My name is Saar Shwartz, and I am a Motorcycle-holic. There, I said it. Even if you don’t know anything about me, as soon as you walk into our front door, the first thing you see is a full-size motorcycle sitting in our foyer where most homes would have a bench or a decorative cabinet. I have four other motorcycles sitting in my garage, waiting for the next adventure.

There’s not one reason for this relentless obsession as it’s a combination of things starting with the sound of the engine and the unrefined vibrations. Motorcycles connect you to life in ways that are hard to replicate otherwise. The speed, the wind, the smells, and testing your skills and fortune every time you ride.

I have a special love for vintage motorcycles that carried legendary riders as the history of riding unfolded. Vintage bikes tell a story of forgotten times, forgotten heroes, when people relied much more on skills and intuition and much less on technology to get by.

Over the years, however, the motorcycle industry was forced to reinvent itself. Old bikes were uncomfortable, unsafe, and would break down fairly often. New segments of buyers demanded motorcycles that are cheaper to own, and easier to operate.

This resulted in new motorcycle categories and a vast array of new technologies such as electronic fuel injection for reliable and predictable power delivery, cornering ABS and Traction Control to keep me safe, and real-time adjustment of the suspension based on the road conditions, just to name a few. Some brands are combining a vintage look with new tech, the best of both worlds for people like me.

Just as the motorcycle industry is working hard to win more business, companies in every sector are trying to get ahead by reinventing new ways to engage with customers while running the business and supporting daily operations. With disruption from digital unicorns looming, traditional banks, retailers, telcos, insurers, and healthcare providers know that they have to accelerate innovation, but not at the expense of continuing to maintain and enhance existing products and services.

We at BMC see that every day, and while customers talk to us about digital transformation, what they really mean is that they are in a constant cycle of run and reinvent. Our customers can no longer afford long release cycles and years of QA before releasing innovative offerings. Leaders in this new economy don’t sacrifice quality at the expense of speed. They get it right the first time, and they do it faster than anyone else.

What run and reinvent means in practice is that companies have to deploy AI customer-facing technologies and integrate them with their legacy systems, mainframe included. It means that they figured out how to interlace security and governance into their agile development processes. It means that they are making good use of cloud technologies alongside traditional datacenters and third-party sources. And above all, it means that they have taken automation to a whole new level. When we get to a point where everything connects the way it should, it feels and sounds like a well-oiled high-performing engine.

I am very blessed and fortunate that my career and passion follow the same principles. A fine-tuned motorcycle represents endless possibilities to conquer anything in its path, just as a run and reinvent minded company will be able to take on the most monumental market and competitive shifts, survive and thrive.

When you’ve been in the business of helping customers solve gnarly enterprise IT issues for as long as we have here at BMC Software, you get to know your customers pretty well.

We know they are under pressure to deploy new functionality and services faster, are trying to move complicated systems to the cloud, need help cutting through the noise of operational performance and service management data to find the real problems, and need to make sure they’re doing all of this in a cost efficient manner.

As a vendor you must continually make the right bets on future trends and innovation to continue the mission of helping customers succeed in their business goals. Seeing our name at number 5 on the IDC Worldwide Cloud System and Service Management Software 2018 Market Share report^* with 24.3 percent year-over-year growth year over year is great validation from the market that those bets have been right so far.

In this age of continual digital transformation, our customers are trying to maximize the value of existing IT investments by driving down costs while maintaining stability and working to evolve their offerings through new services and capabilities. BMC’s mission is to help companies run core operations effectively and reinvent new customer experiences through smart adoption of cloud, pervasive automation, and artificial intelligence.

And we know our customers want the flexibility to deploy applications and services on their platform(s) of choice and it’s our goal to support that desire.

IDC states it well: “In addition to native configuration and monitoring capabilities, enterprises are also investing in end-to-end multi-cloud performance and cost optimization and unified cloud governance solutions that span multiple, heterogeneous public and/or private cloud environments. Increasingly, IDC expects enterprise customers will also prioritize investments in cloud management solutions that can be used consistently across VM and container-based architectures.”

This is why we offer our customers a host of options for helping them reach their goals and better support their needs:

• Container and cloud-based deployment of cognitive service management that can also run in a hybrid environment. The solution is containerized to provide customers with the ultimate deployment flexibility.
• Artificial intelligence to identify patterns in monitoring, service desk, and automation data that is so vast it is otherwise beyond human comprehension.
• Machine learning, automation, and policy-based governance to optimize public cloud cost and enforce security.
• The ability to integrate, automate, and orchestrate application workflows across on-premises, private, and public cloud environments, so jobs get delivered on time, every time.

Adding innovations such AI and automation helps customers get out of the drudgery of monitoring and maintaining systems and allows them to focus on adding value to their organization.

As a company, it’s always nice to be on these types of lists, but even more importantly, it’s validation that we’re helping our customers achieve their business goals and driving a great experience for their own customers.

