 We're starting a monthly series here called TFR Topic of the Month or T3M. The idea of the series is to take a pulse of the ecosystem of the industry and then bring together experts to deep dive into these topics. I sit down with C-level executives, analysts, engineers and experts to explore these topics and then bring these discussions to you. Today we have with us Joseph George, Vice President of Product Management of Digital Services and Operations Management at BMC Software. Joseph, it's good to have you on the show. Thank you, pleasure to be with you here today. What are some of the broader trends you are seeing in the market when it comes to cost cutting or as we look at it, companies are trying to become more cost efficient. Yeah, so now a really good question, right? So especially I think none of us can deny that there are recessionary pressures on the economy. Clearly, I can't predict where the market is going, if I would I'd probably be sitting in a different seat, but I think it's fair to say most organizations are scrutinizing their investments, right? They're looking very hard at how they're spending, especially from an IT perspective, where they're spending their money. And I think a couple of things are important to highlight that the first is it's not just about savings, it's really about optimizing those investments, right? Where are you spending those dollars? What are you getting in return? And how do you ensure that whatever you're spending is effective, right? And effective, both shorter term outcomes, so you can't just rely on an investment you make and you wait for the return investment to be over a longer period. But how do you get quick returns on that investment and you're able to solve larger problems that way? What are you seeing in the market as organizations are trying to maintain a balance between cost optimization without compromising on innovation and staying ahead of competition? When you look at cost, what's interesting to understand, especially from an IT perspective, a big component of that cost is people, right? It's people that are expensive and people are valuable to the organization. So how do you make sure, number one, you're optimizing your people, they're your very valuable resource? How do you ensure that your employees are engaged and productive? That is one of the most important areas and also recognizing the reality of where we live, right? As generations change, we've got more millennials in the workforce. I was reading the other day there was a survey from Career Builder and essentially they were saying that millennials stay in a job an average of two years and nine months. And if you compare that to their grandparents, the grandparents would stay eight years and three months. So you look at the difference there, right? Over an average lifespan, a millennial is going to change their job 12 to 15 times whereas two or three generations ago, people would have maybe three, four or five jobs in a whole career. So what that means is, it just means that the dynamics changes, right? We're in a world where people are going to stay shorter periods of jobs, right? So how do you make sure you're onboarding, offboarding efficiently? When your employees are there, how do you make sure they're engaged and as productive as possible? And also recognizing that every time an employee leaves, that knowledge is walking out the door. So how do you manage your knowledge effectively as well? So all those areas are important and where you spend your investments, how do you make sure you're delivering services to those employees? Talking about millennials again, I think it applies to all of us, right? So we'd rather go Google for a response, right? Or look it up rather than have to call somebody and wait for a response, right? So it's all about self-service. It's about being efficient. And that's where we see a lot of focuses. Just how do you make your employees more effective and productive? That's one area. How does that affect the internal culture of companies? Exactly, right? I mean, to the point that we just made earlier, if someone's going to stay in a role for a shorter period of time, you've got to make sure they're efficient and effective, but you also have to make sure they're productive, right? So if they find that, you know, from an IT perspective, again, a lot of my focus is selling to our IT buyers. From an IT perspective, if those users view IT as basically a challenge to get to what they want to achieve their objectives, then IT is not serving its goals, right? IT has to make it easier for them to do things. So in terms of accessing knowledge, learning, trying to do service, self-service, being able to get to services, being able to solve problems themselves. And also, ultimately, they don't want to do manual repetitive tasks, right? If we have somebody do the same task over and over again, it becomes mundane. It becomes boring. That's when they choose to leave as well. So part of it is how do you also apply automation in the right areas? How do you make sure you're automating those areas that are repetitive, that can be easily done by technology? And you're really focusing your employees on where they can be more productive, where they can be more empowered, and they can be engaged because these are more challenging problems. They're seeing the skills being used. And you look at that, it's the best of both worlds, right? From an organization standpoint, you're actually taking out a lot of your costs because you're automating things that are repetitive. And you're making sure that your expensive employees are being focused on where they can add most value to the organization. Now, we're all talking about Jet, GPT these days. What role do you think EIML and things like Jet, GPT are going to play in helping companies become more cost effective? I've been in the IT operations management space for many years, right, spent many years in the monitoring systems management space. I went off into disaster recovery for a little while, and I realized it's a lot better to try and prevent problems before they happen, right? It's better to be in that space than trying to recover from a disaster. And ultimately, what's been interesting to me is over that period, the problems we're trying to solve are still the same, right? We're still trying to make sure your applications, your IT systems, they're up and running, right? You're monitoring them, you understand what the dependencies are, you're optimizing your costs and use of resources. And determining if there's a problem, how do you make sure you find the root cause as quickly as possible? So from an IT operations standpoint, if you've got an environment where you've got an outage, right, typically what happens is you have a bridge, right, you have an outage bridge, and you've got multiple people in there, again, back to the point, expensive people taking time out, even worse, sometimes maybe on a weekend, right? So how do you first of all prevent those problems from happening? And number two, how do you make them more efficient, right? How do you make sure that they can get to the root cause very quickly? We use terms like mean time to identification, MTTI, mean time to repair. These have been in the industry for a long time. In fact, it was interesting, Swapnil the other day, I was in a call with a customer, and they talked about in those calls where they're trying to, you know, they're trying to figure out how to solve a problem, they're all pointing fingers at each other, right? And he called it MTTI is actually mean time to