Better visibility > better context > better decisions.
I had the opportunity to speak with Vijay Kurkal, CEO and Julie Albright, SVP of Global Marketing for Resolve Systems. I began by asking about how they see the Covid-19 pandemic affecting companies’ business continuity and infrastructure.
Vijay sees the pandemic accelerating adoption and demand. Global 2000 businesses have seen their business shift online over the last two to three months and the pandemic is likely consolidating a 10-year adoption into two years. There is pressure on every IT department to deliver a seamless customer experience (CX) overnight as well as supporting internal stakeholders consuming digital service remotely with a need for VPN, teleconferencing, and the import and export of distributed data and files. Everyone is consuming more digital services and the IT team is working remotely with no more budget. The only way to meet the new demand is to drive automation and AIOps to get more done without a bigger budget or more headcount.
Retail business has shifted online as there are dramatically reduced interactions with people. This puts more pressure on technology and applications to facilitate these touchless services. Automation needs to be a strategic capability organization-wide. Resolve acquired FixStream Systems in 2019 to facilitate proactive and prescriptive monitoring of infrastructure health. Enterprises are reacting to a world of remote workers and need to be able to do more with less. Resolve is providing prebuilt automation to support common situations like VPN access, outages, and security. Pre-built automation enables customers to see the possibilities and make it easy for them to begin their automation journey with networks, security, and service desks.
Today, companies that are not as far along in their digital transformation are researching automation possibilities and solutions. Vijay suggests they take a “crawl, walk, run” approach beginning with tickets, issues, and alerts that may be hindering productivity. Use these to identify patterns and unacceptable mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR) that is hurting revenue, productivity, and customer satisfaction. Once potential use cases are identified, Resolve goes through their prebuilt library of automation and identifies five or six near-term use cases where it’s easy to realize positive results that can be shared with the rest of the enterprise. Auto-discovery
and dependency mapping helps companies get their ITSM house in order and get a holistic view of the infrastructure.
The most prevalent use cases are automated discovery and dependency mapping and service desk transformation. Agentless auto-discovery enables IT organizations to quickly discover all of the compute, network, and storage entities across the dynamic, hybrid IT environment without deploying any agents. Dependency mapping tracks dynamic, multi-layer relationships between applications and hybrid infrastructure, and creates rich, visual topology maps to facilitate operations. The first wave of ITSM controls tickets and requests but still requires a manual response. Automation drives significant changes with tasks, chatbots, and AIOps all driving faster and more efficient responses.
The biggest hindrance to massive adoption is preexisting siloes. Automation helps deliver better service throughout the technology stack. Champions are needed to drive organization-wide transformation - compute, infrastructure, network, security, and service desk. All of this is led by a visionary and change-oriented CIO.
IT organizations can be slow to innovate and typically have a lot of tribal knowledge. While IT process automation is complex, once it is done and repeatable processes are automated, adoption accelerates and enterprises are able to deliver seamless digital experiences for customers and stakeholders while reducing costs.