Information technology service management refers to practices that keep end-to-end IT services chugging smoothly from companies to their customers. The adoption of multicloud methods means routes have become a bit confusing for IT teams to steer through. Artificial-intelligence-powered software tools may help them see past the bends and deliver the goods on time.

“The future of service management in this digital world is what we call cognitive service management,” said Nayaki Nayyar (pictured), president of digital services management at BMC Software Inc. The term “cognitive” implies all of those technologies — machine learning, deep learning, AI — that think and act on behalf of people. This enables new kinds of systems where “service management is no longer just reactive; it is proactive,” according to Nayyar. AI that proactively performs tedious, low-value-add chores frees up IT to hunt bigger game.

BMC has partnered with Amazon Web Services Inc. on a number of AI-related offerings. BMC Discovery for Multi-Cloud and upcoming AWS certification for BMC Remedy service management suite enable intelligent cloud migrations. BCM has also partnered with AWS on Cognitive Service Management, which enables cognitive interactions among IT service desks, employees, customers, etc.

Nayyar spoke with John Walls (@JohnWalls21) and James Kobielus (@jameskobielus), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. (* Disclosure below.)

This week, theCUBE spotlights Nayaki Nayyar in our Women in Tech feature.

Watch Part 1 of our video interview with Nayaki Nayyar below:

BMC shows IT their stuff

Moving workloads, like moving house, quickly makes people realize just how much stuff they’ve hoarded over time. Sometimes it takes special effort just to search it all out. “Most of the CIOs or heads of technology that I talk to — they don’t even know what they own across all the data centers,” Nayyar said in a second interview during re:Invent with Lisa Martin (@LuccaZara), co-host of theCUBE, and guest host Keith Townsend (@CTOAdvisor), principal at The CTO Advisor.

Discovery for Multi-Cloud finds assets across all environments on-premises or in the cloud. It also shows the relationships among assets and any impact to a service if one of those assets moves or shuts down. A service like a customer application can be deceptively simple on the surface, like an Ikea futon actually composed of a dozen parts.

“You have databases, you have application servers, you have code running on various parts,” Nayyar said. Discovery points to all of the elements mapped to a particular service.

BMC is now completing special certification for Remedy on AWS cloud with AWS Aurora relational database and PostgreSQL database. BMC customers will be able to move their Remedy system onto Aurora, which cut costs, according to Nayyar.

AI puts IT fire hose on auto

Cloud-based ITSM use is rising. The market for such solutions will grow from 2016’s $4.41 billion to $8.78 billion by 2021, according to MarketsandMarkets Research Private Ltd. The most beneficial of these will incorporate AI in some form to automate away rote tasks for users.

“In most organizations, the majority of time is still spent on resolving questions and issues that happen over and over again,” said Jan-Willem Middelburg, regional director, APAC, at Pink Elephant Inc., as quoted on Cherwell Software Inc.’s website. “And the truth is that nobody really likes to do these kinds of tasks. By automating repetitive services, time will be freed up to focus on service improvement initiatives.

And according to Roy Atkinson, senior writer and analyst, at HDI Inc. in the same article, “IT itself will move from spending 60 to 80 percent of its time firefighting to becoming more of a proactive business unit.”

BMC’s Cognitive Service Management manifests the company’s vision of proactive service management through machine learning and AI. “You detect an issue before it actually happens and proactively provide that service,” Nayyar said.

Cognitive Service Management leverages AWS’ AI capabilities, such as those in Alexa (BMC has partnered with AWS to bring Alexa for Business to market). “Now you can actually interact with Alexa or a chatbot to get any service you need,” Nayyar said. “That’s what we call omnichannel experience for providing that experience for end users, employees, customers, partners, anyone.”

Watch Part 2 of our video interview with Nayaki Nayyar below:

NLP talking cure for service tickets

Cognitive Service Management can handle typically routine, manual service management processes for end-users. Natural language processing makes it possible for the software to act in place of service-desk professionals when tickets come in, Nayyar pointed out. Only when problems are too complex for the NLP engine to grasp will it punt the ticket to the service pro. “So that level-one, level-two service-desk process is what is being replaced through a chatbot or an Alexa,” she said.

NLP is not yet on par with humans for recognizing subtleties of tone and pitch in language, Nayyar added. However, AWS’ work in offerings such as Comprehend for discovering insights in texts suggests that it is catching up.

Be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (* Disclosure: BMC Software Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither BMC Software nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE