In this episode of BMC AMI Z Talk, Anne Hoelscher, Director of R&D for BMC’s Db2 solutions, and Craig Mullins, President of Mullins Consulting and widely known Db2 thought leader discuss the need for intelligent automation in modernizing Db2 data management to help companies achieve greater availability, resiliency, and agility. Below is a condensed transcript of our conversation.

Anne: Craig, thank you for joining us today. Can we get started by having you share a little bit about yourself and your Db2 background as well as your data management background?

Craig: Sure Ann, and thanks for having me on the podcast today. I look forward to chatting about what’s going on these days in the world of Db2 and data management. So, about me. I’m currently an independent consultant, have my own company, Mullins Consulting and there I specialize in data and database management research and strategy with a big focus on mainframes and Db2. Now, I’ve been working with data for over three decades and during that time I’ve taught database classes. I worked as a systems analyst and programmer. I spent a lot of time as a DBA, first working with IMS and then with Db2, but I’ve also worked with some other database systems like Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server.

I spent a little bit of time at Gartner as an analyst covering database systems and DBA, but really, I’m proud to say I’ve been working with Db2 on the mainframe since Version 1, so seen it grow up before my eyes. I’ve also written a couple of books on Db2 as well as a book on database administration practices and procedures and I’ve also been recognized by IBM as a Champion for Data & AI as well as an IBM Db2 Gold Consultant. And, Analytic Suite magazine recognized me as one of the top 200 thought leaders on big data and analytics. So, that’s me in a nutshell.

Anne: Thanks, Craig. That’s great. So you said you’ve been on Db2 since Version 1. That was a long time ago and I remember when segmented table spaces came out and some people thought the world was going to end. But what do you think has been the biggest impact to Db2 management you’ve seen over all that time?

Craig: Wow. That’s a long period of time, 30 plus years. I think there are several things. I would say things are more heterogeneous today than they’ve ever been. When I started out most organizations ran most of their mission-critical work if not all of it on the mainframe. These are large organizations. And then as we move forward into the ‘90s things like client servers and into the 2000s things like node SQL and then the wide adoption of the internet as a platform have really changed things. So when I started the ‘80s heads down CRTs, green screens, everything running in an insular mainframe environment and that’s not the case anymore.

Today organizations, large ones anyway, still store the bulk of their data on the mainframe and that means mainframe data management skills are at a premium, but they’re accessing it not just with CICS and IMS and not just with PSO and Batch, but also distributed from multiple platforms. A lot of things coming in over the web, WebSphere being booked into this as well and moving from an environment where almost everything is static SQL prebound and we know the access path before they’re run.

To today where almost everything that’s new is coming in through DDF and distributed applications and that means dynamic SQL and we don’t know those access paths to runtime and that’s a little bit more of a challenging environment. So lots of things have changed, but I think that heterogeneity as well as the static to dynamic shift are two of the biggest.

Anne: So that definitely makes our modern data management much different than what it’s been in the past. How do you see DevOps impacting the jobs of Db2 professionals?

Craig: Well, I think with DevOps it means that the DBAs need to be more closely tied to the applications. Again, go back to when I first came into this business in the ‘80s and the DBA was the curmudgeon in the corner back there smoking a pipe and there’s pipe smoke coming out and you’re afraid to go into his cubicle. Now, it’s the DBA has to have a presence, has to be known, has to be a communicator. No longer a curmudgeon, but someone who is adept at working with people, has to actually have a personality. And that is a significant change, but that’s really not the only change with DevOps because DevOps is orchestration and implementation of the entire software development lifecycle.

So as we are adopting DevOps, we are automating. And one of the things I’ve seen as a data bigot, a guy who loves data, is that we had organizations spend a lot of time automating for the application developer and that’s good. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that. We’re seeing things like Jenkins for coordinating and orchestrating and Ansible for configuration resource management and GitHub for source control and Docker to containerize. And what we need really is the same type of tools to automate and integrate DBA into the DevOps pipeline.

One of the things I’m really fond of saying, DevOps has become more DEV Ops. The focus is on Dev. We need Dev and Ops to be at the same pitch and volume.

Anne: That’s a great distinction because the DBAs do fall more into that Ops section than the development section. So as this is all changing, what do you think are the most pressing issues that IT leaders are facing with probably both managing their professionals as well as their data and the volumes of data in their environments?

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In this episode of BMC AMI Z Talk, security experts Grant McDonald and Chad Rikansrud from BMC expose the common myth that the mainframe cannot be hacked and share why it should be included in your enterprise security strategy. Below is a condensed transcript of our conversation.

Grant: So this is a topic that is near and dear to my heart and Chad’s heart. I know he’s done countless presentations on this at many events across Black Hat, DEF CON, SHARE, you name it – It’s probably been something he’s spoken. And you may have even heard him at one of those events – those of you that are listening. But for those who don’t know, Chad, I wonder if you might start out by giving a little bit of the background – before we get into how a mainframe is hacked – kind of your journey into discovering that for yourself because I don’t think you were always the mainframe hacking guru you are now, right?

Chad: Hey, Grant. No, I am not. Thanks for having me here. Nope, that is the case. In fact, I’ve only been doing mainframe, from a technical perspective, for maybe the last – I’ll be generous here and say 12 or 13 years, which makes me positively a newb by mainframe standards where most of the people have 20, 30, 40 years of experience. So definitely did not grow up in mainframe.

But how I got here, to answer your question, I worked for a global financial institution. And I was running mainframe infrastructure for them – a lot of their storage and their ability to recover and all things data privacy and that sort of stuff. And one of the things that occurred to me – This was about the time that ransomware had become really in vogue, so maybe – I don’t know – six, seven, eight years ago.

It just occurred to me because I’ve always had a background in Linux and networking and security. And I was really fascinated by this idea of ransomware and how the bad guys of the world had now really figured out how to monetize their various behavior in a very, very efficient manner, which is ransomware.

And I got to thinking about well, I wonder who’s doing the kind of research on the mainframe that would protect it from this sort of stuff. Because I was always fascinated by the people that – Microsoft releases a patch because somebody found a 0-day in a TCP/IP stack. And I’m like, man, that is just so cool. Who is doing this kind of research on the mainframe? And would it be susceptible to the types of things that we see that allow for something like ransomware, as an example, to happen?

And so I, having access to all kinds of resources because I worked for a giant bank – I just started poking at it and really teaching myself COS in the mainframe in order to get to the point where I could write exploits and testament stuff. And just to give you an idea of the undertaking there – and I don’t mean this to toot my own horn. But it took me a couple years of heads-down, technical work on the mainframe to get to the point where I could even really start that. It would be the equivalent of learning to crawl so you could run a marathon. It was quite an undertaking.

