At BMC Software’s recent customer event, BMC Connect, I spent time speaking with the company’s executive team about current tech trends, the future of AI and enterprise IT, and how technology solves business problems. Thousands of tech professionals attended the whirlwind event, held in Las Vegas. Each of the executives found time to give thoughtful answers to my questions about current and future directions, with a focus on the many challenges businesses face as they work to stay competitive in an environment that requires adding complex emerging tech to their existing IT infrastructure. Here are the highlights of these conversations, which address many of the most compelling issues enterprise leaders must navigate in this period of extraordinary change.
As the CEO of BMC, Ayman Sayed speaks with a wide range of enterprise customers about their plans and challenges. An issue for many customers is that they’ve invested deeply in their existing tech stack yet they’re also adding new tech at a rapid pace. According to Sayed, this creates an issue: “How do you drive a degree of standardization or uniformity without having to do a forklift upgrade, where you have to rip everything up and start from scratch?”
Even as they handle this issue, many businesses’ overriding concern is creating a strategy that “is not focused on technology for technology’s sake, but rather toward the business outcome.” This is where BMC can be the biggest help to customers, Sayed said.
BMC works to “reconcile their past investments and their heterogeneous environments, and at the same time equip them not to just to ride the current wave of technology and shifts, but future-proof their investments in technology.” The goal is to always translate customer needs into a concrete business outcome that supports the bottom line. This work, of course, is constant, as enterprise customers navigate new advances in AI, cloud, data, DevOps, edge computing, and other emerging tech trends.
Looking ahead to the future, Sayed sees enormous potential. “I think we’re barely scratching the surface in terms of AI applicability to IT workflows,” he said. “Every day almost, we come up with a new use case or a new workflow that we can reinvent.”
To that end, BMC has invested deeply in its product portfolio, including mainframe modernization, intelligent automation, and digital services and operation management. Sayed’s message to customers: “I think now is the time to jump on these waves of innovation.”
“Now is the time to jump on these waves of innovation,” according to BMC CEO Ayman Sayed.
Enterprise businesses are inundated with technological changes, said BMC CTO Ram Chakravarti. “The shiny new toy of yesterday becomes obsolete today, and then the next new thing comes up,” he said. “But rarely is enough weight given to operationalization considerations, and how you get value from your tech investments.”
Fully understanding how to derive business value from technology requires leaders to understand key themes in AI, data and risk management.
The first theme, of course, is AI and generative AI. He noted that AI has earned a halo effect as so many users tout its enormous potential. “It would be silly if I didn’t mention that the halo effect has diminished somewhat because of the high cost of implementation, potentially questionable return on value in certain use cases, and a host of risks that we need to solve for,” he said. To counter this, BMC has focused on a pragmatic, business-focused application of AI.
A second overarching theme is data. “In the data space, organizations are stymied by their inability to exploit every single facet of their data ecosystem,” Chakravarti said. “It’s not just about the business data, it’s also the data about the data—otherwise known as metadata.”
To address this, BMC has listened to customer needs and uses generative AI to connect the disparate puzzle pieces of metadata sprawled across the data management ecosystem.
And then there’s perhaps the most essential theme of all: pragmatism and risk management. BMC is always striving to move customers forward with their tech infrastructure, a constant process that must be tempered with pragmatism, Chakravarti said.
“On one side, AI done right is a force for good and it adds value,” he said. “On the other side, there’s a whole host of uncertainties.” Getting ahead of these risks requires a proactive approach to AI risk mitigation, “because the extent to which you’re able to actively manage and mitigate the risks associated with AI, the greater the value from your AI investments.”
“So what I suggest is that organizations get their hands around active risk management and risk mitigation,” Chakravarti said. “That’s going to be the pathway to success.”
“The extent to which you’re able to actively manage and mitigate the risks associated with AI, the greater the value from your AI investments,” BMC CTO Ram Chakravarti said.
Throughout her extensive career in technology, there have always been two conflicting forces for enterprise clients to balance, said BMC’s GM & SVP of Digital Service and Operations Management Margaret Lee. On one hand is the desire to stay current with the latest technology.
“Every company wants to push out new capabilities, new applications, new releases, to try to get every digital experience to be more consumer-like for their customers and employees,” Lee said.
On the other hand, BMC clients are comprised of Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 companies and large governmental entities. These organizations have complex IT infrastructures built over many years of business growth. As they combine today’s next-gen tech with their legacy tech, “it’s a recipe for a lot of heartburn,” Lee explained. “I’m going to approve a release. Which system does it touch? What if something goes wrong? What kind of operations team do you need to be able to understand the true impact of a particular change?”
Large enterprise managers want to move fast, but “they have a certain risk profile,” Lee said. Large enterprise requires both innovation and stability, and she provides the guidance to help these major players navigate a tricky balancing process.
“Inevitably,” she said, “the request takes the form of, ‘Can you help me understand the risk I’m taking? How do I think about the risk profile of a particular release, a particular change? How do I make sure that I don’t shoot myself in the foot with some of the things I’m trying to do?’”
Among the new technologies that are particularly exciting to customers is agentic AI, and BMC has just released new products and features with upgraded agentic AI. Companies see great potential in AI apps whose functionality enables AI to be a true digital colleague, Lee said.
“What we believe is that the form it ideally takes is deeply embedded in your platform, in your application, in your product,” she said. This embedded approach allows users to speed workflow without needing to pivot to a separate app for AI assistance. In particular, this embedded AI offers a major productivity boost to the many staffers who handle documents.
“Whether it’s paper or digital, that’s a lot of intense work,” Lee said. “If some gen AI can help update those articles so that your knowledge article library is up to date, it’s hugely valuable. That’s why [agentic AI] is so hot in the industry—because more and more people realize AI becomes an agent and helper throughout the experience within the application.”
“More and more people realize AI becomes an agent and helper throughout the experience within the application,” said Margaret Lee, BMC’s GM & SVP, Digital Service and Operations Management.
BMC’s President of Digital Business Automation Gur Steif refers to the “multiple axes of innovation” that have transformed IT as technology has evolved across eras. One axis reflects the rapid evolution of IT infrastructure, as it has grown from mainframes to virtual systems and the cloud. Another axis revolves around data, as information management has shifted from simple files to databases to unstructured data. The third axis relates to how businesses build applications, which has advanced from monolithic applications to agile iteration and DevOps.
The difficulty presented by this constant innovation is that businesses now have different eras of technology all working together—or trying to work together—in a single IT infrastructure.
“One of the valuable things that BMC does for customers is that we allow them to manage all those different environments in one way,” Steif said. “A lot of customers, when they first come to BMC, they say, ‘Well, we have this thing we’re doing on the mainframe, and this thing we’re doing on these systems, and we have three or 300 different things we’re doing in the cloud—but they don’t talk to one another.’”
To unify systems, BMC develops a single cohesive automation and orchestration approach for these customers. “We allow them to have one way of managing across all those environments, which makes it easier to share data, to troubleshoot, and to understand what’s going on,” he said. “It gives you one language to speak rather than 27 different languages.”
One major benefit: this automation framework enables customers to focus on driving business value rather than getting bogged down in tech complexity.
BMC’s tool for this automation and orchestration is Control-M, which has recently been named a leader in the Garter Magic Quadrant for Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms (SOAP).
“It’s a tool that thousands of customers are using,” Steif said, “and it’s driving tremendous value in their automation journey.”
“One of the valuable things that BMC does for customers is that we allow them to manage all those different environments in one way,” according to Gur Steif, President, Digital Business Automation at BMC.
Finding optimal ways to handle change and strategize for a better outcome are topics that are close to John McKenny, SVP and GM, mainframe software business at BMC.
“One of the things that I spend quite a bit of time talking about is: what does change look like within an organization?” he said. “So when I’m asked for recommendations, I suggest: Always be very clear about the outcome that you want. What’s the destination? How can you define success?”
It’s essential to be specific. He recommends simplifying the process down to two or three essential criteria. Next, create a plan that goes from inception to destination, a plan that details expected progress over a specific timeframe. Then decide what your successful outcome will be—in detail.
“That sounds simple, but it’s amazing how many times people rush to implement technology and haven’t fully defined the benefits they want to achieve,” McKenny said. When leaders plan properly, “you keep people aligned and really empower them to make that happen.” Best of all, he said, “when you do it well, you’re surprised by the kind of outcomes that you achieve.”
McKenny acknowledges that planning is now harder than ever because rapid tech changes are happening even as planning takes place. How can business leaders plan when the basic functionality of their toolsets is evolving as they build their blueprint?
While this presents a major challenge, there are solutions that can help. For example, in a recent blog post, McKenny addresses how BMC pushes the boundaries of hybrid cloud solutions for mainframe, offering enterprise cloud-native capabilities optimized for modern data functionality.
“That’s why it’s so important to decide the destination first,” he said. “If you’re very clear on the destination and how you define success, then as things change along the way you can keep yourself on track despite the shifts. And you can only do that effectively when you’re clear about where you want to go.”
“If you’re very clear on the destination and how you define success, then as things change along the way you can keep yourself on track despite the shifts,” according to John McKenny, SVP and GM, mainframe software business at BMC.
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