“When you see a fork in the road, take it.” 

Yogi Berra’s famous quip comes in handy for describing my trip last week to Las Vegas for BMC Connect 2024, where this major platform player rolled out products and capabilities that will eventually flow into two new separate businesses it recently announced: BMC and BMC Helix.

“With the creation of these two companies, we are laser focused on innovation and growth,” BMC Software Inc. Chief Executive Ayman Sayed (pictured) said in the opening keynote. 

The exact distribution of the parent company’s organizational structure and vast product portfolio are not yet announced. Still, walking the show floor, imagining next year’s event, I would assume mainframe products under the AMI banner might continue to be featured under BMC, while customers using a software-as-a-service-based portal for service management would visit a BMC Helix booth.

From my conversations with customers and other analysts, the general consensus is that the split will provide a net benefit, as different product lines have different end users, as well as unique sales, licensing and support motions, that could be simplified under the two new companies.

AI infusions for less confusion

With as many as 72% of enterprises already investing in some form of artificial intelligence-related project or initiative, a great deal of that growth is related to the excitement and fear of mission out created by generative AI, which introduces significant risk because of misalignment with well-defined business outcomes.

Rather than introducing a discrete new AI platform or product, BMC is gradually infusing gen AI into its product portfolio, allowing customers to bring their own large language model or retrieval-augmented generation tools and data sources to bear. BMC positions its AI features as capabilities, not products, which are modeled and supplied with data differently based on the target customer environment and business vertical.

“AI is here to stay, AI is the future, and done right, AI is a force of good,” BMC Chief Technology Officer Ram Chakravartik said in a keynote.

On the mainframe side, the first-released AI infusion was unveiled as BMC AMI Assistant, a gen AI-powered capability using open-source LLMs trained to understand COBOL syntax and interdependencies to address critical mainframe team resource and skills gaps.

Through a simple conversational dialogue, developers can get lookahead recommendations and explanations of COBOL source code dependencies directly within their VScode or Eclipse IDE. That highlights where anomalies or change impacts are likely to occur, while documenting the codebase as it goes, so knowledge can be passed on to future engineering teams in their modernization efforts.

Another new R&D result opened up with BMC’s infusion of agentic AI into its AI Ops solution base such as BMC Helix ITSM and BMC HelixGPT Knowledge Curator. Rather than responding to prompts, these agents gather insights from across multiple systems of record and collaboration – whether BMC Remedy tickets, Confluence or Sharepoint posts – so runbook-style tasks can be automated, and content creators can enhance their reach and assist faster issue resolutions for all team members.

As for governance and alignment, their new BMC Helix AI Guardian monitors multiple AI resources to guard against hallucinations and bias, so information technology management can gauge operational cost/value metrics and risk analytics within their observability dashboards.

Moving through automation and autonomy to the edge

BMC has long been evangelizing the movement from digital process automation toward their own vision of “the autonomous enterprise” — a big concept the buzzword of “hyperautomation” fails to encapsulate. 

Several customers were on hand to discuss high-volume results with BMC’s Control-M and other BMC Helix workflows for orchestrating automated issue resolution, managed file transfers, runbook process execution and process automation both within ITSM and ITOM workflows and across the application estate.

The ability to scale data pipelines without adding human toil defines the achievable limits of business automation, as well as machine learning to build analytics and AI models. The firm announced new GenAI-based capabilities for data assurance, which can categorize data with meta tagging and catch errors before orchestrating data pipelines and transfers. 

“Control-M is mission-critical to Domino’s data-driven culture. It will play a key role in helping us continue to grow and deliver cutting-edge innovation,” Deepti Soni, senior manager of data quality, data operations and MLOps at Domino’s Pizza, wrote in this innovation rundown post from BMC. 

Edge computing may be an even bigger opportunity than AI right now, as billions of internet of things sensors, smart devices and remote computing resources are already in play globally. All of them are programmable resources that can run their own software and inference models and produce telemetry data. BMC executives discussed how they are conducting edge data acquisition, device actuation, configuration, and observability which takes service management outside the company firewall.

I saw a cool BMC Helix for Aircraft demo, which showed how billions of lines of continuous event data from more than 150 digital sensors could be processed rapidly into a digital twin of the airplane’s flight path — like a virtual “white box” that could pinpoint anomalies along a timeline for recommending maintenance or part replacement.

Showcasing the partner ecosystem

In addition to service delivery partners such as Emergys, Amdocs and PWC, several vendors were on hand to demonstrate how their newest offerings complement BMC solutions. Here were a few standouts:

Evolven offers a change awareness observability platform that watches production environments to provides insight into the impact of planned or unplanned changes to a staggering variety of enterprise technology assets. So, for instance, if a vendor software upgrade occurs that is not ticketed in BMC Helix Service Management or recorded in the CMDB, an automated alerting function can kick off a remediation workflow. A new conversational AI interface allows team members to simply ask questions about potential issues without writing queries or scanning through large data sets.

Flexera partners with BMC to provide IT asset management and FinOps metrics that feed curated and researched data about software licensing, expenditure and operational expenses into BMC Helix Discovery, BMC Service Management, and other ITSM/ITOM platforms. This allows IT teams to gauge return on investment and make decisions about new purchases, upgrades and end-of-life planning.

MobileReach provides a mobile field service management app that supports remote workers with flow-through data from BMC Helix Edge, Remedy and other service management platforms. A technician can take in work orders, track inventory, order spare parts, read issue resolution instructions and access customer information through a secure, access-controlled mobile presence that can also work offline.

Sentry Software demonstrated unique hardware and infrastructure-level monitoring, outputting metrics all the way down to the temperature or power usage of actual servers and devices. Customers can utilize their OpenTelemetry-formatted metrics within BMC Helix and BMC AMI Cloud observability and management dashboards to track sustainability goals and improve system maintenance.

The Intellyx take

No competitive business wants to be left behind by innovation, but at the same time, no existing enterprise can afford to take too many chances at once and crack the foundations of their IT estate.

You want to bring your own architecture, your own data, your own AI models, then place your bets on what to change, and how to integrate processes through them. Refreshingly, this “bring your own” theme was pervasive throughout the event.

After several off-the-record conversations with customers, I found they universally expressed a high impression of BMC’s commitment to their success. “They are not afraid to set up calls, or fly a subject matter expert in to help us bring our customer engineering teams get up to speed,” one of them told me. 

Here’s hoping these core values will continue, even as BMC and BMC Helix continue on their separate journeys next year.

Jason English is principal analyst and chief marketing officer at Intellyx B.V. He wrote this article for SiliconANGLE. BMC covered travel and registration costs for the analyst to attend the event, a common industry practice. No AI was used to generate this content. At the time of writing, BMC is a current Intellyx subscriber and Evolven is a former Intellyx customer.

Photo: BMC