BMC Expands Its AI Toolset: Agentic AI to Automation

At BMC Software’s recent annual event, BMC Connect, the company announced major news on two different fronts. First, BMC unveiled an array of AI tools to support digital services, greatly expanding its existing AI toolset. The new tools span the IT sector, from AI features that modernize mainframe systems to agentic AI that will drive today’s virtual workforce. Additionally, the company announced it is creating two stand-alone, independent companies, and will divide its existing product lines between the two new entities. In this major corporate restructuring, one company will be called BMC, and will focus on the automation and mainframe sectors. The other company will be called BMC Helix, and will focus on digital services and operational management.

The BMC event, held in Las Vegas, attracted thousands of customers, IT experts, and analysts. I attended and spoke with company executives about BMC’s new products and directions.

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

• BMC’s decision to create two stand-alone companies will enable it to focus deeply on product innovation within the two new companies.  (Jump to Section)
• The “new BMC” will speed innovation and deepen its approach to solving real-world, practical problems for clients. (Jump to Section)
• The companies’ new and upgraded tools span the gamut of enterprise IT, including the most forward-looking use of generative AI. (Jump to Section)

The New BMC

At the event, the company positioned itself as the “new BMC,” and between the debut of new tools and the corporate restructuring, a new approach is clearly in progress. I spoke with Ayman Sayed, CEO of BMC, about the strategy behind the corporate restructuring.

“The concept of the new BMC is something we’ve been working on for several years now,” he said, explaining that the company’s goal is to boost the rate of innovation. “How do we make sure that where we’re innovating solves a real-life problem for our customers? That we’re hitting a sweet spot where it’s not technology for technology’s sake, but technology to improve and speed up business outcomes?”

Sayed said the company has poured resources into developing its product lines. “We’ve invested heavily in areas of data, AI, AIOps, intelligent automation, modernizing the mainframe, and in automating a lot of the operational management.”

BMC’s desire to further support this innovation is driving its decision to create two firms. This move will enable each company to take its respective toolset to a higher level. “Each of these companies is going to be laser-focused on their respective space,” Sayed said. “We see a great benefit in speeding up our innovation cycle, quicker time to market, and the ability to focus on these two spaces for our customers.”

Clearly, both companies will be positioned to play to their relative strength. The first, BMC, will be the larger company in terms of revenue. Its focus on automation targets a rapid growth area, and its investment in the mainframe area will also find a bankable audience. Although the mainframe is not trendy like AI, the mainframe sector remains a pillar of enterprise IT and is forecast to reap solid annual growth into the 2030s.

The second firm, BMC Helix, benefits from its array of IT service tools, a suite that is widely regarded as a top contender in the competitive ServiceOps and AIOps tools category.

I spoke with Charles Betz, VP, Research Director of Enterprise Architecture at Forrester, to assess BMC Helix’s future in the market.

“In the Helix line in particular, BMC is essentially correct when they say that they have strong world-class offerings,” Betz said. “Our research has shown that for a long time, they have absolutely been in highly competitive leadership positions in our evaluative research, the Forrester Wave, in enterprise service management and AIOps in particular.” The Helix platform and its tools are “very tightly integrated, very unified, great for organizations with the largest operational problems,” he said.

Focus on Customer Service and Relationships

To get a sense of BMC’s approach to partnering with customers, I spoke with Jon Ozanne, the CIO of Balfour Beatty, a leading international infrastructure company based in the UK.

“Five years ago, when we entered the relationship with BMC, we were paying more than we should have with a competitor,” he said. After switching to BMC, Balfour Beatty has been happy with its services. “We found an organization that wanted to partner, that wanted to be practical in its delivery and not sell you all the things that you didn’t need,” Ozanne said. “Since then, we’ve built relationships, they’ve delivered what they said they were going to, and we’ve found areas where we can exploit their applications more.”

These applications include tools in BMC’s Helix solution, which Balfour Beatty uses to streamline functions across finance, HR, procurement, and IT. The Helix solution “deals with user issues and it’s very mature,” Ozanne said. For example, it’s integrated with the company supply chain to help users request new items. “I don’t hold a stock of laptops, but BMC will orchestrate new starter requests from the HR supply chain, mobilize for the laptop supply chain, mobilize for the bag, this all comes together and it gets shipped out to the users.”

This creates a “no touch” workflow. “So it’s not just about taking noise out of the system,” Ozanne said. “It’s about giving real predictability and visibility to our employees around when events are going to occur.”

New Tools, New Approaches

BMC unveiled new AI products at BMC Connect, including offerings for automation, edge computing, the mainframe, AIOps, and agentic AI. The uniting factor of these new tools is that they all work to support today’s heterogeneous computing environment. They not only support today’s multicloud environment but also support infrastructures that combine emerging tech with entrenched legacy tech.

BMC HelixGPT: Now with Agentic AI

BMC Helix is the company’s suite of SaaS tools that support an extended menu of service and operations management, orchestration, automation, and data processes. Forrester’s Betz noted that BMC Helix “competes head-to-head with ServiceNow” in the fast-moving IT service management and enterprise service management sectors.

