TEC37 E02: AIOps & App Loyalty

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Robb Boyd:

Welcome to TEC37. It's the podcast for technology education and collaboration from World Wide Technology, I'm Robb Boyd. Today this episode, we're talking AIOps and APM 8:00 PM. We're talking about these things across actually a three part series where we get increasingly prescriptive about what these things can do for you moving forward.

Robb Boyd:

Well, let's get started by introducing our two experts for today. First and foremost, immediately to my side here, we've got Tanner Bechtel, World Wide Technology, Global director, AIOps, and APM. Welcome.

Tanner Bechtel:

Thanks for having us, Robb.

Robb Boyd:

Glad to have you. Also Gregg Ostrowski from AppDynamics, Regional CTO, I should say of AppDynamics. Greg, thanks for joining us.

Gregg Ostrowski:

How you doing Robb? Glad to be here.

Robb Boyd:

I'm doing well. I always enjoy these conversations and you guys are sharp. You very much fit the mold of what we're doing. We're talking AIOps and when it comes to AIOps, I think the natural place to start here is just make sure we all understand the definition. So let me start with you, Tanner AIOps, what do we mean by that? How would you begin to break that down?

Tanner Bechtel:

Sure. It's a complicated definition, one that I think gets construed across a lot of different branding materials and go to market ideas and messages, but ultimately we see it as a pretty simple interoperability for IT tool sets across the enterprise. So utilizing artificial intelligence and machine learning to make your entire enterprise architecture more effective, more cost effective, and really deliver the consumer experience, the individualized technology experience.

Robb Boyd:

Okay. So it sounds like there's... the AI part of course, is where we start talking about the machines taking over and maybe taking jobs and stuff. I don't know, Gregg, what are you saying? What's your definition on AIOps? How would you expand on what he started with there?

Gregg Ostrowski:

When you look at AIOps overall, you have a problem that we're addressing through-

Robb Boyd:

Good point. Lets get in to that.

Gregg Ostrowski:

... into the next evolution of technology here. So you look at the overall application landscape and the complexities that are now introduced in the environment, adding things from cloud services, infrastructure network, more and more advanced technologies for developing applications to make them slick and elegant to run. What happened now is because things have grown to be such a more of an interconnected and interdependent type of environment. You now have expanded past the capabilities of human behavior to be able to address these things in a much faster, rapid pace that keeps up with the demand of the end user.

Gregg Ostrowski:

So AIOps is really about building in some analytical technologies that allow you to absorb more data, to be able to make fast decisions on real time data coming through, and then building an automation to build out what's seen as a self healing, self repairing, self protecting self optimizing type of environment and that way folks can focus on innovation versus focusing on keeping everything running, where, building out that AIOps platform is really how folks need to start building out the roadmap and thinking into the future.

Tanner Bechtel:

Right. I'm going to add to that too-

Gregg Ostrowski:

Please do.

Tanner Bechtel:

... actually, Robb, if you're okay with it. What he's talking about there is this over complexity of the enterprise architecture, right? What have we done? We just made this more... We made it better, but in the process we made it intensely complicated, right? So what we are doing is really figuring out ways to simplify that and realize the one thing that's become truly important, which is the end user experience. If you're booking a flight to see your aunt Martha in Chicago, you really don't care whether that lives in the cloud. You don't care whether it lives on-prem. You don't care if it's a Kubernetes app, it doesn't really matter. At the end of the day, you care about the experience and AIOps is about simplifying the complexity of what we've created to deliver really down to the user experience, automating that process, making it cost effective and really delivering the end user experience.

Robb Boyd:

I want to touch on this a little bit more here and really make sure that we're not setting up any misperceptions, because as you mentioned that we have created a lot of complexity. And obviously I think being the global we-

Tanner Bechtel:

We. Gregg and I.

Robb Boyd:

You worked for World Wide Technology. You've worked in this space for a long time. Gregg you've been in IT your entire life. I feel like it's important to understand unless I'm wrong and you guys correct me that we collectively, the industry has grown into this out of necessity. You know, we keep improving things in our unique individual domains, of course, things get faster and smarter and things like this, but it feels like the problem has happened is that despite all good intentions, this is a natural outcome of the fact that as things get faster and better within their silos, all of a sudden we begin realizing that we need to make decisions or the business needs to be able to make decisions about things that encompass multiple silos.

Gregg Ostrowski:

That's right.

Robb Boyd:

Is that an important understanding for this to be appreciated?

Gregg Ostrowski:

Yeah, that's a very fair statement. Going back to where the problem starts, I shouldn't say problem, and we've all advanced technically speaking, right? If you look at the way that that applications have become the business, the pendulum has shifted where it used to be consumerization of IT about a decade ago, where folks lost faith and technologists being able to drive the business. Where now that pendulum's shifted completely back to the hands of the technologists, because if you look at the whole app space, I mean, in the way that everyone acts on a daily basis, I mean, we all wake up and the first thing we do is we check our phone. You know, we're doing things, we're logging, checking our email or messages things in social media.

Gregg Ostrowski:

I personally go and log in to check my bank account on a daily basis. Not because I have to, but because I can. There's this mindset-

Robb Boyd:

Because you have teenagers, don't you?

Gregg Ostrowski:

I have teenagers, yes. I have teenagers but-

Robb Boyd:

I got stories, buddy.

Gregg Ostrowski:

... if I check it four times during the day, every time I log in-

Robb Boyd:

It's different.

Gregg Ostrowski:

... that bank account goes down. It's funny. It never goes back up.

Robb Boyd:

Mm-mm (negative).

Gregg Ostrowski:

But if you look at the way, the demands that the end user has on these applications has become to a point where they're just using them as a reflex. You're just going in and using the application and they're always dependent on them and when they go down, when they fail on them, they're very, very upset, right? They're not a happy camper and they want that, that really crisp experience and if a company is failing to provide that experience, their customer's going to leave.

Gregg Ostrowski:

They're going to abandon their digital services and their company overall. So now you look at this dependency from that business side that goes into the IT departments, and then you kind of extrapolate that, you know, what does my business look like in terms of those silos? The end game, the end goal has to be my user experience, broken down into individual silos between different domains of knowledge. You know, the folks that run the network, the folks that run the infrastructure, the database, the application, and then you have the business team on the opposite side, thinking, okay, what's going on here? Why is my conversion rates going down? Why is revenue dipping? Why is my user base going down? And then you combine that with the silos of saying, oh, my network's fine. It's not me. My database is fine. It's not me, but you have this lack of cross-communication.

Gregg Ostrowski:

So the whole AIOps market is really about knocking down those silos, putting everybody on the same playing field so that you have the understanding of, I made changes on my network, this is how it affects the application. I made changes on my application, this is how it affects the network, so that you have this common set of tooling that goes over top of it, that everyone has the same understanding and mindset.

Robb Boyd:

Tanner, it sounds like a cultural shift is what we're talking about here.

Tanner Bechtel:

Yeah. I was just going to say that.

Robb Boyd:

Okay.

Tanner Bechtel:

Yeah.

Robb Boyd:

Expand on that.

Tanner Bechtel:

We opened this up-

Robb Boyd:

How do you tackle something like that?

Tanner Bechtel:

Sure. We opened this up and I think Gregg and I both used the same language a little bit like the problems, challenge, et cetera. The concept of what AIOps is, has been done by people forever, right? As a software engineer, myself, if something went wrong, you put a room full of people, you call it the war room, right? You stuck them in the same room and you had network engineers and software engineers and database architects and they all sat at a table and we use the term now MTTI, meantime to identify a problem, but ultimately it's like meantime to innocence. I've heard somebody that'd be say like, how quickly, but-

Robb Boyd:

That one makes more sense to me. [crosstalk 00:08:37]

Tanner Bechtel:

... it's not my fault. And the other part is like, "Oh God, what if I took down the whole application?" But the reality is that we have been trying to solve these problems one to one for a long time, as we have gotten more complex and not complex for the sake of complexity, but complex for the sake of performance, it just has gotten bigger than people can manage effectively individually. So AIOps is really saying, okay, how do we start to isolate high value decision making?