innocence. You have to sort of prove it's not me, it's somewhere else, right? And in the past, the technology was all about bringing data, trying to look at things, look at patterns, right, rules. You know, where AI is helping is that a lot of that can now be automated, right? We've got technology that can go look at a bunch of incidents that are coming into a service desk and identify, here's the patterns, right? Here's the patterns. This may be a major incident that's happening on a Monday morning. And now you don't need people trying to look at that. Similarly, from an AI ops standpoint, that's a lot of where our focus is. We're taking data from multiple tools. We're bringing that together. We're applying intelligent algorithms and AI ML technologies as well. We've got a knowledge graph based approach that's actually starting to do this more efficiently than human beings as well. And part of it is if you think about the cause, whatever you get from tools are very cryptic, right? If you look at log files and all the details, that data is pretty cryptic. Maybe an IT person understands it. For almost a year now, we've been using essentially the precursor to GPT-3, which is basically the platform that's being used by chat GPT. And now we're using an enterprise-scaled version of that internally. And we've been using the technology for about a year, right? And essentially to be able to automate the creation of those messages, the customer see to understand what's happening and generating in the human readable format, right? So you look at the application of AI ML. It's all across the spectrum from reducing noise, finding root cause, and basically generating messages that are human readable. It's just amazing the world that we live in. Can you talk about the areas where companies should look at when it comes to custom optimization? I know we talked a lot about people, how to make them efficient. We talked about the role of AI and AI ops. But ultimately also about resources as you point out. It's interesting, every customer I talk to is on a journey to public cloud. Some at a much more further stage, advanced stage of adopting cloud. But the reality is almost every one of them is hybrid, right? They've got assets in the data center, they've got assets in cloud. And as they move to cloud, what we see is especially in terms of the cost of operating in cloud, the dynamics changes, right? Because up to now it was all about how do I make sure I plan ahead of my budgeting cycle and make sure that I'm planning for my CAPEX expenditure. Because I've got to go justify to my CFO that I need to go by purchase a whole bunch of hardware, set it up in my data center, and then make sure I've got enough capacity, right? So you had dedicated capacity planning personnel that would be responsible for that and determining how to optimize CAPEX. Well, today the world has changed, right? You put it in cloud, guess what? You've got enough resources there, right? So the whole optimization of resources becomes less important. You still have to make sure you've got the right resources and the right place to meet your SLAs. But the problem is how do you make sure you're optimizing the use of those resources, right? Because any cloud provider will give you all the assets you need. The problem is that bill you get at the end of the month, right? You don't want to be shocked. You want to make sure you've budgeted for that OPEX. And most importantly, that you don't have assets that are idle, that you're not using, that you don't need. So technology that helps you look at that, look at your patterns of usage, understand where there's opportunities for optimization, right? Where you've got idle resources, especially in modern Kubernetes environments. We've embraced Kubernetes in a big way, right? With our own Helix SaaS platform. Because ultimately Kubernetes is basically a very scalable architecture. Really helps us deal with large volumes of data, right? Managing at scale, but it's also important to make sure you've got the right resources, right? If you don't have the right resources, you've got overallocated resources. Especially if you leave it to application owners, they're going to ask for all the resources they want. So understanding trends, understanding where you might have optimization opportunities, both in a Kubernetes environment, both at a cluster, as well as a container level. And also looking ahead, doing what if analysis, right? Looking ahead and determining if my business metrics vary, right? If I'm a retailer and Black Friday is coming in over the next couple of weeks, I know I do a lot of my business in those months in November. So how do I plan for that? I can model a different scenarios and figure out what resources I need and scale up as needed, right? So that's really important, really understanding. How do you optimize your resources? Shifting the mindset from a capacity optimization, capacity planning sort of approach to more of a continuous optimization, continuous cost and budget optimization sort of motion. Joseph, thank you so much for taking time out today and talk about this topic. And I would love to have you back on the show. But before we leave, do you have any closing thoughts and any advice for folks out there? Thank you. It's been a pleasure, Supnil. Enjoy the conversation. The one thought I want to leave you with is when you look at cost optimization, cost efficiency, it's always important to understand that in a business context, right? A lot of what we talked about were IT problems. How can IT solve problems, optimize how investments are being spent? But it needs to be related to the business. So as an example, I was talking to a UK hospital system and the gentleman's been managing IT environments for years. And he said he used to talk about servers and devices and different types of IT technology. But as soon as he was able to translate that to the business terms, right? As soon as he was able to talk about, here's the impact on clinical applications or an outage can impact surgery operations, right? Or this is where the pharmacy business is impacted. That's when he started to become much more relevant, much more powerful in the organization as well. And so I think that's important ultimately is making sure we understand from an IT perspective, what are the dependencies? How are systems related to each other? How does it impact the business? Because that's what helps us prioritize, right? We've got very critical businesses. How do we make sure that we understand the impact of those businesses? Do we have the right monitoring in place, the right SLAs, the right level of resources? Can we recover very quickly if there's an outage? And also make sure we understand the cost of downtime as well, right? So that way you're able to prioritize. Now I've been a product manager for most of my career and product management comes down to prioritizing, right? When you look at investments or costs, we could always do with more, right? But as you look at where you spend your resources, you've got to prioritize. And that's why understanding business impact, criticality, dependencies become really important as well. Trying to do that manually, especially in a very complex changing world that we live in today is impossible. So that's where technology tools, right? Tools that can go and automate that, discover that, make it simpler. A, makes it much more efficient. B, that's the only way you can keep up. And C, guess what? We started talking about people. It makes your people much more effective and efficient as well.