 Hi, I'm Peter Burris and welcome to another CUBE conversation, this one from BMC Helix's Immersion Days in the Santa Clara Marriott in Santa Clara, California. One of the biggest challenges that every IT organization faces, in fact, every business, is how to start merging greater control through ITSM as well as greater change and evolvability of systems through DevOps. It's a big topic, a lot of folks looking at how best to do it. We've got a great person here to talk to us about it. Dick Stark is the president and CEO of RightStar. Dick, welcome to the CUBE. Oh, well, thanks very much for having me. I really appreciate the opportunity to be on the CUBE here. Excellent, well, why don't we start? Tell us a little bit about RightStar. Well, sure, RightStar is an ITSM consultancy and we happen to be a DevOps consultancy at the same time. We're also a BMC solution provider and an Atlassian solution provider. Now, we've been a BMC solution provider for 16 years, so we've been in this space a long time. And we've earned several accolades along the way. We made it into the Forrester ITSM service provider. It's not a called a magic quadrant because that's what Gardner uses, but instead it's a wave report. And so we made it sort of into the far right-hand quadrant there. And if you added up all the points, we ended up in North America being rated number five out of all the different ITSM consultancies. So we're very proud about that. And then last year with BMC, we were the North American solution provider of the year in the DSM space. Well, as an ex-Forrester person, I can tell you congratulations. They take those waves very seriously. Let's jump into this question, though, of what does ITSM, from a technology and people and process standpoint, have to do to accommodate some of the changes that are being founded and diffusing out of the whole DevOps world, which is just having an enormous impact on how IT thinks and does. Oh, it really has. And we've been in this space a long time. And ITSM sometimes, I tell the words, are interchangeable. And there are about, if you can believe this, about three million people that ended up getting an idle certification of some sort, like an idle foundation certificate. And over time, that's been a really a big deal. However, idle now is lost, it's luster just a little bit and it's allowed DevOps to sort of sneak in or agile or whatever you want to call it. And idle isn't standard still, though. They've bounced back and bounced back in a hard way and they've come up with what's now called Idle 4. And Idle 4 was just released this year and it takes some of those DevOps principles and it has its own value stream as well. And as a result, Idle 4 or Agile Idle or whatever you want to call it now is taking a little bit stronger position. And when I say DevOps principles, it's things like collaborate. It's things like promote. It's things like operate and automate. It's all about, again, it's all about collaboration and some of these other values that you'll see in DevOps. I guess what happened is, we spent a lot of time in the idle side of things and we did things for process sake and a good example would be change management. And we spent a lot of time putting together this change management processes per this idle framework, okay? And what happened is that a lot of the users then rebelled a little bit because it might take longer to go through and fill out all the paperwork or if it's not paperwork, the online tool set then to do a change than to actually perform the change itself. So Idle got a little bit of a bad rap and so that's where this whole DevOps thing has come in. And the whole idea right now is to get Dev and Ops under the same umbrella because that's not typically very easy to do but it's certainly happening. Well, let's talk about why that intersection's happening, right? So I'm gonna show a little bit of history from my perspective as well. Idle began, first of all, it started in some government agencies many years ago but it started as the basis of it was how do we take better care of the assets within IT which at the time were mainly hardware assets. In many respects what we've seen happen over the last 25, 30 years that Idle's been an extent is that the nature of the assets that IT recognizes as acknowledges delivering value to the business has changed. We've gone from hardware to infrastructure as code. That's where DevOps is. So in many respects what you're saying is that Idle is now trying to bring the best of what it means to do a good job of asset management with a new class of assets namely software as code, infrastructure as code and that's where we have to have that marriage. Have I got that right? That's correct and you don't want to have silos. You wanna be a silo buster if anything else and I just wanted to mention something else that I think is kind of fun. Along with this Idle 4 we now do what's called a Mars lander simulation training. It replaced if you'd heard of the Apollo 13 simulation. Well Mars 4, even though it's Idle 4 specific it's really all about DevOps. And I took the Mars 4 just about a month or so ago and it's a lot of fun. You sit down and the whole objective is to get to Mars and you're a business though and you're going to be selling the data that you're gonna collect along the way and so the whole idea is to make a profit and you have all these different roles that you play. When I went through it I was the release manager then but you might have a business analyst, you might have a service desk person, you have vendors and it's very realistic then and typically like a lot of large enterprises you start