Tanner Bechtel:

Like, instead of just having somebody sitting there monitoring, I'm monitoring the knock and I'm monitoring the app and I'm monitoring the cloud and we have to share that data to make any sense of it. If we're measuring all of these sets of data and we're essentially experiencing same correlated problems, right.

Robb Boyd:

Yeah.

Tanner Bechtel:

So I know if my cloud space runs out that I get the same type of error at the app in this way. So let's start to use AI instead of this AI to start isolating those problems and saying, "Hey, wait a minute. The last time these two things happen in sequence. I know that within 48 hours, we had a major outage at the P1 incident level or whatever."

Tanner Bechtel:

So we were starting to automate those processes and give the smart decision making back to people. So you asked about jobs.

Robb Boyd:

Yeah.

Tanner Bechtel:

Is this signal, the robots taking over the data center? Absolutely not. It puts people back into high value decision making positions, which is what helps us continue to advance technology, right? They're out of the seat of monitoring their window and back to the point of making and advancing technology.

Robb Boyd:

Something occurs to me here when you were bringing up the fact that all these advancements, it's not pointing fingers at anybody of course, and we're all suffering from it. You know, things get faster. Domain expertise gets deeper, but then we begin to realize, now we get to a certain point that we've achieved much as an industry, but it seems to me that what we're also saying with AIOps is we're saying, where's that next big growth going to come from? Because it feels like we're maybe operating at max capacity, given the chaos that it creates when we don't have a way to kind of interconnect these different bits of information so that they can be shared more readily. So proactive decisions can be made, so that as I think... as I would paraphrase it, so we let machines do the stuff we really don't want to do and aren't good at doing.

Gregg Ostrowski:

Right.

Robb Boyd:

Which frees us up to do the stuff that machines aren't good at doing, which ostensibly are more strategic and bigger thinking and more important for just for being distinctive and competitive. I would say in each of our individual markets. So AIOps, in the sense to me, sounds like something that is about how do we get to that next level? Because so many businesses, I would guess, are actually running as hard as they can now, but they're at their peak chaos, in terms of each individual thing may do as well as it does, but if it cohesively is at its max, then you've got challenges.

Tanner Bechtel:

Yeah. And we've been doing this forever, right? I mean-

Robb Boyd:

Yeah, you worked with a lot of the customers too.

Tanner Bechtel:

... with the advent of the calculator, right? I mean, we started this process this long ago, what we were doing. I think what they signify for the first time is it's not just interoperability. It's not just integration. Getting data together is something we've become very good at in tech, right. APIs have made it possible to share data across platforms everywhere. It's like the car we talk about this, the car.

Tanner Bechtel:

The car was invented to solve a problem, right? Monitoring was created to solve a problem. APM solves a problem. The next step for us as a partnership is really to take that and say, okay, what other things can we now do with it? We can advance this thing that we needed. We absolutely need monitoring tools in their silos.

Tanner Bechtel:

We definitely need to be able to monitor the network. We have to monitor their application performance. But two things have kind of dynamically shifted. One, we've been overwhelmed with the complexity of the application architecture and two, we have become application centric. It doesn't matter who you are, auto parts store. You, sell pizzas, or you're a global healthcare company. It doesn't really matter. Now you are measured, unfortunately by the bar of standard that organizations like Google set. 300 milliseconds is I think, Gregg it might've changed, but it used to be 300 milliseconds is the point in which when you click search, you begin to think, I might go elsewhere. I'm tired of waiting. 300 milliseconds. What is wrong with us?

Robb Boyd:

Very impatient.

Gregg Ostrowski:

Yeah.

Tanner Bechtel:

What have we done to the industry [crosstalk 00:13:09] far.

Gregg Ostrowski:

Exactly. Yeah. Patience is definitely tested here, right?

Tanner Bechtel:

Yeah.

Gregg Ostrowski:

It's and it's a matter of... you have things you depend on.

Robb Boyd:

Yeah.

Gregg Ostrowski:

Right. It's the same thing as like going to flick a light switch, you depend on that light turning on.

Robb Boyd:

Do we.

Gregg Ostrowski:

You depend on your application when you log in, it logs you in and gives you what you want.

