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Perfecting cloud strategies, and getting the most out of automation

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Could you tell us a little about what BMC does and your role within the company? 

BMC delivers industry-leading software solutions for IT automation, orchestration, operations, and service management to help organisations free up time and space as they continue to drive their digital initiatives forward. We work with thousands of customers and partners around the world, including more than 85% of the Forbes Global 50.

I’m part of the Solutions Marketing organisation within our Digital Business Automation Business Unit. My primary area of focus is leading our data and cloud market strategy for our Application and Data Workflow Orchestration products, Control-M and BMC Helix Control-M.  

What have been the latest developments at BMC with regards to data and multi-cloud? 

If you’ve just been casually glancing through your newsfeed over the last couple of years, then you’ve surely seen headlines on how companies are investing heavily in modern data technologies particularly around AI and ML. What has not been as prominent in the news is the fact that, despite the level of investment, focus and sponsorship of the C-Suite, the report card for these initiatives is less than stellar.  

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A recent stat from a Gartner study on modern data projects shows that only 15% of use cases leveraging AI techniques (such as ML and DNNs) and involving edge and IoT environments will be successful. In other words, the failure rate in such initiatives is about 85%. In another survey run by McKinsey of major advanced analytics programs, they found that 80% of companies’ time in analytics projects is spent on repetitive tasks such as preparing data, whereas the actual value-added work is limited. Moreover, just 10% of companies believe they have this issue under control. 

These results are eye popping and immediately call into question why the failure rate is so high despite the investment and focus. There are many contributing factors to this, including the complexity of these projects, the global shortage of data scientists, cloud architects and data engineers required for such initiatives, and – the one that stands out the most to us at BMC – that many of these projects are failing because companies are struggling to operationalise these projects at scale in production.  

The industry response to the operationalisation problem has been to develop modern Ops models. This has led to the emergence of DataOps, MLOps etc. DataOps is the application of Agile Engineering and DevOps best practices to the field of Data Management, to rapidly turn new insights into fully operationalised production deliverables that unlock business value from Data. 

Within DataOps an important discipline is Orchestration, or in other words the ability to run a complex set of interdependent steps in a data pipeline across four major phases of any data project, Data Ingestion, Data Storage/Processing, and Data Analytics. Control-M from BMC has been a market leader in the application workflow orchestration space for a long time and recently we have invested heavily in making sure that Control-M can continue to serve as the layer of abstraction for orchestrating complex data pipelines from a single point of control so that data initiatives can be operationalised at scale in production. It is important to note that without achieving scale in production no project will be able to deliver the intended value.  

What have been the biggest trends you’ve seen developing in automation? 

Companies are investing in automation to drive speed and acceleration of business outcomes. Many industries are seeking speed and agility to adapt to a very challenging competitive landscape. For example, Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan Chase wrote, in the annual letter to the shareholders in 2020 that banks are competing against a large and powerful shadow banking system. And they are facing extensive competition from Silicon Valley, both in the form of FinTech and Big Tech. One of their strategies to stay competitive is to invest heavily in AI/ML and subsequently in automation not just in the Data and Analytics space but all aspects of their business. It was interesting to see in Dimon’s letter to the shareholders that an entire section was titled “AI, the cloud and digital are transforming how we do business.

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It just goes to show that technology is not just the job and purview of CIOs and CTOs, but the CEOs consider it part of their business strategy. So, the main thing for us to understand as a global supplier of automation and orchestration technology is that our customers are investing in technology to drive business outcomes faster and at scale and not just to gain back-office efficiencies. As a result of all of this we see a high degree of importance being put on aligning technology investments to tangible business outcomes.  

At a technological level we see massive adoption of public cloud but at the same time most companies will continue to run many critical systems on-premises and even if the plan is to go all-in on cloud it will be a multi-year journey. This means that a successful orchestration and automation strategy will need platforms that can orchestrate across a hybrid and highly heterogeneous environment that is likely to be multi-cloud but will also include on-premises applications including applications running on the Mainframe in certain industries.  

What are the main challenges companies face when starting to build scalable automation strategies? And how can these be overcome? 

A big challenge that companies are facing with the rapid adoption of public cloud and many open-source projects is that they have massive technology sprawl, we often describe it as an ever-growing spaghetti bowl of tools. This is primarily because as companies adopt modern technology, they are not necessarily retiring what they adopted years ago. For example, we often see that new systems of engagement are being developed with a modern tech stack, but transactional systems and systems of records such as ERPs and core business applications are still there as they are critical to running the business. This dynamic can often lead to silos of automation because the teams working on the modern, innovative technologies are frequently separated, often by design, from the teams that run what you might consider core business applications.