But the punchline of the whole thing is it’s just another computer. And it’s absolutely susceptible to all the types of vulnerabilities and attacks that all the other computers are. It’s a computer operating system written by humans for humans. And as such, there are mistakes that are out there and misconfigurations and coding errors that can all be exploited. And so, I started figuring out how to do that and writing talks, as you mentioned, and tools and that sort of stuff to do that. And here we are.

Grant: Gotcha. You mentioned how it took you some time to get up to speed and understand the mainframe. Now, this is something I think that somebody on the other end, I could see, listening to this and say – Aha! See, it took you how long to get up to speed on the mainframe before you knew how to uncover all these compromises. Do you think it still would take somebody to really get that level of expertise in order to compromise a mainframe or is it simpler than that

Chad: Yeah. It takes a long time, and here’s why. It’s an operating system that is unlike any other operating system. It is not forgiving. There’s no training wheels for it. There’s no wizards or strips you can follow along with. There are attempts at that. But to really understand – For instance, if you want to write an exploit of something, you really have to understand how memory is organized and how programs are organized and how they work and how things are stored on disk.

If you get to that level, you have to first understand basic stuff on the operating system – how to install it, how to upgrade it. How does it boot? How does the load process work? All that. It’s just a tremendous amount of information there – So, there’s two things.

One, it’s well-documented to the point where it’s actually, I would say, over-documented. Everything is documented. There are tens and tens of thousands of pages of documentation, but none of it is presented in a way that is – so you want to exploit the mainframe. Here’s what you need to know. You can go out and take a class on how to do that in Windows and have relatively little Window experience, and they will take you right to the head of the class of – Okay, here’s the kernel, and here’s how it works. And here’s how drivers work. And here’s how memory works. And so on and so forth.

That doesn’t really exist for the mainframe. The classes and the stuff that’s out there that exist for DUS are really geared at people who want to learn how to develop programs for it or operate it or use it. But in terms of the people who want to do what I’m doing, which is find vulnerabilities and exploit them and learn how to pen test it and improve that discipline, that knowledge isn’t really out there. We’ve been forging, by and large, an untested trail with the exception of a few people out there in the world who’ve done a little bit of this work, as well.

Grant: Gotcha. So do you think that, in part, is what gives credence to the belief sometimes that people feel the mainframe should not be regarded as part of their security plan because they feel it’s this box in the back corner that doesn’t really require the same controls as a Windows device?

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Eliminating as many bottlenecks as possible in the Software Delivery Lifecycle is essential to competing effectively in the Digital Age. Dev teams must continuously deliver new features and services their customers demand, while Ops teams need to predict and solve problems as quickly as possible, ensuring optimal performance, availability and security. Achieving this state of equilibrium is next to impossible in siloed organizations with staid cultures—a breeding ground for friction and mistrust. In this episode of BMC AMI Z Talk, BMC product management leaders April Hickel and Sam Knutson discuss how modernizing tools, processes and culture, including adopting mainframe-inclusive DevOps, can help organizations continuously deliver high quality apps and services to market more quickly. Below is a condensed transcript of our conversation.

April: Sam, you’ve had a lot of experience working over the last six years, helping large enterprises adapt Agile and DevOps on the mainframe. Can you share with us what the early days were like?

Sam: When I started at Compuware six years ago, enterprises generally undervalued the mainframe. There was a lot of discussion of re-platforming, re-hosting. There were still people who thought rip and replace might be the best way to modernize the mainframe. And, there was some good reason for this. You saw a lot of frustration where organizations were internally silent, so that mainframe application development had been left unchanged since the 1970s or 1980s. It was purely waterfall. Very, very heavy project management.

And, those groups were kind of the masters of know, while these same organizations, who work in a very competitive landscape, were confronting opponents who were being successful with some of their digital transformation. They wanted to do this themselves. They saw the opportunity in some of these global industries that are really driven by mainframes, but they couldn’t emulate what was being done by some of the small start-ups. And, the start-ups really had paved the path with some very worthy techniques, using Agile development, DevOps methods to build a continuous delivery of new capabilities that customers loved, and to really develop product management to an art.

And, what we saw on the mainframe was a very apathetic landscape, where there wasn’t a feeling that customers had great choices. And, they didn’t see the mainframe as modern. And, of course, they thought this very wrong because the mainframe was, in fact, a platform that has evolved – from a hardware and operating system perspective – very, very continuously. IBM has been a good steward of that ecosystem. But, what hadn’t changed was the way that develop – that customers built their applications – the way they treated their developers.

And, in particular, their mainframe developers were often the side organization that worked in different ways from the developers who worked on systems of engagement – their web front-ends. And, those developers in the very same company, often, had adopted the tools, and techniques that did allow them to go faster. So, they were building software in small iteration.

So, it wasn’t that the companies didn’t know how to do this; it’s that they hadn’t applied those techniques to their mainframe. They left it in its own silo. And, there was just that there was a lot of apathy, and so people tended to either do nothing, or do the wrong thing – investing in solutions that really didn’t provide any savings, or competitive advantage. And, they kind of saw their mainframe as a cash-cow in the basement that just did the record-keeping, and they couldn’t do any better. And, the only option was to replace it. And, it was not a happy time.

April: Given that context, I think it’s really interesting how you looked at the struggles that customers were having, and you helped pioneer the idea of mainstreaming the mainframe. Can you talk a little bit about the changes that have happened?

Sam: So, that approach that we did bring to the market is one that we internally did a lot of those techniques ourselves. And, as we learned what we needed to do to change the way that we were building software for our customers, and we started to talk to customers who had the same challenges, we realized that there was a broader concept that everyone needed to get behind. And, that was this idea of mainstreaming the mainframe; making it different only in syntax, so that all of the goodness that had evolved in the development ecosystem, outside of the mainframe, could be brought to the mainframe.

And, that you could on-board next generation developers who typically, when they looked at the very old archaic processes that surrounded mainframe development, and the tools that were given to them, made them just kind of run the other way, screaming. You know, they didn’t want to work on a green screen. They didn’t want to fill out three-part paper forms on changes. It was those things that were repellent to them; not the actual syntax.

April: So, can you share what you’ve seen in customers who have started down the Agile and DevOps adoption path?