Robb Boyd:

Let me-

Gregg Ostrowski:

You ever have a panic situation when you log into your bank? And then all of a sudden there's a problem on the banking application. You can't get your... you're like, "Oh my God, am I being hacked? Is something going wrong."

Robb Boyd:

Something you go through every morning, Gregg? It sounds like. Yeah.

Gregg Ostrowski:

Yeah.

Robb Boyd:

Let me shift for a second here, because Gregg, you work for AppDynamics and I'm going to put on a cynical hat. I remember I was at Cisco when they acquired AppDynamics and I still don't fully understand the depth of what can be done because on one hand, I would say AppDynamics is both just a case study in the beauty of simplicity, born out of complexity, in terms of the way you can just instantly drill down and flesh out stuff that you never would have seen before. It is a fantastic platform, but the cynical side of me, and maybe this is from working with customers, some of whom love Cisco, some of which we're always looking for a way to find something wrong, but it's in this, this is a three part series that we're working on here and today our objective is to set up and make sure we fully understand the problem, fully understand what AIOps proposes to do, but we're purposefully for this episode only not getting really prescriptive.

Robb Boyd:

What keeps us from someone saying, "Oh, this is why Gregg's on the call today because he works for AppD and really this just a big flowery way for us to say this AIOps are calling it AIOps," but all they really want us to do is buy a tool and that tool will be AppD. I think AppD is great, but I would guess that that's probably not the only answer. How would you respond?

Gregg Ostrowski:

That's one of the answers. The real answer... Let me just go back to what I said before with the user experience, being the top notch problem that everybody wants to address. When you look at Cisco, Cisco has the network, they have the infrastructure, they've got the security business, and you look at all those components. When we talked about earlier about having all the different domain knowledge and understanding the full stack of the application, AppD fits in there beautifully because now that spans across and completes the overall portfolio so that you have the visibility into the network, into the infrastructure, whether it be cloud on-premise, whether it be the security elements, and then also understanding that user experience on how that all ties together.

Gregg Ostrowski:

So when you start thinking about domain knowledge and understanding the full stack of the application, by Cisco acquiring AppDynamics, it really fills a really strong gap that it was in the overall portfolio to allow companies to have that full stack visibility, right? So it's a matter of addressing that area. Cisco is very cloud focused, very user experience-focused, and they really understand that, the applications are really what drive the business and at the end of the day, it's a great synergy between how we work with Cisco, how we work with third parties, you know, guys like Tanner, phenomenal to help us out in that regard too, because WWT understands that full stack extremely well and helps us drive our products that's forward and solve the problems for the customers at the end of the day.

Robb Boyd:

Well, Tanner, let me come to you then. Now, that's a great point and obviously setting you up for that, Gregg, because I do believe in what AppD can do, but I also know that shame on us, if we should ever say that we're here to sell you a tool that will solve all your problems. I would say World Wide Technology actually has built their entire business for quite some time now successfully never saying that to customers because they work with multiple manufacturers, some of which Cisco probably doesn't care for, but that doesn't matter because it's not about what Cisco wants or anything like that, or what AppD wants. It's really what the customer wants. And World Wide Technology, you guys have been set up to do this.

Robb Boyd:

I'd like for you to explain kind of what... we've been talking about, what is AIOps, but talk about what it isn't, because I know from previous discussions with you, you would say that it's not a tool, but what else is it not to make sure we're really honing in on exactly what we're dealing with here?

Tanner Bechtel:

No, I think that's a great question and this is something that we did as an exercise internally at the beginning of this process is to say, this is what led us down this path as a partial story is that I understood that there was more we could accomplish here. I understood that we could get further with what we're doing in APM. And so I started looking around for who had these tools, like who could deliver on this promise. What I found is that it was pretty hard to come by. First thing we did is try to figure out, okay, let's build our own definition of this.

Tanner Bechtel:

Let's quit talking and start doing, let's start creating this, which is funny because we're talking about it right now. Our intent, we will show this as the second episode or the third, but our goal was really to say, okay, we are in the business of being the advocate for the client. So what is it? And what is it not? And how do we start providing this pathway and being a guide for people?

