Guest: Margaret Lee (LinkedIn)
Company: BMC Software (LinkedIn, Twitter)

BMC has been busy transforming the company and its product portfolio. It recently announced a significant product innovation around its BMC Helix platform for ServiceOps. It is clear that its approach to ServiceOps goes beyond just combining service and operations management.

In this episode of TFiR Let’s Talk recorded at the BMC Exchange Miami, Swapnil Bhartiya sits down with Margaret Lee, GM and SVP of Digital Services and Operations Management at BMC Software, to discuss how BMC Helix is helping organizations achieve their ServiceOps objectives.

Key highlights of this video interview:

• The BMC Exchange has allowed Lee to finally meet customers, industry analysts, and press analysts in person, after being stuck in Zoom meetings during the pandemic. She feels that there is a lot of pent-up energy to talk live about BMC products and offerings.
• ServiceOps is the combination of service management and operations management—from IT service desk all the way through to end operations, monitoring alerts, and automation. BMC Helix helps customers accelerate their ServiceOps objectives by streamlining processes, using integrated AI for faster decision-making, and enabling strong collaboration.
• BMC has invested deeply in the Helix platform, focusing on two key areas: making sure that the data on the data layer is visible across service and operations; and enabling customers to extend their IT service management as an ERP-type application.
• BMC has been building out the Helix platform and introducing a lot of AI capabilities, such as Proactive Problem Management and Incident Clustering to make it easier for service desk teams to handle large volumes of tickets coming in. Lee also explains their investments in AI in Ops Management and how it is helping teams deal with events and incoming alerts.
• BMC’s history in the IT infrastructure software space started about 40 years ago and has undergone its own transformations in the past year.
• BMC’s portfolio is used by 6% of Fortune 500 companies. These are large, global companies with multiple generations of technology in production. Although many of these companies are moving to the cloud and are building containers, a single business transaction can go through many technologies. Since BMC has been involved in every generation of technologies, it uses all of them and it understands the importance of performance, availability, and visibility.
• Telecommunication is a key vertical for BMC and they have many Helix customers in that sector. With the build-out of 5G, many operators are looking at being able to handle the traffic and the increase in the number of devices. BMC sees edge computing as a tremendous growth opportunity and is prepared for it.
• BMC’s Helix platform can help a lot of use cases from cloud-native startup companies who are looking for end-to-end service and operations management. However, the company also supports their longest-serving customers who have the most complex environments.

The summary of the show is written by Emily Nicholls.