Sam: Absolutely. And, we’ve seen customers who’ve gotten in the boat with us on mainstreaming the mainframe, and they’ve really realized that they have to go away from these processes that they’ve had, and embrace Agile and DevOps. And, my mission has been to enable Agile and DevOps on the ZOS platform. And, I can tell you that, when I was talking to customers originally, you know, say, again, going back to 2016, when we were going through these changes, the conversations would often be, “Why should I do that?

Why should I use Agile? Why would I want to do DevOps?”

And, when they saw that there were outcomes that could be derived from this, and they saw those outcomes both from Compuware, and from other customers. So, Compuware, by adopting Agile development, was able to deliver roughly twice as much code per developer. We were able to deliver in quarterly releases, so that our customers could adopt these new capabilities that they needed much sooner, and get value from them. These smaller iterations were much easier for them to manage. And, we were able to significantly reduce trapped bugs – bugs that never escaped the lab.

Because, we wanted to find them, but, you know, developers will never write perfect code, but by adopting shift-left techniques, but putting up all of the quality automation into a CD pipeline, you’re able to help the developers deliver quality production. And, we’ve definitely seen that in our customers’ efforts, as well. And, some of them – I’ll give you a good example of a customer in the UK that adopted automated testing. And, they were able to significantly reduce bugs by more than 80 percent; cut their delivery time by a third; they’ve been able to bring new graduates to work in their mainframe environment.

Over 150 developers that they’ve on-boarded, and they figure that they saved about three months, per developer, in terms of on-boarding time, and have saved over $21 million in a three-year period. And, by the way, that’s not my number. That’s a number that was derived by Forrester Research, who did a study with the customer on the total economic impact of automated testing. So, they’ve seen outcomes that matter to them by applying these DevOps techniques, including automated testing, to the mainframe

April: So, as you think about the evolution of development to DevOps, there’s a link between development and delivering that code, and operations. Can you talk a little bit about how those organizations, or teams within customers, are working together?

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In this episode of BMC AMI Z Talk, Grant McDonald and Chad Rikansrud return to the show to share examples and cautionary tales of what happens if you fail to take proactive steps to safeguard your mainframe. Below is a condensed transcript of our conversation.

Grant: So, Chad, I know obviously, you can’t give out any names. We have to protect the names of those that are involved here, but what are the couple, you know, one or two more interesting cases maybe that you can think of where something you noticed when you were performing a penetration test that kind of surprised you?

Chad: Hey, Grant. Well, thanks for having me back. Yeah, I’ll tell you. Two things that surprise me continuously when I’m out looking at client sites – and you know, just for listeners, to remind them, these are some of the biggest, most complex organizations on earth, right? I mean, these are the biggest financial institutions or government or healthcare companies or retail companies or airlines, whatever.

I mean, when I talk about this kind of stuff, what kind of adds an exclamation point or some gravity behind it is just what’s at stake with these systems because like I said last time, and I usually say this every time I give a presentation, is if you’re running a mainframe, you’re probably doing something important with it, right? Or put another way, if it isn’t working correctly or if it gets compromised, your business isn’t doing business, really operating in any kind of meaningful way. And so, two things that I – and they’re big things, but kind of broad-level things that I see that are just generally shocking.

One is just the basics. There are – and we can talk about this later. I’ve talked about this in a lot of other different podcasts and presentations and talks and stuff. But there are so many basics on the system with respect to security that just don’t get done.

I mean, for people out there that are mainframe fluent, things like having update access to APF-authorized libraries or things like the number of people that have elevated privileges on their own IDs that still exist or the number of network connections that require no authentication, whether it be anonymous FTP or a JES that doesn’t require any – like network job entry that doesn’t require any usernames, passwords, or keys, anything like that.

Those things still exist in the wild, and they’re kind of shocking because all of that tells me that the folks sitting behind those systems are really relying on their perimeter security in the hope that none of their internal users that have access to the system over the network are ever compromised. So, that’s No. 1, and I just mentioned a couple of them, but there are many of those that fall into that sort of basics bucket. Before we even get to things like No. 2, which is just kind of shocking to me, is the number of times we find bona fide back doors on the system. This is something that on any other platform anywhere else would be just unheard of or crazy.

I remember – it’s been several years now, but I remember there were a couple of routing and switch companies that I won’t mention by name, but where they found backdoors in the code that it looked like they had been there for years and don’t really know where those came from. You know, there’s always speculation about government actors or foreign actors, that kind of stuff.

But what we have found while doing assessments of clients’ systems are everything from software vendors that have intentionally put back doors on systems so that they can better support them, meaning that they can come in – if they get access to your system, they can give themselves whatever permissions they need without having to ask you, which is just absolutely crazy. I mean, it would be like someone installing an alarm system in your house and making sure that they had access to disarm it at any point in time, even if the alarm went off or whatever. So, that’s kind of bananas. I’m actually going to talk about one of the more egregious ones that I’ve ever found.

And the other part of it is we see – sometimes, we see users of the systems who probably had their privileges taken away through some enterprise initiative where they’re removing privileges from people’s daily driver’s ID, which is the right thing to do, and they sort of, you know, take that not lying down, kicking and screaming, and as a result, they add themselves a little magic backdoor, a little magic system call or supervisor call or program call that lets them basically escalate their own privileges if they need to.

And I tend to think people do this with – if there is sort of a good intentions, with good intentions, but it’s terribly shortsighted. If I can find this in a pen test where I’ve been looking at the system for a couple of hours, then you know, a bad person who is working on your network that has a lot of time is certainly going to be able to find it as well.

Grant: Gotcha. And in most of these incidents, do you think there was something that there should’ve been an alarm sounded for somebody that they just didn’t notice, or do you think they were just completely unaware that this kind of thing was happening?

Chad: I think up until very recently, in terms of – in mainframe terms, right? Because we talk about the history of Z, we’re talking about 50, 60 years, right? So, up until very recently, in the last few years, there hasn’t really been a good way to find these things that was commercially available. Now, there’s a couple products out there that can help you find these things, maybe, right? Some of them, not as much. But you know, I think that they didn’t – to answer your question, I think that there wasn’t any way of sort of proactively finding these things, or even after the fact, without looking at it.

And generally speaking, you have to trust the systems programmers or the security folks. They have the keys to the kingdom, and there’s very few people in the enterprise with the knowledge to check it, that would know how to check what they had done or what they’re doing, and if your system’s not locked down to begin with, it’s pretty easy to install what we call in pen testing some type of persistence, which is just a fancy way of saying a back door that lets you get back onto the system or lets you get back to escalating your privileges. Pretty easy to do that, and a lot of systems programmers or whatever would know how to do that, and we certainly have found those in multiple systems.