For expedience, many of the teams working on the modern tech stack will choose the automation tools that they are most familiar with and are used to leveraging. Ultimately this results in a scenario where they have many tools for automation but none of them can automate and orchestrate across the underlying architecture of disparate applications to deliver the intended business outcome. When something goes wrong in production it is excruciatingly difficult to find out where the problem lies as you don’t have a cockpit style view into the workflows that automated the business outcome.  

Addressing this problem has been a cornerstone of our strategy with Control-M. We aim to provide customers the ability to automate and orchestrate critical workflows across highly heterogenous environments so that business outcomes are not only automated but as they on-board new business services powered by modern technologies, they don’t have to rewire their automation and orchestration strategy every time.  

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Many companies understand the value of having a single pane of glass for orchestration but find it difficult to put it in practice because automation and orchestration patterns were not considered during the design phase of their engineering cycle. It is imperative to consider how business outcomes will be operationalised in production at a very early stage in the engineering lifecycle, in other words take a strategic approach to running production.  

You’ve advised numerous companies on how to build scalable automation strategies for cloud and data initiatives. Are there any examples of companies that you think have done a particularly good job with this? 

I often quote the case study we did with The Hershey Company as a great example of driving business outcomes by focusing on orchestration and automation as a strategic initiative. Many years ago, they standardised on Control-M as their orchestration and automation platform to manage the digital interactions that are necessary to run their business – not just manufacturing, supply planning, supply chain, warehousing, and distribution but also finance, payroll, costing, human resources, marketing, and sales. This allows them to achieve not only scale in production but manage the interdependencies of workflows across all these business functions. 

As one of the largest chocolate manufacturers in the world they run a highly complex, data-driven supply chain function, involving daily decisions on production quantities and scheduling shipments to warehouses and distribution centers. Any disruption in these processes can have a significant negative impact on the business, such as delays in shipments and unstocked shelves in sales outlets. To prevent such issues, Hershey relies on Control-M, as a centralised workflow orchestration and automation platform. Control-M not only runs complex interdependent workflows based on events and time-based schedules but also allows them to detect and address problems before they affect the business.

A few years ago, they wrote a blog on their orchestration strategy and in the blog, they shared that one-day Control-M could not trigger workflows on one of their largest SAP instances as SAP became hung in the middle of the day. The action halted the entire SAP landscape for that instance. The application owners might not have become aware of the problem for hours. Fortunately, Control-M detected the issue and alerted the appropriate people. They addressed the problem within minutes and Control-M could continue running the downstream steps in the supply chain workflow, averting potential impact to their business.  

What advice would you give to companies that are trying to align data with specific business goals and make better use of insights? 

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As I mentioned earlier, with the emergence of DataOps and MLOps, the industry is clearly recognising that a strong focus on Ops will be a crucial ingredient in the recipe for success of modern AI and ML projects. It is vital to take orchestration patterns in production as a practice within data engineering, otherwise putting scalable orchestration and operational models at the end of the engineering project will be extremely difficult to retrofit.  

What developments from BMC can we expect to see in the year ahead? 

Our strategy for Control-M at BMC will stay focused on a couple of basic principles:

  • Continue to allow our customers to use Control-M as a single point of control for orchestration as they onboard modern technologies, particularly on the public cloud. This means we will continue to provide new integrations to all major public cloud providers to ensure they can use Control-M to orchestrate workflows across three major cloud infrastructure models of IaaS, Containers and PaaS (Serverless Cloud Services). We plan to continue our strong focus on serverless, and you will see more out-of-the-box integrations from Control-M to support the PaaS model.  
  • We recognise that enterprise orchestration is a team sport, which involves coordination across engineering, operations and business users. And, with this in mind, we plan to bring a user experience and interface that is persona based so that collaboration is frictionless.  

A couple of years ago we launched Helix Control-M, which is our SaaS offer for orchestration. We are seeing very strong demand from customers globally to consume orchestration as a SaaS model and we have plans for investing heavily in this consumption model for our customers.  

  • Basil Faruqui is the director of solutions marketing at BMC Software, which helps customers run and reinvent their businesses with open, scalable, and modular solutions to complex IT problems.

