Long before anyone ever coined the term DevOps there were terms such as IT service management (ITSM) and IT infrastructure library (ITIL) that at one time epitomized the state of the art in help desk. Now, as IT organizations enter 2018, much of the focus in the new year will be integrating DevOps processes with legacy approaches to delivering IT as a service that still permeate the enterprise.
To achieve that goal, BMC Software has integrated BMC Remedy service desk software with the Jira project tracking software developed by Atlassian. In addition, the latest release of BMC Remedy provides support for Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure public clouds.
Nayaki Nayyar, president of digital service management at BMC Software, says the rise of both DevOps and cloud computing has clearly changed the way organizations need to manage IT. At the same time, however, traditional service desks still play a critical role in managing IT. Most enterprise IT organizations are looking to extend their investments in service desks by providing tighter integration with DevOps tools in addition to managing applications and IT infrastructure running on-premises and in a public cloud, she says.
Nayyar also notes that modern IT management tools need to be accessible to a much broader constituency. Not only do IT operations teams want to be able to manage distributed IT resources, but also developers, business leaders and others need the ability to drill down into IT processes that affect specific applications.
While there is widespread recognition of that requirement, Nayyar notes progress has been at best uneven. A recent survey of IT professionals published by BMC Software finds 80 percent of the respondents said new management approaches and tools are required for effective multi-cloud management. At the same time, however, 40 percent of the respondents readily admit their organization does not have a firm grasp on how much they are spending on cloud services.
Nayyar says it’s clear IT organizations will need to rely more on various types of cognitive and artificial intelligence technologies to manage IT at scale. To provide those capabilities, BMC Software previously outlined a strategy for infusing cognitive and AI technologies across its entire portfolio. The latest release of BMC Remedy adds support for virtual agents and chatbots, in addition the ability to automatically classify and route IT events and incidents.
Less clear is how long it will take for traditional IT organizations to modernize their environments. Large web-scale companies have already taken advantage of modern DevOps processes to transform the way IT is managed. More traditional enterprise IT organizations are still evolving, clearly borrowing many of the concepts pioneered by DevOps practitioners. But most of them don’t have the software engineering skills required to build, deploy and maintain a modern DevOps environment built from scratch. Many of them are looking to providers of packaged IT management tools to provide them with a modern DevOps experience capable of spanning both modern and legacy application environments.
Most IT organizations will employ a raft of tools to accomplish that goal. But over time, it’s also clear most of them will eventually look to consolidate many of those tools to reduce as much of the friction inside their IT environments as possible.