Grant: Yeah, I’m curious. Obviously, part of your day job is actually performing penetration tests and to try to act and think like a bad guy and see if you can get into somebody’s mainframe. When you’re out there, do you often have somebody who works in either operations or security coming and saying, “Hey, what are you doing? I saw you pop up over here or over there.” I mean, does that already happen very often, or does it generally happen too late in the cycle at a point where you could’ve effectively, if you were a bad guy, have taken over control?

Chad: That is a great, great question because a lot of people maybe don’t think about that one of the reasons we pen test is obviously to find vulnerabilities in the systems, missed configurations, missing patches, another back door, like I’ve been talking about. Those kinds of things. Another reason, though, we do this is to test out the responses, so sometimes if it’s more of a red team exercise or even just during a pen test, we may do it where the SOC, for instance, doesn’t know we’re doing it, intentionally, because we want to know what are they able to detect.

And honestly, of all the times I’ve done this, only once have I had somebody come crashing through the door and tell me that they saw something that I did and that sort of thing. And even then, it was because I had moved past the period where I was trying to be very stealthy to being very loud. So, it was the equivalent of being a cat burglar and tiptoeing around the house to when you realize nobody’s home and you just start flipping on lights and turning on the radio and checking out the fridge to see what there is to eat while you steal things. And then, they actually came out and said something about that, which was better than nothing.

But most of the time, funnily enough, the way we get noticed is just because we might be running a  job that’s sort of searching data sets for passwords or crypto keys or things like that, and those are kind of brute force things you do, and sometimes they take up CPU, and so often, we’ll get – if we get outed, we’ll get outed by operations, who’s called us in the past and said, “Hey, that job you’re running is taking a lot of CPU. Is it okay if I knock down the priority a little bit?” We’re just like, “Yeah, sure. That’s fine.”

But they’re not really asking, “What are you doing?” They’re more just concerned that you’re taking up precious CPU cycles, which interestingly enough, there have been – you know, I can’t name names, but there have been very high profile breaches where they weren’t mainframe breaches, but the mainframe was delivering the data behind the scenes, so imagine a website getting breached and people figuring out how to query databases to dump data from some company where the mainframe is the back-end database on that, so it’s not a mainframe breach, but that’s where the data’s coming from.

And the way that they actually found the breach was because of the number of CPU cycles and number of jobs being spawned on the mainframe. So, it’s a poor detector, but it’s one of the things that mainframe operation shops are conditioned to look at because historically, that’s how you keep a good – a smooth running shop is by making sure you don’t overuse your CPU or have too many jobs running at the same time or you’re not running up the credit card on the system.

Grant: Interesting. And I wonder, when you perform those tests, I think some people think that you’re starting from basically a high-ground position where you’ve already got mostly what you need to compromise, and of course, you’d be able to do it. But is it something where you start from a point where you’ve got some level of access that you’re able to leverage, or is it more of an uphill battle when you do a penetration test?

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In this episode of BMC AMI Z Talk, Stefanie Scott and Alan Warhurst discuss how an intelligent, automated mainframe can drive digital business forward and help companies progress on their journey towards becoming an Autonomous Digital Enterprise. Below is a condensed transcript of our conversation.

Stefanie:  For those who aren’t familiar with autonomous digital enterprise or ADE, Alan, can you give us a quick overview of what this means in today’s enterprise?

Alan: Certainly, Stephanie, yes. So, ADE is BMC’s vision of what organizations will need to transform to become, to give themselves that competitive differentiation to operate in the digital economy. It’s really focused around five key tenets, so: Looking at people’s customer experience, giving them a transcendent customer experience. Supplying automation to everything that’s there. Not just IT, but across the entire enterprise.

Supporting the move towards Enterprise DevOps to give them the agility that’s there and use data to actually fundamentally draw business decisions – to allow them to make impactful business decisions in the right time and in the right way. Finally, one of the key elements of it is around cybersecurity, so having the organization properly guarded by an adaptive cybersecurity approach.

Stefanie: Okay, with that said, what do you see as your biggest challenge to companies getting to an autonomous digital enterprise, especially in the mainframe space?

Alan: So, I think for mainframe users, it’s about how they transform not only things like their working practices, as in the DevOps space, but also how they transform the way that they monitor and manage their mainframe environment to continue to deliver that transcendent customer experience, and to make sure that it’s always available regardless of whether customers are actually coming in. I mentioned about ADE and the five key tenets, but one of the pieces that drives that is about mobile access to the mainframe, and that drives different ways of looking at and picking out with the mainframe environment.

Stefanie: You know, companies keep talking about getting off the mainframe, but we’re rarely seeing this happen. Do you feel companies see the mainframe simply as a cost center they’re trying to exit? Or are they confused on how to modernize the mainframe and get to an autonomous digital enterprise?

Alan: Well, I think it’s really interesting – as we’ve talked to customers and as I’ve seen customers evolve over the time I worked with BMC, we’ve seen more and more customers recognizing the true value that exists in the mainframe platform and how it can be used to help drive forwards toward an ADE type approach to working. You know, those companies that are modernizing, that are adapting – adaptive cybersecurity, those kinds of pieces are truly thriving in this digital economy and they’re increasing in value.

If you look at things like BMC’s annual mainframe survey and those kinds of things, sentiment and that approach to the mainframe is at an all-time high. It has been gradually growing, particularly in the executive community in the past few years.

Stefanie: So, how do you think the recent pandemic has affected companies’ mainframe strategy, with that in mind?

Alan: We’ve kind of seen a combination of things. We see a perceived growth in additional MIPS, in additional workload actually coming onto the mainframe. Certainly, when we’ve had the last financial crisis, we saw actually a growth in mainframe use because people were looking at it as a platform for consolidation. So, we see that growth element. We also see people very much focusing on an opportunity to retrench and an opportunity to truly understand how their mainframe can support their business.

So, optimizing that cost base but also truly focusing – and I think it’s the primary focus of almost all the organizations we spoke to as we’ve gone through this evolving situation. They’re really, really focused on their availability. They need their mainframe systems to be there to truly underpin their business. The growth in online activity, people working behind – just generally online activity shopping and those kind of things has meant that the mainframe that truly drives those industries needs to always be there, and in the event that they have any kind of a problem, that could affect them, that means that they’re going to have to lose business.

And then they start to struggle. A lot of organizations at the moment are trying to retrench and put themselves into a level of survival mode. Some are focusing on “Okay, how do we move from survive through into that thrive and to try forward and to expand into that opportunity that’s going to come forward.”

Stefanie: We’ve heard for years mainframers are retiring and now that trend is actually happening. How can BMC AMI Ops help an organization who’s losing experienced teams faster than new employees can close that knowledge gap?

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In this inaugural episode of the new BMC AMI Z Talk podcast, BMC’s John McKenny, SVP of Strategy & Innovation for ZSolutions, discusses the journey that is mainframe modernization, the Autonomous Digital Enterprise, and who BMC AMI is and what it means for customers. Below is a condensed transcript of our conversation.

Jill Perez: We hear a lot about modernizing the mainframe. Can you explain for our listeners what that means, and why it’s important?

John McKenny:  Sure. As we talk about modernizing the mainframe, and we talk with a lot of clients, it’s really about the concept that, anything that’s important in your business and your business environment you always have to be modernizing it. You always need to be keeping current. You should always be focusing in how you can continue to improve and take advantage of the latest technologies. The latest processes.

And so, when we talk about modernizing the mainframe, it’s really important that you don’t forget about the mainframe and leave it out of your modernization efforts. And we really think about modernizing as a journey, right? It’s something – it’s not a destination, it’s a mindset. And what we’re really excited about is we see more and more clients recognizing that they need to continue modernizing how they develop on the platform. How they manage and operate the platform. And how they the secure a platform. So, that’s really what we’re talking about when we say ‘modernizing the mainframe.’

Jill: Okay. Well, that makes sense. That’s great. So, having said that then what would be some of the common barriers in the journey of modernizing the mainframe? And how do customers overcome them?

John: Probably the biggest barrier frankly is the mindset and – the object overall. And we run into customers, again, that have been modernizing and recognize that they need to have a growth mindset. They need to have a mindset that is adaptive and about being adaptive and trying to improve all facets of their business. And that includes how they run and manage and monitor and develop on the platform.

So, I think attitude and the mindset that this is something that’s important, that this is something that can help them impact and help them achieve their business objectives is probably the biggest barrier when we see that organizations have been modernizing. And when they haven’t been modernizing that’s where we run into organizations that are having different types of challenges. They’re unable to meet some of their business demands that might want them to move faster. That might want them to try to improve delivery, right. Want them to improve service levels.

And if they’ve not been modernizing and they don’t have that mindset to modernize and stay current and stay abreast and leveraging the latest and greatest technologies, that’s what we run into.

Jill: Mm-hmm, great. So – so our topic today talks about BMC AMI, so can you explain for our listeners what does ‘AMI’ stand for? And I know she’s referred to as a she, so who is she?

John: So, BMC AMI really represents our strategy and vision for helping organizations continue to modernize the platform. So, it stands for Automated Mainframe Intelligence. So, BMC AMI really represents that mindset that we have within BMC to be leveraging the latest technology for our customers’ advantage. So, that’s all about driving more automation, more intelligence, and more seamless and easy ways to get work done. So, BMC AMI is, as we think about it, we have some fun with it, we say, you know, BMC AMI is like the doctor that we all wish we had, right. That helps you identify potential problems and – and keeps you healthy all the time, right.

We say that BMC AMI is like the security professional who’s constantly scanning your parameter to keep you and your – your assets safe. We have fun with it and say, BMC AMI is a little bit like the modern librarian or data scientist who ensures that your data is always available and accessible, but only to the folks that really should have access to it. And we think of BMC AMI as being like the financial advisor. So, we recognize that organizations have to make difficult decisions around how they balance business requirements and budget requirements, and that BMC AMI helps them make the the best decisions for their business.

Jill: That’s fantastic. So, BMC AMI really is all inclusive of all the different facets that folks need to really optimize their mainframe, so that’s fantastic. So, what makes a product BMC AMI?

John: Well, there’s several things that as we think about these as some of our design tenets, if you will, right, so probably first and foremost about it that BMC AMI has to provide real value and power to an organization. So, we want to make sure that BMC AMI is very easy to use. BMC AMI is leveraging the latest technology so you’ll see increasingly more artificial intelligence and machine learning, helping BMC AMI provide value to the organization, right. So, that also means that we want to be able to provide value in a very quick timeframe.

So, as you’re using BMC AMI products, we expect you’re going to get rapid time to value whether it’s improving your security, reducing main time to diagnose or repair, or automating some of your processes.

One of the other key tenets is that we’re embedding a tremendous amount of domain expertise into the products, right. So, with many artificial intelligence machine learning solutions out there you almost need your – your own data scientist with your own domain experts really kind of building and assembling the capabilities that you’re trying to achieve. And with BMC AMI because we’re embedding domain experts into the product with our AI machine learning, that’s what’s enabling us to get rapid time to value.

The other thing I’d say is that BMC AMI has an open borders approach. So, BMC AMI is all about integrating and making sure that your mainframe and your processes are connected, right. Open and connected with the variety of different kind of frameworks and technologies that you want. We hear that from customers every day. The mainframe’s not an island, it’s just part of our infrastructure. So, BMC AMI will help you connect that to the different parts of your business that you want.

Jill: That’s fantastic. Wow. So that really is truly the mainframe intelligence for sure. Okay, so circling back to the modern mainframe we discussed just a minute ago, what value does BMC AMI specifically provide then in achieving that modern mainframe?

Listen to the the rest of this episode, visit SoundCloud or Apple Podcasts

In this Run and Reinvent podcast, Seth Paskin, Director of Technical Marketing at BMC continues his discussion with Ram Chakravarti, BMC’s Chief Technology Officer as he shares more of his thoughts about AI and machine learning, as well as BMC Helix and how intelligent technologies play into the future of BMC products. Below is a condensed transcript of our conversation.

Seth Paskin: All right. Let’s kick this off with just a little bit of context. We hear a lot in the market these days, you called it buzzword bingo on the last podcast about artificial intelligence, machine learning, robot process automation, cognitive technologies. Can you give us just a quick definition of what those intelligent technologies are, and what they really mean in practical terms for consumers?

Ram Chakravarti: Yeah, we talked about each of these quickly. AI is basically a machine that can do a bunch of cognitive stuff, much like humans can, which is think, learn, understand, and reason. Machine learning is a subset of AI. I won’t go into the details because we it covered it in the prior podcast. Machine learning is a subset of artificial intelligence, that’s finding the broadest applicability in the industry today. And it’s based on learning rather than programming. Right? Teaching systems. Robotic process automation is basically using a machine to interact, transact with the applications, in a humancentric way to improve productivity by automating some workflows.