playing the game and it's just chaos and you have to go back and try this over and over again until essentially you get it right and I was surprised how easy it is to get sucked in if you're in a big enterprise, you're siloed. You have a specific role that you have to do and you have instructions how you're supposed to do that and you want to stick to it. Whatever your assignment is you have to do that but that's not the right thing to do. Remember it's about collaboration, it's about transparency, it's about posting your goals, posting the results and moving forward from there and so I was surprised how I got sucked into it and so I can understand why we need to make some progress in this space and it's all about getting people to change their behavior a little bit and some of these new tools that certainly help with it as well. Well, going back to what you said, there used to be the three R's of any regime where roles, responsibilities and relationships and so the roles are evolving but often it's just in name only. The responsibilities, you know, the day it's still code, it still has to run on hardware, it's not a bunch of hamsters that are doing things but as you said, it's really the relationships amongst the various actors as we introduce more business people, as technology gets put into position to generate more revenue or to do more with customer experience, the relationships are being pressured, are being really pushed to evolve. So how do you see in your practice, in Wright-Starr's practice, how do you see the relationships between DevOps and ITSM and the business starting to evolve so that you can have a more coherent, comprehensive view of how you make system change? I think in that particular case it's gonna take some time. I mean, it's not gonna happen overnight. I mean, that's why you have agile coaches or that's why you have the scaled agile or the safe framework is because people don't get it and they need to understand how to work together better with others and so it's not gonna happen by just implementing a new tool set, turning the key and then saying, okay, everything's gonna be fine. I mean, it's good to get the integration between all the different tool sets and the technology is certainly there to do that but without having some instruction to begin with and having the darn users cooperate, you're not gonna see that kind of performance improvement or cost savings or whatever it is that you're looking for. You're not gonna see that. Yeah, one of the biggest challenges in any change is abandonment. The user's ultimately abandoned. So as you look at the ITSM tool set that you're utilizing, mainly from BMC Helix, is it, there's a degree of, there's always a degree of pedagogy in the tool. Away it says, here's how you should do things. What are you discovering is that tool set is really catalyzing or helping to catalyze positive changes in your mind within a lot of your customer bases. Well, the thing about Helix, and I'm very excited about this because we're making a lot of good progress with Helix at our different customer base that we have right now. And to give you a good example, George Washington University, we're based in the DC area, they are too. They've been a long time remedy customer. We moved them to Helix. And then just recently, when I say recently it started a year ago in August, they moved to the BMC Chatbot platform. Then this past August, they totally went cold turkey with Chatbots throughout the entire university. That makes a tremendous difference in the performance and not just performance, but also the cost and the efficiency that the university, particularly from a service management perspective, is providing to its university employees and to its students. Just like they mentioned today in keynote session that it's all about mobility and practically all the students there rely on their cell phone day in and day out. And so when they have a question at GW, if it's how do I get a new account? How do I get a parking permit? Gee, the wireless in my dorm room isn't working. You don't pick up the phone and call, nobody does that. You text it in. And this is a Chatbot that's powered by IBM Watson. And it works great. And there's lots of good things that are gonna come out of that. For example, students, I think they probably still have to turn papers in, right? Maybe it's all electronically delivered, but I think you might still have to print out a paper and turn it into your professor. I'm not sure, but. Blue boats are probably still there. Anyway, you're probably gonna do this late at night when the service desk isn't open. So what do you do if you can't get the printer to work? Well, you pick up your cell phone, you text in the issue and bingo, you've got a response. So those are the sorts of things that are gonna make a tremendous amount of impact and it's gonna cause people to change their behavior in really a good way. And another good example, we have another longtime hospital customer. They have a 24 by seven service desk. They're huge and they pay a lot of money to operate that 24 by seven, but they hardly get any calls in at night, right? Not that many people work. So why don't they just turn that in, start using chatbots and think of the ROI. It's just incredible. And I think you're gonna see more and that more situations like that as we move forward. Dick Stark, president, CEO of RightStar. Yep. Thanks very much for being on theCUBE. Thanks very much, appreciate it. Okay. And once again, I'm Peter Burris. You've been watching another Cube conversation from BMC Helix Immersion Days in Santa Clara. Thanks very much. Till next time.