Businesses need to balance the equation of exploding data stores and relatively stable numbers of IT staffers. They are finding they can’t keep the pace with operations in the Digital Age by endlessly punting tasks around to many different siloed departments. Most of the options that come to mind seem impractical or cost ineffective. IT ops seems ripe for some ultimate reconnaissance tool to make the whole spectrum of activity viewable at once.

Rocana Inc. CEO Omer Trajman recently spoke about the drastic transformation that swept IT operations in recent years. He explained that in the past, a business’ customers experiencing problems would be routed to humans who could help them.

“I, as a business, employed those humans, and they relied on internal systems. IT’s job? Fix the printers, fix the faxes, right? Very simple world. I had my mainframe and a few other systems,” Trajman said. He went on to explain to Peter Burris (@plburris), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, that now communication with customers is digital and so the burden is on IT to make it run smoothly.

Today, he argued, “Everything’s a web app, everything’s a mobile app. As IT, instead of supporting a few thousand, maybe 100,000 people internally, now I’m supporting the entire customer base.”

Silo osmosis

The more a business separates its IT personnel into siloes, the bigger a headache they will have doing business digitally, Trajman said. Security, database management and other departments cannot operate in isolation — and this is as true for dealing with customers as it is for implementing orders handed down from the C-suite; Trajman said that digitization is making such changes imperative at a more hectic rate nowadays.

“When business comes along and says, ‘I need something new,’ all of a sudden you have 40 different organizations looking at 40 different tools with 40 different ways of operating that have to collaborate at an increasing cadence,” he said.

The idea of centralizing data into a database was the first step to pooling it into one place for IT teams to access, Trajman said. The “data lake” or “data ocean” are developments that further attempt to collate the data into one location for management.

The next logical step is to give IT much more intelligence on the data much more quickly, Trajman added. So instead of simply warehousing the data, he says that the launch of Rocana Ops 2.0 goes further and develops a kind of “central nervous system” for the data. This is an interconnected system, which records all inputs and events, even seemingly insignificant ones.

This lets IT “flow it through one location, not just to warehouse it, but actually to be able to do rich analytics, to have the machines do a lot of the heavy lifting through machine learning and anomaly detection so that the business as a whole, not in individual siloes, but holistically, react to changes in the system, to changes in the business,” he said.

On the wire: beyond ops visibility

Trajman said that Rocana started with a mission to bring greater visibility to IT ops — to let them know what happened yesterday and compare that to what happened a year ago, all with a few clicks. “Rocana Ops 2.0 takes that and puts it on the wire,” he said.

Trajman continued: “We call this the Rocana reflex system where you can basically take all the information that’s flowing through and instantly take action on it or alert someone or just record that it happened, because that’s going to be a very important event to look at later,” he said.

He added that the anomaly detection reflex is particularly valuable to businesses; it allows them to plumb intelligent automation in a way never before possible.

Watch the full interview below:

Photo by SiliconANGLE