And, cognitive technology is a broad umbrella that encompasses all of the above, and extends beyond just the operational components, but also into creating differentiated experiences with chatbots, and what have you, as well. So, in terms of how this applies to us and what it means to our customer. Our strategy, as a Jill mentioned, is a run and reinvent strategy. The reinvent part of our strategy is guided by four solution principles. These are modern platforms, optimizing from anti-cloud deployment, intelligence driven, and creating an exceptional user experience. Of these, the intelligence driven piece, the intelligence driven principle is at the heart of our approach.

The infusing AI in software development across our product lengths. So, this is where I bet big, both across main frame and distributed systems. But, given that this is a topic, the focal point of Helix, maybe I should just stick to that component.

Seth: Sure, no, that makes sense. In fact, let’s segue to that. If we’re talking about infusing our product development, we know we’ve recently launched automated mainframe intelligence for mainframe. And we’ve got, decades of intelligent technologies built into our various solutions. But, let’s talk specifically about what we’re doing with Helix, what we have now and what we’re thinking about doing?

Ram: Sure. So, what we have now. We’ve had for a little while now, we’ve had Helix cognitive management, which is the collaborative AI piece that I may have mentioned in a previous discussion. But, it’s truly the first of its kind in service management industry, in that it provides a differentiated experience with chatbots that also have context switching. And it fundamentally helps reimagine the whole service management experience by empowering the workforce with these intuitive intelligent and differentiated experience, right? So, at the heart of it is AI and machine learning.

But, beyond that, there’s so much more we can do, right? So, AIOps powered products can do a whole bunch of things in terms of offering real time insights, to improve user experience, events and services to not just proactively identify issues, but also predictably identify issues and correct them before they are caught. There’s no reason why we cannot extend that to the distributed system as one killer use case. And, the broader point I want to make is that we are just at the beginning of the AIOps journey, what we need to do is have the Helix platform get set as a foundational cornerstone on top of which we can amp up our focus on differentiation with AIOps.

So, in closing, what I’d say is I think we’re okay with where we are, from a market leadership standpoint, from chatbots and collaborative AI. And I would personally devote attention to high value cross product solutions, enabled by AI, which can help us break down barriers for that adjacency, as well in our core solutions. And if we do that and if we are successful taking it to market, we are in a great place.

Seth: Great, thank you for that. It’s certainly a very exciting time to be at BMC, that’s for sure. And there’s just so much activity, it’s a joy to see it happen. You know, I think we know there’s a lot of stuff happening in the platform. You just mentioned a few examples of where we’re at and some of the things we’re thinking about. How can we help our customers, or how can customer take advantage of that, and what sorts of incremental value are they going to see? For example, out of adopting chatbot over, you know, the traditional way of doing service management, and with manual tasks, and head counts, and so forth.

Ram: Absolutely. I mean, there’s a lot of hype, right? And, given where we are in our intelligence journey, and given the fact that the potential is enormous, I would humbly submit that we and our customers, in turn, have to be relentlessly focused on three things. The first of these is to make the right strategic bets for us and that translates into what we can provide our customers. And this is whether it’s buying with our partner, the strategic bets that we make in our intelligence journey will be in the context of a high impact use case, that translates directly to one or more positive business outcomes. And these being revenue impact, productivity gains, and risk mitigation.

So, if we do that, then we are in a good place in terms of what we can take to market, customers are in a good place then, with a clear value proposition by implementing our solutions that they can realize these positive business outcomes. So, that’s number one.

The second thing I would ask that we focus on, and customers focus on, is excellence and execution. What I mean by this is, do this right with the right mix of high caliber talent, as well as domain expertise. And in our case, a domain expertise as in IT-operations, as well as data science. So, we need to get the right balance in-house to augment what we already have. And the second point of the excellence and execution, I would say, particularly with respect to intelligence, AIOps is, let’s not roll this out in a hurry. Because as we well know, these are learning systems. So, let’s take adequate measures and sufficient cleaning data and test these thoroughly to ensure that we got the answer right, and more importantly, are asking the right questions. We don’t want the answer to be 42. If you get what I mean, right?

Listen to the full episode from SoundCloud (https://soundcloud.com/bmc-run-reinvent/episode-26-the-power-of-helix-and-how-bmc-is-using-intelligent-technologies) or Apple Podcasts (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-26-power-helix-how-bmc-is-using-intelligent/id1449509568?i=1000455599736) to hear the rest of this interview.

In this Run and Reinvent podcast, Seth Paskin, Director of Technical Marketing at BMC chats with Ram Chakravarti, BMC’s Chief Technology Officer as he shares his thoughts on what AI means and the impact of machine learning and intelligent technologies on businesses and customers, now and into the future. Below is a condensed transcript of our conversation.

Seth Paskin: We hear a lot about machine intelligence in our specific market these days and you’ll hear terms like: cognitive, artificial intelligence, machine learning, RPA… What we were hoping is that you could start us off and give us a quick primer on what those terms are and what kind of applications those technologies have?

Ram Chakravarti: Seth, that’s a great question and you know there’s buzz word lingo. Let’s try and get grounded on what these actually mean. So, the term cognitive gets used – gets bandied about. If we look at what a cognitive system is, it’s a natural or an artificial system of interconnected components that interact with the world to understand reason and learn, right? You, me, Jill and all the people at BMC and the broader world are examples of natural cognitive systems of beings. If we then take that to the artificial dimension, that’s where AI comes into play. Artificial Intelligence is a machine; it’s an artificial cognitive system. AI is defined as a machine that can perform cognitive functions that would be associated with human minds such as: perceiving, reasoning, learning, and problem solving. Marketing of technologies that are AI based to solve our business problems. Robotics and autonomous vehicles, computer vision, natural language processing, virtual agents in machine learning, are examples of said technologies.

If we flip to the next part or dimension, machine learning. What is machine learning? If we double click into a subset of AI, machine learning is a branch of AI that is categorized by training systems rather than programming them as would typically be done in a traditional programming language. You get a set of input and then you basically learn from processing that set of input and apply the learnings, and then are you able to provide an observable output. An observable output, again, reinforces in some cases what you’ve learned, plays it back. It’s about learning and then providing better responses. What is the use of machine learning? Practically most recent advances in AI have been done by applying machine learning to very large data sets. Machine learning algorithms typically detect patterns and learn how to make predictions and recommendations. But processing data and experiences, rather than by destining explicit programming instructions. This is a huge area of focus and the cool thing about this is that the algorithms are also adapt and response to new data and experiences to improve our efficacy over time. I’ll just give you a, what do you call, a spoiler alert, but not really. It’s a huge area of focus for BMC but we’ll talk more about that later.

