The BMC Beat Blog

Automation Initiatives to Power an Autonomous Digital Enterprise

BMC Exchange
6 minute read
BMC Software

As today’s businesses advance in their Autonomous Digital Enterprise (ADE) evolution, they are quickly ramping up efforts to make more efficient and effective use of one of their most critical assets: data. At BMC Exchange 2021, we learned about key new initiatives that are helping organizations become Data-driven Businesses by employing artificial intelligence (AI) and Automation Everywhere to derive powerful insights from their data, create production-ready outcomes, and orchestrate application and data workflows across multiple cloud and on-premises infrastructures.

DataOps

In BMC CTO Ram Chakravarti’s session, “DataOps for Value Realization in Data & Analytics Transformations,” we hear about why traditional data and analytics approaches have fallen short and how the emergence of DataOps can rapidly turn new insights into fully operationalized production deliverables that unlock maximum business value.

“I define DataOps as the application of Agile Engineering and DevOps best practices to the field of data management,” says Chakravarti. “Considering that DataOps is based on application of DevOps best practices, it should come as no surprise that collaboration and automation are critical to the success of DataOps.”

Chakravarti goes on to highlight the importance of orchestration in the data pipeline, saying, “The takeaway here is that an enterprise-scale data pipeline orchestration capability is required to guarantee the requisite agility, scale, and resilience; orchestration is a critical success factor to enable pervasive automation for the Data-driven Business.”

The session also includes a compelling use case from BMC customer Navistar. As a $10B industry leader, Navistar needed to stay ahead of the competition by delivering new business-critical digital services to its customers. In 2013, Navistar launched its OnCommand Connection system, a brand new paid digital business offering, to improve the vehicle service use information providing operating cost savings for their fleet customers. With Control-M as its enterprise orchestration solution across all their platforms, Navistar’s Hadoop team began using Control-M to set up and schedule Internet of Things (IoT) job streams as well.

Navistar can now collect and process over 20 million IoT data records per day from the built-in sensors on more than 350,00 trucks over five times faster than before. With OnCommand, Navistar monitors customer fleets, diagnosing issues as they develop, and providing real-time guidance to fleet owners directing vehicles to dealer service centers that have the required parts readily available for quick servicing. They’ve achieved 40 percent reduction in vehicle downtime, 80 percent reduction in unplanned downtime, and five-times faster delivery of actionable insights.

DataOps

To learn more, please view the full session. It’s free to register!

Control-M with Python

We also got a great look at how Control-M can help businesses on their data initiatives in “Powering DataOps with Control-M Workflow Orchestration,” led by Tim Eusterman, AVP, Solutions Marketing, and Guy Eden, AVP, Product Management, joined by Principal Solutions Marketing Manager Joe Goldberg and Senior Manager, Innovation, Venkatesh Tadinada.

Says Eusterman, “Your Control-M platform is the abstraction layer to simplify the most complex of data pipelines. It’s the orchestration platform that gives you end-to-end visibility and predictive SLAs across any data technology or infrastructure. Control-M helps you help the data engineers and scientists to deliver their data-driven insights in production at scale.”

The session then goes on to demonstrate how those data engineers and scientists can streamline the delivery of data-centric digital services by accessing Control-M’s production-ready orchestration of cloud services with Python, the preferred programming language among data professionals.

Says Eden, “Complex data pipelines are a challenge; making sure they get into production with all the governance and compliance required even more so. So, we’re trying to do is provide data engineers and data scientists with a very familiar environment, which is very easy for them to use by providing the Python client so there’s a familiar language. (…) This will enable you to take those complex pipelines and put them into the framework of Control-M, allowing you to exploit all of Control-M’s governance and compliance capabilities in production while ensuring a friction-free experience for all your technical users.”

Control-M with Python

Check out the full session here!

To see another demonstration of how the new Control-M Python client helps organizations address the challenge of getting complex data pipelines from data engineers and scientists into production at scale, allowing data personas to define and run their data pipelines and workflows in Control-M using Python, see this session as well!

Control-M Workflow Insights

You can check out an exciting new addition to Control-M called Workflow Insights in “Operating Business Workflows at Peak Performance with Better Insights” with Amir Banai, Senior Product Manager at BMC and Basil Faruqui, Principal Solutions Marketing Manager, BMC. Driven by workflow telemetry data, Control-M Workflow Insights is a new collection of data-rich dashboards that offer observable insights showing how workflow changes and trends impact the delivery and SLAs of business services over time.

Says Faruqui, “What we concluded after some of that market research was what we really need is a solution that can capture runtime metrics in real time, as these jobs run, archive those into a separate repository, and you should be able to have highly interactive dashboards where you can visualize the trends, set KPIs, be able to […] really measure it, and really allow the—not only just Control-M product owners, but the constituents that they serve, the application teams—to really focus on continuous optimization and not really have to deal with the plumbing behind the scenes that leads to the insights.”

Watch the full session here!

Control-M Workflow Insights

Control-M Managed File Transfer

Next up was a great session on Control-M Managed File Transfer with Jason Garner, Manager of Workload Automation and Global Cloud Operations at Finastra, a FinTech provider of technology services and solutions to close to 8,600 financial institutions. In “Get Maximum File Transfer Visibility, Control, and Integration,” Garner and Robby Dick, Solutions Marketing Manager from BMC, discussed Finastra’s success with the automation of batch processing file movements and other automations.

File transfers are critical to virtually every business service you deliver. Using separate products to manage file transfers and related application workflows can be risky and complicated, and negatively impact your critical business services. Says Garner about Control-M, “…it’s one solution that gives us the dashboard and the monitoring, and then the ability to roll it out easily, and we can provide secure access to other areas so that they can look into it…It just really expanded our ability to cover more areas, but with a smaller team, a smaller overhead, it’s all in one spot.”

See the full session here!

Control-M Managed File Transfer

BMC Helix Control-M

And don’t miss the opportunity to get a comprehensive look at cloud-based application workflow orchestration, available where you need it, when you need it, in “BMC Helix Control-M: Application Workflow Orchestration as a Service” with Tijs Monte, Managing Principal Software Engineer, BMC. BMC Helix Control-M provides the benefits of software-as-a-service (SaaS) consumption while delivering deep operational capabilities, speed, scale, and governance in production.

“The beauty of BMC Helix Control-M is that we can have this end-to-end view, but at the same time, we can allow these teams to own their own piece of the workflow. And this is what we see at the systems of innovations, where teams are working with cloud technologies, working in a DevOps-based operating model, and they can own their part of the flow, but still at the end of the day, you need to have that end-to-end visibility of your process,” explains Monte.

Watch this session now for a great demonstration and hear more about how BMC Helix Control-M is helping customers improve and derive more value from their agility, customer centricity, and actionable insights, and get a swift and satisfying look at all upcoming Control-M innovations here.

BMC Helix Control-M

To see more of the great conversations from BMC Exchange 2021, visit https://exchange.bmc.com.

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About the author

BMC Software

BMC works with 86% of the Forbes Global 50 and customers and partners around the world to create their future. With our history of innovation, industry-leading automation, operations, and service management solutions, combined with unmatched flexibility, we help organizations free up time and space to become an Autonomous Digital Enterprise that conquers the opportunities ahead.