Tanner Bechtel:

The first thing it's not is impossible. It's not five years away. It's not an idea that only major enterprises can reach. It's very straightforward. I applaud Cisco for having the vision to acquire AppDynamics, to see the very first step of that. And that is really, you can't change what you can't measure, right? And truly in an application environment, you have to know how the user experiences the application. So is it a product? Yeah, it's a product, but what it also is, is architecture. It's not a standard. So that is something else that it's not, right?

Tanner Bechtel:

It's not impossible. It's not standard. Every organization has different business objectives. It requires expertise. World Wide has... I think that's what makes our partnership so strong with an organization like AppDynamics is that they come to the table full well, understanding that they own a space and they deliver it incredibly well, but they also need a partner that can say, okay, let's plug you into and configure you to the overall enterprise architecture.

Tanner Bechtel:

So let's start talking about, Cisco has done this as well, too. Like Crosswork Situation Manager, they've added Seawall. They've got a number of different products [crosstalk 00:19:46]. That's absolutely right. So it is as much. It's a great symbiosis between us and a company like Cisco, because it allows us to both do what we do best. Ours is understanding expertise and services and delivery and understanding customer objectives, being that ombudsman for their business and AppDynamics allows us to measure exactly what all of that.

Tanner Bechtel:

If you think about the funnel of technology that we build, the data center, call it, right? All of that technology goes one thing and that's delivered that individual customer experience. So for us, the initial building block is really to say, okay, let's measure that. Let's see how it affects them. And then let's make decisions and integrate other points of data so that we can start to automate the decision making around that.

Tanner Bechtel:

So it's really, it's not impossible. That's what I want people to take away. It's not impossible. You need a guide just like you wouldn't set off on a journey to the top of Everest, without a partner, right? You'd have somebody who's been there before. You'd have somebody who understands the terrain, who can provide you the right gear to get there. And you have to have the courage to do it. And that sounds hokey, but it does require a cultural shift. It requires CIOs or leaders or lines of business leaders to make decisions that say-

Robb Boyd:

You just got to see the... You'd have to see a bigger picture, right?

Gregg Ostrowski:

Yeah. Absolutely.

Tanner Bechtel:

You got people afraid for their jobs. You have people who really like their domain. Sometimes the people protect themselves inside of their silos. Like their fiefdom. You have to start making IT people understand that business objectives drive IT development and the changes that it makes affect business performance, you know, getting those two things to lock up and those two people to start seeing the world in the same way. So it's a cultural shift. It's a journey. You know, it's something that you're not going to get to tomorrow, we can't. If you gave at least all the money in the world, well, we probably could. Gregg and I could.

Robb Boyd:

Yeah. We'll spend time working on that. Yeah.

Tanner Bechtel:

You can go in and just flip a switch, right? You can't just flip it on. You have to build the blocks. You have to build the path and you have to go together-

Robb Boyd:

Well, let me ask you-

Tanner Bechtel:

... go together, go far, go alone, go fast, right? Well, that's kind of how it breaks down.

Robb Boyd:

Let's pursue another angle at the other extreme, which is because I know you've worked with a lot of different customers that come in. Is it possible that a customer comes to you and goes, "I agree with the principles of what we want to do. I'm coming to World Wide Technology, wwt.com to get the platform and if not reach out to... or just go, I need I need to talk to, I need to talk to somebody important."

Tanner Bechtel:

[inaudible 00:22:22]

Robb Boyd:

But is it possible that a customer comes in and that as you start to understand the organization, you can begin pointing out places where they already have a lot of tools that maybe aren't being used to the extent that they could be or to the... Because I find that so much of the time. I remember when we were all kids, maybe just me and Gregg, I think we're a little older than you, but when we were kids, I remember if I had a chance to play with something that was anywhere near technology, I would get to know the heck out of that thing, because it was the only thing I had.

Robb Boyd:

And so, either you read the stories of Bill Gates in the early days and all this kind of stuff and it's always about people who just hyper-focus and extract every bit of value, plus a bunch of stuff you never would've thought you could have done with that particular tool. Nowadays, we're so overwhelmed with software updates and things are pushing out that I'd say the opposite problem happens. Now we never get a chance to really explore the genius that is probably built into the tool sets that we've already purchased. How often are you seeing people come in and you're going, "Hey, I think we could use what you already have in a much more intelligent manner before we even look at new tools?"