Want to learn more about cybersecurity and the cloud from industry leaders? Check out Cyber Security & Cloud Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.

  • Duncan is an award-winning editor with more than 20 years experience in journalism. Having launched his tech journalism career as editor of Arabian Computer News in Dubai, he has since edited an array of tech and digital marketing publications, including Computer Business Review, TechWeekEurope, Figaro Digital, Digit and Marketing Gazette.

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Tags: automation, BMC, data

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Next-gen chips, Amazon Q, and speedy S3

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AWS re:Invent, which has been taking place from November 27 and runs to December 1, has had its usual plethora of announcements: a total of 21 at time of print.

Perhaps not surprisingly, given the huge potential impact of generative AI – ChatGPT officially turns one year old today – a lot of focus has been on the AI side for AWS’ announcements, including a major partnership inked with NVIDIA across infrastructure, software, and services.

Yet there has been plenty more announced at the Las Vegas jamboree besides. Here, CloudTech rounds up the best of the rest:

Next-generation chips

This was the other major AI-focused announcement at re:Invent: the launch of two new chips, AWS Graviton4 and AWS Trainium2, for training and running AI and machine learning (ML) models, among other customer workloads. Graviton4 shapes up against its predecessor with 30% better compute performance, 50% more cores and 75% more memory bandwidth, while Trainium2 delivers up to four times faster training than before and will be able to be deployed in EC2 UltraClusters of up to 100,000 chips.

The EC2 UltraClusters are designed to ‘deliver the highest performance, most energy efficient AI model training infrastructure in the cloud’, as AWS puts it. With it, customers will be able to train large language models in ‘a fraction of the time’, as well as double energy efficiency.

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As ever, AWS offers customers who are already utilising these tools. Databricks, Epic and SAP are among the companies cited as using the new AWS-designed chips.

Zero-ETL integrations

AWS announced new Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon Relational Database Services (Amazon RDS) for MySQL integrations with Amazon Redshift, AWS’ cloud data warehouse. The zero-ETL integrations – eliminating the need to build ETL (extract, transform, load) data pipelines – make it easier to connect and analyse transactional data across various relational and non-relational databases in Amazon Redshift.

A simple example of how zero-ETL functions can be seen is in a hypothetical company which stores transactional data – time of transaction, items bought, where the transaction occurred – in a relational database, but use another analytics tool to analyse data in a non-relational database. To connect it all up, companies would previously have to construct ETL data pipelines which are a time and money sink.

The latest integrations “build on AWS’s zero-ETL foundation… so customers can quickly and easily connect all of their data, no matter where it lives,” the company said.

Amazon S3 Express One Zone

AWS announced the general availability of Amazon S3 Express One Zone, a new storage class purpose-built for customers’ most frequently-accessed data. Data access speed is up to 10 times faster and request costs up to 50% lower than standard S3. Companies can also opt to collocate their Amazon S3 Express One Zone data in the same availability zone as their compute resources.  

Companies and partners who are using Amazon S3 Express One Zone include ChaosSearch, Cloudera, and Pinterest.

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Amazon Q

A new product, and an interesting pivot, again with generative AI at its core. Amazon Q was announced as a ‘new type of generative AI-powered assistant’ which can be tailored to a customer’s business. “Customers can get fast, relevant answers to pressing questions, generate content, and take actions – all informed by a customer’s information repositories, code, and enterprise systems,” AWS added. The service also can assist companies building on AWS, as well as companies using AWS applications for business intelligence, contact centres, and supply chain management.

Customers cited as early adopters include Accenture, BMW and Wunderkind.

Want to learn more about cybersecurity and the cloud from industry leaders? Check out Cyber Security & Cloud Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.

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HCLTech and Cisco create collaborative hybrid workplaces

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Digital comms specialist Cisco and global tech firm HCLTech have teamed up to launch Meeting-Rooms-as-a-Service (MRaaS).

Available on a subscription model, this solution modernises legacy meeting rooms and enables users to join meetings from any meeting solution provider using Webex devices.

The MRaaS solution helps enterprises simplify the design, implementation and maintenance of integrated meeting rooms, enabling seamless collaboration for their globally distributed hybrid workforces.

Rakshit Ghura, senior VP and Global head of digital workplace services, HCLTech, said: “MRaaS combines our consulting and managed services expertise with Cisco’s proficiency in Webex devices to change the way employees conceptualise, organise and interact in a collaborative environment for a modern hybrid work model.

