BMC Unveils New Data Management and Analytics Capabilities

BMC Software has added a number of new capabilities to its flagship BMC Helix and Control-M products, as the legacy IT services company, which traditionally targeted mainframes, seeks to meet today’s data management and operations requirements with highly distributed infrastructures.

During much of BMC’s user conference BMC Exchange 2021 in late October, company representatives, users and partners described how BMC Helix and Control-M help to further the needs of what BMC describes as the “autonomous digital  enterprise,” for cloud and on-premises environments.

Simply put, the products’ new and existing capabilities involve more than helping organizations pull together data in near or real time into data lakes from highly distributed sources. They offer the ability to rely on automated data orchestration and inferences to make key business decisions.

@BMCSoftware CEO @asayed: “BMC is not a data analytics company. We are a data operations company. Our solutions orchestrate and optimize..data pipelines and translate data to actionable insights.” #BMCExchange @thenewstack #keynotespeaker https://t.co/ou76Hl3gAS pic.twitter.com/U6ZadUta1e

— BC Gain (@bcamerongain) October 27, 2021

Proper data analytics should thus enable DevOps teams to distill data into findings to help make changes to business services quickly and effectively — which is also a key attribute of DataOps.

“DataOps is quickly becoming a way to optimize data practices so that we can glean information and translate it into business value that comes alive in every autonomous digital enterprise,” said Ayman Sayed, BMC’s president and chief executive officer, during a BMC Exchange keynote.

How do you pool together all of those systems of record APIs? @BMCSoftware CEO @asayed: Analytics distills “data into actionable insights to enable you to change your offering and adjust quickly and effectively.” #BMCExchange @thenewstack #keynotespeaker https://t.co/ou76Hl3gAS pic.twitter.com/nNRHsaFokk

— BC Gain (@bcamerongain) October 27, 2021

A New Capability for Data Scientists

Specific to improving workflows by supporting DevOps processes for DataOps,  BMC’s Control-M Python client allows data for integration with data science and data engineering tools and open source code.

The new capability was created to help data scientists to better define and run their data pipelines and build  workflows in Control-M using Python.

“Control-M allows data scientists to use Python to create workflows for orchestrating data pipelines in such a way so that the Control-M Python client automatically translates the Python code to Control-M workflows,” said Ali Siddiqui, BMC’s chief product officer, during a keynote.

“With this solution, enterprises really have the best of both worlds: Data personas can continue to use Python, their preferred language, so that there is absolutely no disruption to their creativity,” Siddiqui said. “The organization, in turn, benefits from the resulting data pipeline ownership, benefiting from Control-M’s best-in-class controllers.”

AI for Advanced Data Analysis

The application of artificial intelligence (AI), of course, will and should play an increasingly important role for automation to replace cumbersome and low-level data management and monitoring tasks that DevOps team members would otherwise have to perform.

Helix’s new capabilities also allow for advanced data analysis with AI that provides actionable insights to improve specific business services.

One of Helix’s new capabilities, consisting of Helix Log Analytics, for example, offers “observable insights,” Siddiqui said. “This allows log data to be enriched with contextual data to provide insights that drive actions to optimize operations for the most complex enterprises; enriching log data to apply the right user context is part of our observability strategy.

“Building on this and applying AI to this enriched log data, to detect anomalies as part of user and entity behavior analytics, would offer killer insights for sure.”

@BMCSoftware‘s Anthony Bryce on BMC Helix Discovery’s roadmap: Organizations need to find a way to have more event- and API-driven updates and move away slowly from that concept of only discovering things once a week.” #BMCExchange @thenewstack
https://t.co/ou76Hl3gAS pic.twitter.com/jUZLUCTaxv

— BC Gain (@bcamerongain) October 28, 2021

Other new Control-M and Helix capabilities BMC discussed during BMC Exchange included:

• Improved performance of business-critical services with real-time insights: The Control-M Workflow Insights solution provides application and data workflow observability to continuously monitor and improve the performance of workflows for business services. With telemetry data gathered from application and data workflow behavior, organizations can continually optimize workflow and resource consumption, BMC said.
• Access workflow orchestration benefits through common cloud services tools: New integrations for BMC’s Control-M solution include new data-processing capabilities for cloud-environment platform as a service (PaaS) offerings. The idea is to simplify workflow orchestration for Amazon Web Services (AWS) Glue, Google Cloud Dataflow and Function, Microsoft Azure Data Factory and other data-workflow integrations.
• Improved “immersive” customer and employee experiences: The new BMC Helix Digital Workplaces studio offers a custom workspace for teams so that, among other things, content and context can be customized, with the user interface layer specifically created to support different functions and lines of business within an organization, according to BMC.
• Intelligent automation targeting communication service providers (CSP): BMC Helix for CSPs offers what BMC describes as 360-degree service assurance with a zero-touch network operations center (NOC), provided by the BMC Helix platform that combines AIOps with intelligent automation in a single pane of glass.