, Nayaki, tell us a little bit more about how the outcomes within business, the capabilities of businesses are gonna change as a consequence of applying these technologies. >> Absolutely, Peter. So if you look at, traditionally, IT service management was a very reactive process. Every ticket that came in was manually created, assigned, and routed. That was a very reactive process. But as we enter into this cognitive world and you apply intelligence, AIML, you evolve into what we call a proactive and predictive. Before an issue actually happens, you want to resolve that issue. And that's what we call the cognitive services management. And the real business outcomes, you put yourself in a customer's shoes who's providing this service and evolving into this proactive, predictive, and cognitive world, they wanna provide that service at the highest accuracy, at the highest speed, and the lowest cost. That's what is gonna become competitive advantage for every company indifferent of the industry. They could be in a telco, they could be in high-tech, or pharmaceutical. It doesn't matter which industry they are in, how they provide this service at the highest accuracy, highest speed, and lowest cost is gonna be fundamentally a competitive advantage for these customers. >> And when we talk about accuracy, again we're not just talking about accuracy in a technology context. We're talking about accuracy in terms of a brand promise, perhaps. >> Absolutely. >> Or a service promise, or a product promise. >> Yes. >> That's the context. We wanna make sure that the customer is getting what they expect fast, with accuracy, and at low cost. >> Right, every time you tweet or you're SMS-ing your service provider, you expect that response to be at the highest accuracy, at the speed, and the cost. >> So when we start talking about multi-channel, Vidhya, what we're really saying is that this is not just your, you know, this is not just service management for the traditional technology service desk. We're talking about service management for other personas, other individuals, other consumers as well. Take us through that a little bit. >> Yeah, that's right. So we actually take a very holistic approach, right, across the enterprise. So we have end-users who are, at the end of the day, the key subscribers or consumers of our service and we wanna make sure they're very happy with what we provide. We have the agents which kinda goes to the IT persona that people know about in the service desk. But then, as Nayaki said earlier, it's also about extending to a lines of business so you have HR agents, right, people who support HR requests, people who support facilities or procurement request. So making sure that the agent persona is able to do everything that they need to do at the most efficiency level that they can so that they can meet their SLAs to their end consumers is a big part of what Helix, BMC Helix and cognitive service management can provide. And ultimately, when you think about this transformation and where they wanna go, there's a lot of custom applications and custom needs that businesses have. So really thinking about the developer persona and how you actually embed and build intelligent applications through our cognitive microservices that BMC Helix provides is a big part of that value proposition we provide. So as you navigate through this journey and become a cognitive enterprise, how do you make sure that all of these personas throughout your enterprise is able to deliver and get value out of this is what BMC Helix provides for the whole enterprise. >> So the whole concept of incorporating these cognitive capabilities into a service management stack allows us to not only envision, in a traditional way, more complex applications but actually extend this out to new classes of users because we are masking a lot of the complexity and a lot of the uncertainty associated with how this stuff works from that customer. >> That's correct. >> For end-users, for agents, and for developers, and consumers, and customers too. >> Great. >> That's good. >> So you know what... Great conversation. But let's hear what a customer has to say about it, shall we? >> Absolutely, okay. >> My name is Marco Jongen. I work for a company called DSM. And I'm the Director for Service Management within the Global Business Services department. Royal DSM is a global science-based company active in health, nutrition, and materials. And by connecting our unique competencies in life science and in material sciences, DSM is driving economic prosperity, environmental progress, and social advance to create sustainable value for all stakeholders simultaneously. The Global Business Service department is serving the 20,000 employees of DSM spread over 200 locations globally. We are handling, annually, about 600,000 tickets, and we are supporting four business functions: finance, HR, procurement, and IT. We started together with BMC on a shared services transformation across IT, HR, finance, and procurement. And we created a unified ticketing system and a self-service portal using the Remedy system and the Digital Workplace environment. And with this, we are now able to handle all functions in one unified ticketing tool and giving visibility to all our employees with questions related to finance, HR, purchasing, and IT. We were still have and involved with BMC in bringing this product to the next level and we are very excited in the work we have done with BMC so far. >> That was great to hear Royal DSM is transforming its shared services organization with cognitive services management. But, Nayaki, there's no such thing as an easy transformation especially one of this magnitude. We're talking about digital business which is, we're using data assets differently, it's affecting virtually every feature of business today. And now we've got a technology set that's gonna have potentially an enormous impact on IT but everything that IT is being, or everywhere that IT is being employed. That kind of a transformation is not something that people do lightly. They expect their suppliers to help them out. So what is BMC gonna do to ensure that customers are successful as they go through this transformation to cognitive services management? >> Absolutely, Peter. I always say these transformations are not one-month, two-month transformations. These are multi-year transformations and it's a journey that customers go through. We partner very closely with customers in this journey, assessing their requirements, understanding what their future looks like, and helping them every step of the way. Especially in service management, this change, this transformation that is happening, is gonna be very disruptive to their end-to-end processes. Today, all service desks are manned by individuals. Every ticket that comes in gets manually created, assigned, and routed. But if you fast forward into the future world in the next two to three years, that service desk function, which is especially level zero, level one, level two, service desk function, will completely get replaced by bots or virtual agents. It could be 50-50, 70-30, you can pick what the percentage-- >> Whatever the business needs. >> Right? But it is coming. And it is very important for customers to see that change and that transformation that is happening and to be ready for it. And that's where we are working very closely with them in making sure it's not just a system transformation. It's also the people side and the process that have to change. And companies who can do that, what we call cognitive service management using bots and virtual agents at the highest accuracy, highest speed, and the lowest cost, I keep coming back to that because that is what is gonna give them the highest competitive advantage. >> Lot to think about. >> Absolutely. >> Exciting future, crucial for IT if it's gonna succeed moving forward, but even if the business choose to use cloud, you're going to need to be able to discover and sustain service management at a very, very high level. >> Absolutely. How we discover, how we help them discover, how we help them provide that service proactively, predictively, and provide that experience through omni-channel experiences, what this whole thing brings together for our customers. >> Excellent, this has been a great conversation. Nayaki Nayyar, President of BMC's Digital Services Management business unit. Thank you very much for being here on theCUBE and working with us to help announce Helix. Now don't forget folks, that immediately after this, we'll be running the CrowdChat. And in that CrowdChat, your peers, BMC experts, us analysts will be participating to help answer your questions, share experience, identify simpler ways of doing more complex things. So join us in the CrowdChat. Once again, Nayaki, thank you very much. >> Thank you, Peter, and thank you everyone. Thank you all.