“The common vision of our partnership is to elevate the collaboration experience at work and drive productivity through modern meeting rooms.”

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Alexandra Zagury, VP of partner managed and as-a-Service Sales at Cisco, said: “Our partnership with HCLTech helps our clients transform their offices through cost-effective managed services that support the ongoing evolution of workspaces.

“As we reimagine the modern office, we are making it easier to support collaboration and productivity among workers, whether they are in the office or elsewhere.”

Cisco’s Webex collaboration devices harness the power of artificial intelligence to offer intuitive, seamless collaboration experiences, enabling meeting rooms with smart features such as meeting zones, intelligent people framing, optimised attendee audio and background noise removal, among others.

Want to learn more about cybersecurity and the cloud from industry leaders? Check out Cyber Security & Cloud Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.

Tags: Cisco, collaboration, HCLTech, Hybrid, meetings

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Canonical releases low-touch private cloud MicroCloud

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Canonical has announced the general availability of MicroCloud, a low-touch, open source cloud solution. MicroCloud is part of Canonical’s growing cloud infrastructure portfolio.

It is purpose-built for scalable clusters and edge deployments for all types of enterprises. It is designed with simplicity, security and automation in mind, minimising the time and effort to both deploy and maintain it. Conveniently, enterprise support for MicroCloud is offered as part of Canonical’s Ubuntu Pro subscription, with several support tiers available, and priced per node.

MicroClouds are optimised for repeatable and reliable remote deployments. A single command initiates the orchestration and clustering of various components with minimal involvement by the user, resulting in a fully functional cloud within minutes. This simplified deployment process significantly reduces the barrier to entry, putting a production-grade cloud at everyone’s fingertips.

Juan Manuel Ventura, head of architectures & technologies at Spindox, said: “Cloud computing is not only about technology, it’s the beating heart of any modern industrial transformation, driving agility and innovation. Our mission is to provide our customers with the most effective ways to innovate and bring value; having a complexity-free cloud infrastructure is one important piece of that puzzle. With MicroCloud, the focus shifts away from struggling with cloud operations to solving real business challenges” says

In addition to seamless deployment, MicroCloud prioritises security and ease of maintenance. All MicroCloud components are built with strict confinement for increased security, with over-the-air transactional updates that preserve data and roll back on errors automatically. Upgrades to newer versions are handled automatically and without downtime, with the mechanisms to hold or schedule them as needed.

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With this approach, MicroCloud caters to both on-premise clouds but also edge deployments at remote locations, allowing organisations to use the same infrastructure primitives and services wherever they are needed. It is suitable for business-in-branch office locations or industrial use inside a factory, as well as distributed locations where the focus is on replicability and unattended operations.

Cedric Gegout, VP of product at Canonical, said: “As data becomes more distributed, the infrastructure has to follow. Cloud computing is now distributed, spanning across data centres, far and near edge computing appliances. MicroCloud is our answer to that.

“By packaging known infrastructure primitives in a portable and unattended way, we are delivering a simpler, more prescriptive cloud experience that makes zero-ops a reality for many Industries.“

MicroCloud’s lightweight architecture makes it usable on both commodity and high-end hardware, with several ways to further reduce its footprint depending on your workload needs. In addition to the standard Ubuntu Server or Desktop, MicroClouds can be run on Ubuntu Core – a lightweight OS optimised for the edge. With Ubuntu Core, MicroClouds are a perfect solution for far-edge locations with limited computing capabilities. Users can choose to run their workloads using Kubernetes or via system containers. System containers based on LXD behave similarly to traditional VMs but consume fewer resources while providing bare-metal performance.

Coupled with Canonical’s Ubuntu Pro + Support subscription, MicroCloud users can benefit from an enterprise-grade open source cloud solution that is fully supported and with better economics. An Ubuntu Pro subscription offers security maintenance for the broadest collection of open-source software available from a single vendor today. It covers over 30k packages with a consistent security maintenance commitment, and additional features such as kernel livepatch, systems management at scale, certified compliance and hardening profiles enabling easy adoption for enterprises. With per-node pricing and no hidden fees, customers can rest assured that their environment is secure and supported without the expensive price tag typically associated with cloud solutions.

Want to learn more about cybersecurity and the cloud from industry leaders? Check out Cyber Security & Cloud Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.

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Tags: automation, Canonical, MicroCloud, private cloud

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