Among its many tools, the Helix suite includes:

• BMC Helix for Observability and AIOps: Enables businesses to monitor and manage their AIOps platform faster and more efficiently.
• BMC Helix Virtual Agent: Interacts in real-time with users/customers, accessing a knowledge base to support self-service.
• BMC Helix Business Workflows: Provides services in an automated and managed manner; fully cloud native.

Now, BMC is taking Helix to a higher level by building in agentic AI, a technology that is gaining extraordinarily rapid adoption across the enterprise tech sector. Agentic AI uses AI to make an exponential leap in functionality over a basic generative AI app. While ChatGPT, for instance, can perform one task at a time, an agentic AI bot performs a series of tasks in sequence, with each task built on the results of the previous ones. An agentic AI bot is a true “colleague” for a worker.

BMC Helix’s agentic AI bots will work alongside tech professionals, assisting, automating, curating, and streamlining. Helix’s use of agentic AI enables improved automation, deeper insights, and ultimately better outcomes in AIOps.

Helix already benefits from generative AI via the HelixGPT solution, which uses gen AI to drive actionable results in the many products in the Helix toolkit. For the Virtual Agent, HelixGPT supports conversational access to the enterprise knowledge base. In DevOps, it balances speed and risk, reducing challenges using an AI-supported change risk scoring. It can also assist with change governance and enhance innovation.

BMC AMI: Generative AI Assists Developers

The BMC AMI product is one that I personally find quite fascinating. AMI Assistant uses generative AI to provide support for mainframe developers. In other words, it combines the most longstanding technology, mainframes—first introduced in the 1960s—with today’s most current technology, generative AI, first introduced in 2022.

A challenge for mainframes is that they’ve been in operation so long that some of their leading practitioners are retiring. BMC’s AMI Assistant addresses this by incorporating a generative AI element that allows every developer—even less experienced developers—to be a versatile mainframe developer.

John McKenny, SVP and General Manager, Intelligent Z Optimization and Transformation at BMC, told me that many large language models can support AMI. Customers can mix and match LLMs so that AMI Assistant works best for them.

“You have a large language model that can help you with an explanation of COBOL code, Java code, Python code, and I can go on and on,” McKenny said. “So our approach with our AMI platform is to enable our customers to choose the large language model they want for the specific use case.”

AMI Assistant breathes new life into the powerful mainframe environment. “I think more and more customers will continue to look at the processes they use to develop and manage and secure the [mainframe] platform,” McKenny said. “So they’re more interested and more flexible in looking at and thinking about change.”

BMC Helix Edge: AI and Edge Computing

Edge computing, in which a network of remote computing devices—typically sensors—are connected across an extended environment, is growing at a torrid rate: Grand View Research forecasts a combined annual growth rate ranging from 28 to 33.6 percent between now and 2032.

BMC’s Helix Edge uses AI to enhance the data collection that a network’s sensors are designed to harvest. It also supports analytics in any location within the network that needs lifecycle and inventory management using digital twin technology. Additionally, BMC is using its expertise in service management, asset management, and automation to the edge to enhance the company’s operations technology.

In our recent conversation, Ram Chakravarti, CTO of BMC, detailed why the company decided to bring BMC Helix Edge to market. “In a variety of industries with physical assets, we’re seeing a significant opportunity to harness value from those assets, extend the lifecycle and performance,” he said. “We built [Helix Edge] from the ground up—it’s purpose-built for the edge, and we’re finding tremendous potential there across any industry with a physical asset, aviation and other forms of transportation, communication, manufacturing, retail, you name it, it’s there. So we’re pretty excited for this opportunity.”

Control-M: Supporting a Multicloud World

If you survey the tech landscape, it’s clear that automation is a driving force across an evolving landscape that includes on-premise, hybrid cloud, and multicloud. Long before AI became a buzzword, automation was creating major efficiencies that enabled human workers freedom from certain manual tasks.

Control-M is a business automation platform that enables IT pros to monitor and manage business workflows. To enhance this product, the company has debuted two innovations:

• Unified View: Provides a single pane of glass for SaaS and on-premises orchestration.
• Data Assurance: Identifies and enables management of data problems at a nascent stage so they don’t impact software and AI models in other parts of the system, providing observability for data health (this solution is currently in beta).

I spoke with Gur Steif, President, Digital Business Automation at BMC, about Control-M, which has been named a leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms (SOAP).

“Our mission for customers is: how do we simplify and abstract the technology complexity? Control-M is positioned for that,” he said, “because we’ve done this from the days of the mainframe all the way to cloud containers and beyond.”

As BMC has developed its automation platform, the chief focus has never been the thousands of data pipelines that get automated. Instead, the objective “is to have customers focus on what drives their business,” Steif said. “[The automation] is a means to an end, but the business value is driven by an executive that understands what’s going on in their environment and what they need to do to run the business better.”

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