Let’s go to deep learning, it’s a subset of machine learning. Which uses layers of information processing to create knowledge from a set of algorithms. This is typically used in facial recognition, voice recognition, and image classification.

And I think lastly you mentioned the RPA (Robotic Process Automation). That’s another one that’s super popular in a whole bunch of companies. Think of RPA – my lay person’s definition of RPA is its screen scrapers on steroids, but that notwithstanding, if we step back and look at the definition is it’s a technical capability that allows one to conduct a transaction in any software application. This could be a custom application, an ERP cart, a CRM, websites, and what have you. But the fundamental point of this is that it transacts with a software application in a humancentric way to automate complex rule-based work. Where we are in the industry is what I call RPA 3.0. There are many popular windows out there. And RPA 3.0 is about infusing AI and ML into traditional robotic process automation to get to what is now being termed either as Intelligent Process Automation or Cognitive Process Automation.

Seth: Wow. Well, thank you for that clarification, disambiguation of those terms. Sounds like there’s applications individually for each one and they interact and can also complement each other, depending on the use case. I wanted to ask this, some of these technologies, particularly machine learning, have been around for a long time. What is it about now, what’s the tipping point, or what’s changed recently that we start to see this sort of broader adoption of these technologies in the IT space?

Ram: Let’s talk about the broader technology revolution and then double click on the machine learning piece by itself. I think, you guys I’m sure have heard of this, but there are pundits across the industry talking about us being in the midst of a fourth Industrial Revolution, right? So, if you recall the first Industrial Revolution was about the steam power, second was electricity in the early 19^th century, steam power being in the 18^th century and the third one was, pretty much most of us had a genesis from a career standpoint, which is the computing revolution, which was the latter half of the 20^th century. And now as we get to the fourth one, we are in the connectivity Industrial Revolution because of the fourth, and what we mean by connectivity is that our new business models, based on game-changing, differentiated technology, I mean game-changing but strict technology differentiated connector would be what I call experience innovation, real-time data and analytics as well as pervasive automation that have really brought about a fundamental change in pretty much every walk of life. One anecdotal evidence of that is, the top five positions by market cap today are all tech companies. Not quite so a couple of decades back. That is really the power of this disruptive and constant technology-enabled change. Which is mostly good.

My favorite about this is – goes back to your question, Seth, which is around AI and ML. I sincerely believe that we are witnessing the renaissance of AI and ML and I think I mentioned that during my radio chat with Saar a few weeks back. You could ask the question, and you did I believe, what’s new now? AI concepts and algorithms have been around for a few decades, but what’s different now? There are really three main factors and a supporting factor, with respect to the renaissance of AI and ML. One, the availability of new and previously unused sources of data like never before. Second, the massive decrease in computing storage and cost. Third, and in my eye the most important reason, which is the exponential increase in computing power and storage capacity that enables the application of these decades-old algorithms on these new sets of data to give you really higher-order insights. And then there is another supporting factor, which is: Google, Microsoft, AWS, and a whole bunch of open-source folks have come up with a whole bunch of methodologies, tools, and framework that allow the packaging, bill serialization in a sense the ability to use the algorithms in a not-so-archaic manner, but make it easier to use. All of these have converged to produce the renaissance of AI and ML.

Listen to the full episode from SoundCloud (https://soundcloud.com/bmc-run-reinvent/episode-25-understanding-ai-and-the-impact-intelligent-technologies-have-on-businesses-today) or Apple Podcasts (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-25-understanding-ai-impact-intelligent-technologies/id1449509568?i=1000455430693) to hear the rest of this interview.

In this Run and Reinvent podcast my colleague Dave Schmidt and I chat with Trung Quach, Senior Director of Infrastructure and Operations at Videotron, about how his company is leveraging BMC solutions to improve service management with remarkable results. Videotron is a leading Canadian telecommunications provider with over 7,000 employees. Below is a condensed transcript of our conversation.

Dave Schmidt: Can you give us a quick summary of Videotron, its business and some stats?

Trung Quach: We’re a telecom company of 7,000 employees that provides services for TV, Internet, house phone, and cell phone. We have a bit more than two million customers for an annual sale of $2.2 billion.

Dave: I would imagine with a company of that size, your ITSM environment has got to be fairly substantial and fairly robust. Can you describe what your environment is and the size of your organization? Give some data points of what it takes to support and service this type of organization.

Trung: I’m in the IT team, and our infrastructure is in two data centers. We have 23,000 assets so far. We have 40 servers for all the BMC products, for everything that you guys sell that can push us forward. And the most important thing is we did the ITIL service management. So, we have 49 management servers with all the CIs.

Dave: Oh, that’s great. So, when you look at all the complexity in your business, all the things that you have set up there, what are the major challenges that you face in today’s business environment?

Trung: So, a year and a half ago we tried to compete a lot in the telecom industry. We got a new OSS, TV and Internet; and a DSS, so the IT part was stacked with a lot of new vendors – third parties – that’s coming to help us manage the business instead of internal teams. So, this is a big shift for us in term of business and in term of internal.

Dave: So, when you look at that shift, what was the major motivation for making that type of shift?

Trung: We saw a lot of our competitors going big. So we had to do it, too. We had to reinvent our business for years to compete with them. So, it was a choice, but we had no choice.

Dave: No, and I totally understand. I mean, obviously, in today’s modern world, you have to move at the speed of business and that does take a transformation and definitely looking at what you’re trying to accomplish with your goals. When you look at your transformation, what was a strategy, or strategies, that you came up with to address these challenges?

Trung: So, we’re trying to go forward with more buying and building because we believe it’s faster and it’s more standard. When we did that, we found out that we have to do transfers as well, and manage services. We couldn’t do everything ourselves. For the I&Os on my team, we went about it at the same time. We orchestrated ITIL because the speed is increasing. So, we couldn’t do it manually. We even went cloud brokerage, stop service, and AI ops is our last hope.

Dave: Let’s now go to a deeper dive into IT service management and your experience with BMC technologies and IT service management. Can you just give me overall impressions, what your experience has been, and how BMC’s solutions have helped with your IT service management?