^* Source: IDC, Worldwide Cloud System and Service Management Software Market Shares, 2018: Multicloud Strategies Take the Lead, doc #US44895519, June 2019↩

If you are anything like me, and chances are that you are, you no longer talk to people you don’t know. Sure, maybe it’s the result of the childhood lesson “don’t talk to strangers,” but the more likely scenario is that you have become accustomed to tapping a digital icon when you have personal business to attend to.

The way I interact with service providers and retailers is vastly different than ever before. If I need to refill a prescription, I don’t call the pharmacy, I use the Walgreens mobile app. If I need to deposit a check, I use Chase’s mobile banking app. I can file insurance claims from anywhere, 24×7, using State Farm’s mobile app. I bypass the check-in counter at the Marriott using mobile check-in. And I don’t recall the last time I had to print a copy of my airline boarding pass. These days, my primary criteria for evaluating service providers is technology-related; Who can give me the fastest and easiest path to what I want/need, at the lowest possible cost?

This shift in thinking is forcing businesses into a critical juncture: adopt and adapt technology to meet the demands of customers that expect products and services faster than ever before, delivered easily, anytime, anywhere, and on any device—or risk becoming obsolete.

Customer expectations have become a truly disruptive force, prompting companies to rethink entire business models. One of the primary shifts in responding to such demands is the creation and delivery of digital services, mobile-first applications that are intuitive and intelligent, bringing contextual information to people based on who they are, where they are, and what they are trying to do. They provide automated self-service, crowd-sourced collaboration, and are continuously refined at high speed.

What does it mean to become a digital enterprise?

A digital enterprise is an organization that has a digital-service-first mindset for new services, and is actively working to convert internal and customer-facing services to digital services. An example could be a car insurance company that is working to convert printed insurance cards to digital cards, or a healthcare provider enabling doctors to be available via video conferencing through designated apps.

These new services are fulfilled through agile applications, mandating fast development cycles and continuous maintenance. New apps marry data, policy, and workflows in real-time, and they are hosted on infrastructure more dynamic than ever before. Massive automation is ensuring that apps, infrastructure, and policy are all optimized to serve consumers with unprecedented ease and efficiency.

Digital enterprises are also helping to reinvent the workplace: employees of transformed businesses benefit from an intuitive and connected work environment that reflects the consumer-driven digital culture. The result is a breakthrough in human productivity.

Digital Enterprise Management – Enabling the Digital Enterprise

With new demands on business, more moving parts than ever before, and speed of delivery that cannot sacrifice quality and security, the old ways of managing technology only get you so far. A new approach is needed – one that’s real-time, intuitive, automated, secure, and open.

BMC Digital Enterprise Management (DEM) is a set of IT solutions designed to make digital business fast, seamless, and optimized from mainframe to mobile to cloud and beyond.

In line with accelerating the development of digital services and apps, there are five core elements to Digital Enterprise Management:

Digital Service Management

Digital Service Management blends modern digital services design with IT service management (ITSM) principles and platforms to reinvent how business gets done and enable breakthroughs in human productivity.

Digital Enterprise Automation

Digital Enterprise Automation represents a more integrated and strategic approach to automation, enabling you to accelerate the delivery of digital services while improving quality and control. Our comprehensive and policy-driven platform will help you orchestrate and automate the full digital infrastructure stack.

Digital Service Assurance

Digital Service Assurance extends traditional assurance principles well beyond watching over the health of hardware, applications, and networks. It integrates data from multiple external sources, including social human sentiment, to allow you to take action quickly based on customer online posts and complaints.

Digital Infrastructure Optimization

Digital Infrastructure Optimization is our approach to building and maintaining a leaner, more cost-effective digital infrastructure. We can help you avoid wasted capacity and licensing across your entire technology portfolio. You’ll benefit from a stronger return on your investment in technology and a consolidated, easier to manage, lower risk platform.

Analytics, Orchestration, and Policy — A Shared Foundation

We provide a common foundation for configuration data, automation, orchestration, analytics, and policy, enabling you to share a single, real-time view of your infrastructure across teams and processes. You can automate complex tasks that span multiple systems. You can uncover relationships and patterns between IT operations disciplines, helping you drive continual improvement.

In Closing

Companies that deliver groundbreaking apps and are in the process of becoming digital enterprises have long realized that great apps depend on a strong foundation of traditional and hybrid technologies that need to be managed to perfection. To get to digital bliss you have to look at your value chain soup to nuts – applications, apps, infrastructure, policy, data, analytics, products, business models, etc. – and bring all of those elements together for the new digital consumer (whether a customer, employee, or partner). What good is a beautiful app if, when I try to check into my flight, it hangs? What good is a banking app that responds slower than physically visiting the branch? What good is a prescription-filling app if it does not let me know I need my doctor’s approval? That’s what we focus on here at BMC, our Digital Enterprise Management solutions enable the value chain for digital businesses across all technology silos. We make it all work, and 92 of the Forbes Global 100 turn to BMC to help them on their own unique digital journeys.