Tanner Bechtel:

I'll give you two answers in context all the time.

Robb Boyd:

Okay.

Tanner Bechtel:

All the time. That's one of the areas that we show people which we'll do in these second and third episode of this. We show people the architecture and kind of our reference architecture of how we build key important components to AIOps. And they almost every time they say, "Man that's a ton of stuff." And we'd say, "Yeah, but you've got eight of these things already, you're just not utilizing them." World Wide Technology as a whole, we see this all the time, almost every customer. That's why you just mentioned the platform, right? wwt.com. We build labs. We build... there's articles and research and all of our R&D that happens in the ATC ends up on wwt.com.

Tanner Bechtel:

That's the whole purpose because people don't leverage either integrations or technical capabilities of the tool sets they've got. When we start looking at AIOps and you'll see if you go out there and you search AIOps on the platform, you'll see that we've taken labs from lots of different tool sets, integrated them with AppD. We've built our own dashboards around generalized business objectives. We have created the spaces where people can go in and that was really our intention. That's what AppD and us have done from the get go inside AIOps. This is why we're having this conversation is because we got tired of talking about what was out there and went to work.

Tanner Bechtel:

We went to work to create the thing. What is the thing? The thing is it's actually tactical and it's deliverable and it's out there and people don't realize that... when you asked me what it wasn't. And I said, impossible.

Robb Boyd:

Yeah.

Tanner Bechtel:

It's not impossible because the majority of the time, as long as you are measuring the right things and you're pulling the right data together, AIOps in its principle model is accessible to almost every enterprise organization. Gregg, I don't know what your take on that is, but I may be a little bit rosy about the outlook, but I feel that.

Robb Boyd:

Yeah, Greg, is he too rosy? You think he's not facing facts.

Tanner Bechtel:

Gregg's just stoic.

Robb Boyd:

I think he got very stoic and it's probably more representative because I think his videos are frozen a bit there, but as we wait for him to catch back up and we'll figure out what happened here.

Gregg Ostrowski:

No, the-

Robb Boyd:

I think you're back. You can start over. Is he being too rosy? Greg? We'll pause for a second because-

Gregg Ostrowski:

No, he's not being too... sorry, I got a little bandwidth issue going on here.

Tanner Bechtel:

No problem.

Gregg Ostrowski:

So he's not being too rosy but... you asked the question about, do customers have tools that they're not able to use or not using to the fullest? One of the pieces that I've noticed. Tanner and I have been talking together for the last couple of years on AIOps in general and moving the market forward, but what I've seen is that now companies are starting to adopt more of that mentality of being blameless and being able to take risks and having those tool sets in place are critical for them to be able to do that.

Gregg Ostrowski:

Now, the other part that I've picked up on is that more and more companies are getting a champion inside that see this as the vision to go forward and are asking for help from both guys like myself and Tanner, to help them evangelize the ideas and the value to their other areas of IT and into the business.

Gregg Ostrowski:

So you're seeing folks looking for help, not just on what technology you use, but how to properly communicate that message out to their internal stakeholders.

Robb Boyd:

To develop the culture. Yeah.

Gregg Ostrowski:

That to me is a big fundamental shift on what we've seen two years ago, to what we're seeing now. Two years ago, people thought it was a pipe dream, or now they're seeing that there's some validity validity here to help them adopt an AIOps mindset.

Robb Boyd:

I think we've moved from a nice to have to this is what we got to do. We've got to get some form of this because we've talked about other strategies before our previous episode on TEC37, was around DevOps and there's going to be many more about this as well. That's also a cultural/technology shift. You know, the two have to work together to be successful and that definitely sounds like something that's happening here.

Robb Boyd:

[inaudible 00:27:42] I've become such a dad and I don't know if this resonates with you guys, but you're talking about the whole, if you can't see something, then you can't measure it. I think that's what you said. If we don't have the visibility to-

Tanner Bechtel:

You can't change what you can't measure.

