Note: This video is part of our monthly series “T3M” aka “TFiR Topic Of The Month”; the topic for January was Cost Cutting vs Cost Efficiency.

Guest: Joseph George (LinkedIn)
Company: BMC Software (Twitter)

BMC Software provides automation, operations, and service management solutions to more than 85% of Fortune 100 enterprises. In this episode of TFiR: T3M, Swapnil Bhartiya sits down with VP Product Management for Digital Service and Operations Management Joseph George to talk about the market trends he is seeing, particularly in terms of cost cutting and cost efficiency.

Current trends in the market:

• Organizations are scrutinizing their investments and IT spending.
• It’s no longer just about savings, but about optimizing investments to get quick returns and solve larger problems.
• AI/ML is helping companies become cost effective by reducing noise, finding root causes, and basically generating human-readable messages.

Companies need to optimize their valuable asset, i.e., their people, by:

• Ensuring they are engaged and productive. Expensive employees should be focused on where they can add most value to the organization.
• Having an efficient onboarding/offboarding process.
• Having effective knowledge sharing/transfer.
• Enabling self-service and automating manual repetitive tasks.

BMC is focusing on:

• AIOps, i.e., taking data from multiple tools, bringing that together, and applying intelligent algorithms and AI/ML technologies. They have a knowledge graph-based approach that’s actually starting to do this more efficiently than humans.
• For almost a year now, they’ve been using the precursor to GPT-3, which is basically the platform that’s been used by ChatGPT. They’re using an enterprise scale version internally to automate the creation of messages that customers see to understand what’s happening.

To be cost efficient, companies need to:

• Prioritize by understanding, from an IT perspective, their system dependencies and how they impact the business.
• Make sure they have the right resources in the right place to meet SLAs.
• Make sure they have the budget for it.
• Understand patterns of usage so that there are no idle assets.
• Check for optimization opportunities in a Kubernetes environment, both at the cluster and container levels.
• Look ahead and do what-if analysis.
• Determine if the business metrics vary.
• Shift the mindset from a capacity optimization/capacity planning approach to continuous optimization, continuous cost and budget optimization.

This summary was written by Camille Gregory.