Trung: Yeah. So, the product is great. It’s exactly what I heard of it when I was at other companies that didn’t have it. Great features, innovation features – pretty good. But I think the two main things that made us very good in business, especially from the mindset of the people who access the technology and the help of BMC support for the sales team has been great. Because many times we came to a conclusion that it was not doable. And then, we brought in BMC and they said, “Yes, it’s doable, but you have to do this, that, and that.” And then we accomplished it.

In this Run and Reinvent podcast, Andy Hardwick, director of global service management at Arcadis, chats with Jules Murray, senior business relationship manager at BMC, about how to provide a consistent approach to IT service management across a global customer audience. Below is a condensed transcript of their discussion.

Jules Murray: Could you tell us a bit about Arcadis for those who maybe are not familiar with your organization? And maybe a bit about the customers that you serve?
Andy Hardwick: Arcadis is the leading global design and consultancy firm for natural and built assets. What that means is that we provide market insights and collective design, consultancy, engineering, and project management services, and we work in partnership with our clients to deliver exceptional and sustainable outcomes throughout the lifecycle of their natural and built assets.

So, some of the examples, certainly within the U.K., some of the projects that we would work on that people would be familiar with are things like the HS2 rail project and the Manchester Airport expansion. So, they’re the kind of projects we would get involved with, and usually it’s anything that can be built or designed. Also, natural assets, which is water management – that kind of thing. In total, there are 27,000 people within Arcadis, and we’re actually in over 70 countries, and we have revenues of EUR 3.3 billion.

Jules: Before using BMC Remedyforce, what set of support tools where you using for IT service management across your business?

Andy: A variety of different tools. Arcadis have grown through acquisition, and each new acquisition brought its own IT department with its own view of IT support and their own ITSM tools usually. So, we had 42 different countries, 42 different IT teams, and pretty much 42 different ways of providing IT support. So, some teams had ITSM tools as we would see them, such as TOPdesk and SCSM.

But all the teams didn’t have any specific ITSM tools at all, so they were using things like SharePoint or maybe even Outlook mailboxes. So, that obviously resulted the inability for us to have a consistent view of what was happening. We had little visibility and certainly no standard processes. And then, obviously, one decision that was made – this happened by Arcadis in the U.S. – was to move towards Remedyforce.

Jules: Had they been using Remedyforce for some time previous to that, then?

Andy: They started using it in 2013. So, the decision was made in 2013 to move towards Remedyforce. Previously, they had used SCSM, which is part of the Microsoft suite. So, they were using that and weren’t entirely happy. And obviously, they made the decision to move towards Remedyforce.

Jules: Did they feel Remedyforce was going to give to the more global business side of things that they found of benefit to themselves in the U.S.?

Andy: So, in actual fact, I don’t think there was ever any vision that it would be used globally. It’s really grown quite organically. So, Arcadis bought it in the U.S., and they were happy to use it. And then as other regions sort of were looking for other tools as well, the U.S. region provided guidance and said, “Well, actually, we think Remedyforce is probably a good fit. It seems to deliver what we want to do.”

So, to that point, it was really became the de facto standard that we would move towards Remedyforce as a global sort of platform. And that’s when I became involved. So, the U.K. were targeted to roll out Remedyforce within 2014. At that point, I joined the Remedyforce team and started putting together the process for rolling that out globally.

Jules: Did you start small with certain objects being implemented or was it more of a kind of a Big-Bang-type approach that you adopted?

Andy: I think somewhere in the middle, to be fair. Because the U.S. already had experience of using it for about a year at that point, we started with probably a few different modules.

So, certainly, incident was the big one, which probably is for most people. So, we had incident management set up. But we also had knowledge base articles right from the start. We used the CMDB to a small extent right from the start. And then, we grew the functionality from there.

Change management was one that we used fairly quickly and the self-service portal. And we’ve carried on now. So, pretty much every one of the main features within Remedyforce, we are currently using.

Jules: As you’ve rolled this out globally, obviously, you need to be administering this system in a consistent manner. How do you go about doing that when you’re so widely spread?

Andy: We have changed that model quite a few times. I’ve personally been administering Remedyforce for over five years now, so I’m fairly comfortable with the layout and what needs to be done when. However, as new people join the teams, we have found that quite difficult. There’s quite a big learning curve there in some aspects.

So, for example, it’s not always easy to see what permissions you will give. So, permissions can be split between profile permission sets, roles, and accounts. And it’s not always easy to see which ones you need to change to set the appropriate permissions. So, initially, we had a team of administrators globally that sort of met on a weekly basis and agreed what would be done, but we pretty much really looked after their own areas. So, we have someone in the U.S. looking after the U.S. and someone in Europe looking after Europe, but on a standard theme.

We found, though, that that’s – we’ve outgrown that model as we’ve moved towards a more global IT offering anyway. So, what we try to do now is split it now into functionalities. So, we have certain people that focus more on the self-service forums and the knowledge articles and making sure that that kind of thing is working well. Then we have more traditional developers that are actually doing some of the coding and creating things in the background with code and triggers and things like that. So, we’ve tried to split it into different skill sets, really.

Jules: Does that mean if you’re kind of enabling your developers to do that coding that you’re finding you can do most of the administration of the system that you need in house now?

Andy: Absolutely. I would say, when we first started, we were going out to partners for probably 50% of what we were doing at that point. But now it is very rare that we would go out to a partner. We’ve built that skill and that knowledge up internally over the last five or six years.

Jules: If we look a bit more at your customer base, whether that be internal customers or external, what’s the kind of perception of Remedyforce and your other supporting tools in relation to IT service management? Has it been adopted well?

Andy: I think, generally, the business and our customers are blissfully unaware of Remedyforce’s switch. They don’t come to us and say, “Remedyforce isn’t working.” But one of their main interactions, for example, would be through the IT self-service portal. So, they know that this is a self-service portal, and they know that they can go there to interact with IT. And the fact that we have 27.5% of all our tickets flood through that channel now seems to suggest that customers are fairly happy with that.

So, they log in, they request services or they log incident tickets or they check the progress of their tickets, and they’re doing that on the – every single day. So, while we’re not getting feedback directly about Remedyforce, we aren’t getting any complaints saying that self-service isn’t working or that they’re not able to interact with us in that way. So, I think that that probably speaks for itself, really.

Jules: If they use the self-service, is that a mixture of incident raising and service requests? Or is it predominantly one or the other?

Andy: It’s both. And I would say it’s probably a fairly even mix. So, we have been trying to increase our self-service capability over the last few years to give more offerings. So, we’ve spent quite a lot of time and effort making sure that we’ve got service request definitions available that people can go in there and request the services that they’re wanting. And we’re trying to increase that on a daily basis.