Robb Boyd:

Then my father had always said, I think I've mentioned this before. My father measured twice cut once was always a good one and another one you reminded me of, which is the whole notion of how do you eat an elephant one bite at a time? Such dad isms that I groaned when I heard it as a kid and here I am repeating it now, and thanks for my kids are still asleep.

Robb Boyd:

Let me ask real quick before we wrap things up, we've got a couple of minutes left. We've already acknowledged and we did this at the top. This is part of the series we've got at this stage, we're planning three parts to the series. I think we've answered the question. What is AIOps? What it isn't and things like this. And so if anybody is still watching, the whole point is they're like, now I want something to do. I want to see something more specific and get more prescriptive. Tanner, Is that where we're going to go next? I wonder if you could tease us a bit with what to expect in the rest of the series?

Tanner Bechtel:

I mean, my pleasure. Yeah. We really talk about which is funny. We talk about getting down to the grid here and actually explaining and showing what we have in the first episode, we spend all of our time talking.

Robb Boyd:

Yeah.

Tanner Bechtel:

But that's part of the teaser, right? So three parts, our intention is really to establish the why, like what's happening? Why are we here? What is AIOps? We tend to just jump right into it and talk about it and we never really talk about what got us here. So hopefully we answered that today, right? In discussion, we at least painted the picture of the landscape and how we got here and what's driving it, so that's the why.

Tanner Bechtel:

The second conversation we're going to have, we're going to bring in our technical solutions architect from my team, some folks from AppD, and we're going to start talking about the, what, what is it? What tools what's it look like? What are we actually connecting? And what's it solving for?

Tanner Bechtel:

Then the third part is really like the journey we talked about, climbing Everest, you go with a guide, how do you get there? What's the roadmap look like? And we'll talk about the how. How do people do this? How do they begin and how do they utilize World Wide and how do they utilize Cisco and how do they utilize the partners they want in the mix? And how do we mix other tools together to really get to the point of understanding the full journey, the cultural part, the technology part, the operational change, the people change and really the destination insight.

Robb Boyd:

Well, I think we've hit the mark here and so, as I say, thank you, Tanner, Gregg, I want to also say, is there any final point you want to make here before we wrap things up?

Gregg Ostrowski:

Yeah. I think from an overall strategy point of view, I think our customer base needs to get, if they're not already building AIOps into their future plans on the roadmap, they really got to get on to build that into their strategies. Because ultimately as these things are becoming more and more complex and more and more inter interdependent, there's no rolling back, right? So you got to move forward and get an AIOps mindset. It's the same thing as if you went from waterfall to agile or you went to DevOps and you change the philosophies and the strategies there.

Gregg Ostrowski:

No different than what we've done in the past, as technology just kind of change in our processes and procedures and culture, it's got to happen again and get everybody on the same playing field and move forward with an AIOps strategy and vision.

Robb Boyd:

well said. So Gregg, thank you very much. Tanner, thank you as well. All right.

Gregg Ostrowski:

Pleasure.

Robb Boyd:

I also want to say, thank you guys. I appreciate you watching the show. Don't forget there's more to this series as well as more to a whole lot of things more. This is the TEC37 podcast. TEC stands for Technology, Education and Collaboration all in about 37 minutes, hopefully give or take. Ether way, I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you found something valuable. You can find all information about not just the podcast, but everything talked about today, including how to get in touch with these individuals and engage with the rest of their team members on what we call the platform. And that's a wwt.com.

Robb Boyd:

So be sure and go on there. AIOps APM, AppDynamics. These are all great search terms on there. They're going to make an offer for you to join the platform, which I highly encourage you to do, because that is where it allows you to interact and comment on the articles that are there, because it's not just about video or audio, of course, there are labs, there are white papers. There are case studies. It's a wealth of information. It's the virtual extension of this incredible place if you are ever in the St. Louis area that they've done with their ATC, what's it called the Advanced Technology Center, which I've been to.

Robb Boyd:

I'm so glad they've may have made it virtual as well, because these are the days we need things to be a bit more virtual. So either way for the TEC37 podcast at World Wide Technologies, my name is Robb Boyd. Thank you so much for watching. Hope you enjoyed it. We'll see you on the next one.