The intangible digital age has never been so real. Businesses deepened their digital journey during the global pandemic, while the demand for digital products and services has reached new heights. With that came the challenge of dealing with an increasingly complex information technology infrastructure.

In this scenario, making IT systems more intelligent with artificial intelligence platforms is a necessity for enterprises looking to increase efficiencies and reduce costs, according to Sreenivasan Rajagopal (pictured, middle), head of products and strategy, Broadcom Enterprise Software, at Broadcom Inc.

“The digital economy, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, is 9% of the U.S. GDP. It’s only ranked slightly lower than manufacturing, which is at 11.3% GDP, and slightly above finance and insurance, which is about 7.5% GDP,” he said. “So digital economy is firmly in our lives … and digital operational excellence is critical for customers to drive profitability and growth in the digital economy.”

Rajagopal; Rich Lane (pictured, left), senior research analyst, infrastructure and operations at Forrester Research Inc.; and Usman Nasir (pictured, right), global product management at Verizon, spoke with Lisa Martin, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the AIOps Virtual Forum. They discussed where AIOps needs to go for organizations to succeed in the future, what some of the quick gains are for businesses, and whether companies are prepared for truly automated IT operations. (* Disclosure below.)

Complex IT infrastructures call for automation

Immersed in the digital world, businesses are building new architectures, such as containers and microservices, in a highly distributed system that includes multicloud and edge computing. This complexity makes it increasingly difficult for organizations to keep everything running efficiently, according to Lane.

“In operations, for a number of years … we’re afraid of changing things sometimes, or we just didn’t think about it. Tooling is often the last thing to change because we’re spending so much time to project work and modernization, and fighting fires on a daily basis,” Lane said. “That problem is going to get worse if we do nothing.”

Although IT infrastructure has become more sophisticated, IT teams have not grown at the pace necessary to keep up, creating an ever-widening gap between the tasks to be done and the people who perform them.

“That’s the gap we have to fill,” Lane stated. “We have to fill that through better automation, more intelligent systems.”

When adopting AIOps, businesses are able to drive cost efficiencies by automating many tasks that were previously very manually intensive or resource intensive, according to Nasir.

“You could allocate those resources towards doing much better things, which, let’s be very honest, going into 2021 after what we’ve seen in 2020 is going to be mandatory,” he pointed out.

Improving the customer experience is the goal

Among the quick gains enterprises can achieve with AIOps platforms is the possibility of detecting problems in the system before customers do so, according to Rajagopal. This means being proactive in order to avoid interruptions in services that could harm the customer experience, which is so important to business outcomes.

“An immediate value is visibility,” Rajagopal stated. “If you do not know what is happening in your complex systems that make up your digital supply chain, it’s going to be hard to be responsible.”

Another benefit is being able to identify inefficiencies across the business ecosystem and data so that resources can be better used. “That whole triage is an immediate cost saving, and the bigger your network, the bigger the cost savings,” Nasir said.

The advanced analytics and machine learning algorithms of AIOps platforms can also help organizations to understand the entire customer journey toward products and services, and therefore improve what they offer in order to retain them.

“We know online retail. You’re having a bad experience in that one retailer; you just want your thing, so you’re going to go to another retailer,” Lane explained. “Brand loyalty isn’t what it was like in the brick-and-mortar world, where you had a department store near you, so you were loyal to that because it was in your neighborhood. Online, that doesn’t exist anymore.”

The use of digital services peaked during the pandemic and tends to remain at a high level.

“What the [enterprises] have learned is they’re never going to go back down. They’re never going to return to the pre-pandemic level,” Lane said. “So, now they’re stuck with this new reality: ‘Well, how do we service those customers? And how do we make sure we keep them loyal to our brand?’ And they’re looking for modernization opportunities.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AIOps Virtual Forum. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the AIOps Virtual Forum. Neither Broadcom Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE