What are larger enterprises looking for when it comes to automation? There are two major things that must come first before automation, artificial intelligence, and machine learning: simplification of the tool sets required, and continuing to make sure data is in a good place, according to Nigel Wilks (pictured, left), head of technical platform and tooling at Computacenter Ltd., and Clive Spanswick (pictured, right), vice president of sales, EMEA at ScienceLogic Inc. They have seen the issue from both a client and supplier perspective.

Wilks and Spanswick spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the ScienceLogic Symposium in Washington, D.C. They discussed automation, data, and why Computacenter moved to the ScienceLogic solution (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s note: The following has been condensed for clarity.]

Nigel, we are unparalleled as to how fast things are changing in the industry. There’s more complexity, more heterogeneous environments for companies like yours. What do you hear from the business side, and how can you run services faster and, ultimately, serve your customers better?

Wilks: We’ve got quite a fragmented tooling landscape globally. Nearly two years ago, we kind of set on the journey to become more of a global entity, and certainly from my perspective — a tooling landscape — [we were] looking to consolidate those down, simplify our services, again helping reduce our cost base, and then leverage the automation. So just going to ScienceLogic, we’re moving away from from some of the big names and consolidating over 50 tools into the one ScienceLogic solution.

Clive, I think back about five years ago, frictionless and simplicity were the terms I heard. How is that resonating with your customer base?

Spanswick: We see this a lot with the leading service providers now that are really being challenged by their customers to extend their portfolio of services over an ever more-diverse range of technologies. And this is one of the big challenges over the course of the last seven to 10 years. So simplification of a toolset is really one of the key drivers to really deliver outcomes for efficiency.

A lot of the way we see modern service providers operating today really is all about automation. To get to better automation at a lower cost, you have to drive simplification into the toolchain. So we see this a lot with our customers across the region and indeed worldwide. They’re taking the tools landscape and really collapsing that into a much more simplified model. [It’s] an essential ingredient to drive efficiencies that then, in turn, can be delivered to the customer as … lower cost services. That’s the real driving force that we see for customers today.

Digital transformation often is a buzzword, but we’ve really defined the difference between the old way and the modern environment as ‘how is data something that can actually drive your business? Are you data driven in your decisions? Can you monetize data?’ How much did … that focus on data play into your decision, and can you give us insight as to how your company looks at the role of data in the IT world today?

Wilks: It’s very important. So from an infrastructure tooling perspective, being able to bring all the data into one place but contextualize it as well means that we can then do some some good stuff — again driving us down that automation path. From an end-user point of view, we’ve got end-user analytics, which can open up a lot of different worlds for us. Predicting what issues users have — those kind of decisions that we can make from that data.

But in my kind of space, the infrastructure tooling side, we kind of need to go onto that AIOps journey. But to get there, it’s about getting the data into a good shape knowing what we want to do with AIOps moving forward.

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE