It’s been an exciting first two days at BMC Connect, with almost a thousand customers, partners, and peers gathered in Las Vegas to discover the new BMC. Tuesday morning, in a packed house at the Fontainebleau Las Vegas, BMC CEO Ayman Sayed and several members of the BMC leadership team took to the stage to deliver rousing keynotes about the path forward.

Sayed recounted that BMC—and the larger technology industry—are coming into a wave of growth as the market shifts toward a more positive outlook. With that turn toward the positive, tools like data analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), generative AI (GenAI), and automation are empowering businesses to capitalize on emerging opportunities, and BMC is in a prime position for it.

He says our breadth of AI-, GenAI- and machine learning (ML)-infused solutions have been born out of investments, innovation, customer focus, collaboration, and a modern culture. By connecting our past to our future, BMC is prepared to meet our customers where they are at this moment in time and help them accelerate their success.

Sayed brought out some of BMC’s largest customers to share where they are today, and what’s on their minds. A recurring theme of the discussion was the importance of the employee experience, with a focus on adapting to a changing workforce and delivering better employee experiences to unlock better customer experiences. As one customer puts it, “GenAI is new shiny thing. But keep your focus on the experience and make it meaningful.”

“ #GenAI is freeing up time to focus on what really matters. It can solve problems at lightning speed. The key is understanding how to operationalize and use that power for your organizations.“— Ankita Sharda, Cloud Customer Experience Lead of @googlecloud pic.twitter.com/y27CiAHwFd

— BMC Software (@BMCSoftware) October 15, 202

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Next, BMC Chief Product Officer Ali Siddiqui recapped our commitment to GenAI, reiterating that BMC was an intentional, early adopter of the technology and has now integrated it across the BMC AMI, Control-M, and BMC Helix portfolios in ways that deliver the most value—and amazing experiences—to our customers, line-of-business stakeholders, and our customers’ customers and employees.

Our GenAI- and agentic AI-driven solutions are also helping customers increase productivity, automate business services and data management workflows, and improve service level agreements (SLAs). You can read more about the individual solution enhancements announced today in Siddiqui’s blog here.

Jeff Hardy, VP and GM for the Americas at BMC, closed out Tuesday morning’s keynote with a roundtable with the leaders of the BMC Helix, Control-M, and BMC AMI portfolios. Margaret Lee, SVP and GM of Digital Service and Operations Management at BMC, spoke about the ascent of AI, sharing that 81 percent of respondents in our recent survey developed with Forbes are using it to simplify their business.

Gur Steif, the President of Digital Business Automation at BMC, referenced Control-M’s stability as legacy solution, pointing out that legacy means it’s still in place because it’s working. He says Control-M customers are using it to bring together structured and unstructured data to find new insights, as demonstrated by customers like Domino’s, Navistar, and CARFAX. “Seeing our customers innovate is my favorite part of the job,” he added.

John McKenny, SVP and General Manager of Intelligent Z Optimization and Transformation at BMC, spoke about the power of AI to unlock more data use cases in the mainframe space, and the importance of modernizing the mainframe for early-career developers and enhancing productivity for experienced employees.

In his breakout session, “Strategy and Roadmap for the BMC AMI Portfolio,” he referred to the mainframe as the fourth cloud, speaking to its enduring strength as a mission-critical platform. This reinforces the findings of our recently released 19^th annual BMC Mainframe Survey, available here. During his sneak peek at the BMC AMI roadmap, he discussed what’s new and next, as well as the innovations announced Tuesday, which are designed to support current developers and the generation coming behind them.

#BMCConnect2024 Attendees: Don’t forget to visit the BMC Collective Lounge and Customer Success Lounge for exclusive points and swag. pic.twitter.com/qXfflbXPMz

— BMC Software (@BMCSoftware) October 15, 2024

The Expo Hall, open throughout BMC Connect, is a popular destination with attendees, giving them a chance to get out from behind their screens, meet peers and experts—and pick up some cool new swag! They were also excited to get hands on in the real-life demos of our solutions, and join the AMA with our leadership team.

“There are many examples of how we’ve innovated in IT and then put that into our products.” – Scott Crowder, SVP and CIO pic.twitter.com/49lqsa0OUw

— BMC Software (@BMCSoftware) October 15, 2024

BMC Connect continues Wednesday with another full day of conversations, keynotes, educational opportunities, and more. Stay tuned to our social channels for the latest news: LinkedIn, X/Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Threads.

We continuously hear from our customers that they face rapidly changing expectations from their consumers and the market. To continue to thrive and innovate, they must have technology that helps them be agile, build resilience, and accelerate business. As we become the new BMC, we aim to unlock human and machine potential to drive business growth, innovation, and sustainable success.

To that end, I want to outline some recent BMC offerings that simplify the complex, improve productivity, offer an amazing employee and customer experience, and lead to agility and resilience. Announced today at our BMC Connect event in Las Vegas, these solutions will empower enterprise leaders to unify and act on data with the power of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) across an increasingly complex digital landscape—from cloud to mainframe to edge.

BMC has been delivering secure and trusted solutions for decades. We offer many solutions that incorporate AI and the latest GenAI functionality to extend and enhance customer capabilities. By building market-leading products our customers can rely on, we give organizations the tools they need to work more efficiently so they can focus on innovation. Our customizable portfolio also allows organizations to create their unique solutions tailored to their needs. This flexibility enables customers to solve their business challenges as they innovate across their technology stack.

Accelerate IT and business effectiveness

Introducing agentic AI: Our latest release of BMC Helix introduces agentic AI powered by BMC HelixGPT to transform enterprise IT work. It drives a set of autonomous agents that work proactively alongside human users to improve user experience, insights, and outcomes. It also extends the deployment flexibility of BMC HelixGPT so that service and operations management organizations can use the infrastructure of their choice. As part of the BMC Helix platform, BMC HelixGPT can be deployed via SaaS, on-premises, hybrid cloud, private cloud, and (soon) the Snowflake data cloud.

AIOps: The lack of efficiency and increased vulnerability due to visibility gaps in IT and security operations can leave IT teams constantly playing catch up. Our latest BMC Helix AIOps solution release addresses these challenges while also improving the overall operator experience with BMC HelixGPT. “AIOps will help us anticipate and address issues before they become problematic. We are excited about the capabilities BMC Helix will bring,” said Gisela Riggan, Chief Information Officer at BMC customer Prosperity Bank.

BMC Helix Control-M Data Assurance (Beta): This new service works with Control-M to strengthen customers’ data pipelines. With it, users can define dozens of data quality metrics and inspect and evaluate their data in motion at critical checkpoints throughout their workflows. By catching errors before they continue downstream, users can fix quality issues and prevent negative events from impacting customers and the business, thereby building more trust in significant data orchestration results. This is especially important in today’s data-driven world, with the ever-increasing volume of data that organizations work with. “Control-M is mission-critical to Domino’s data-driven culture. It will play a key role in helping us continue to grow and deliver cutting-edge innovation,” said Deepti Soni, Sr. Manager of Data Quality, Data Operations, and MLOps at Domino’s Pizza.

BMC Helix Control-M Data Assurance (Beta)

Transform and modernize critical core systems

BMC AMI Assistant: Organizations can unlock the full potential of the mainframe with the GenAI-powered BMC AMI Assistant, which is designed to be seamlessly infused into BMC AMI solutions. Whether explaining complex code or identifying the root cause of system anomalies, the assistant will provide actionable recommendations and automate manual, time-consuming tasks, empowering teams to work smarter and innovate faster. BMC AMI Assistant is pivotal to modernizing and transforming core mainframe systems, ensuring they remain agile and future-ready while preserving the reliability and performance that are critical to business operations. As of October 2024, BMC AMI Assistant will be available within:

• BMC AMI DevX Code Insights: Supercharged with BMC AMI Assistant, the GenAI-driven code explanation service offers developers the ability to demystify complex and unfamiliar code with a single right-click. Developers can confidently maintain and modify mainframe applications, eliminating the fear of change and accelerating time to delivery for impactful solutions. “It was imperative for us to give developers time to innovate and to focus on what it is they need to do. And that is to write code, build, and test that before shipping it,” Jakes Oliver, DevOps Engineer at Nedbank Ltd., explains about BMC AMI DevX.
• BMC AMI Ops Insight (Beta): Enhanced by BMC AMI Assistant, BMC AMI Ops Insight, now in Beta, delivers GenAI-powered root cause analysis, providing clear explanations for performance issues and system outages. Operators instantly understand problems and receive actionable recommendations, significantly reducing downtime and ensuring system resilience.

BMC AMI DevX Code Insights

Unlock innovation through orchestration and automation

BMC Helix Control-M Unified View: Our new “hybrid architecture” allows organizations to seamlessly manage workflows across Control-M self-hosted and BMC Helix Control-M SaaS with a consolidated, single-pane-of-glass view of all their workflows. With BMC Helix Control-M Unified View, customers can dynamically evolve their application and data pipeline orchestration strategy to fit their desired technology environment and operating model today and into the future. This future readiness is important to BMC and our customers, as emphasized by José Fortemps, Head of Infrastructure and Operations at AG Insurance, “We are confident that Control-M is the best way to go, not only to orchestrate the replatformed applications and data, but also to support other future workloads and activities. Control-M is a great investment for the future.”

BMC Helix Edge: BMC’s AI-powered solution takes orchestration and automation to the edge. It simplifies complex data collection and analysis anywhere in the network so you can predict and prevent problems before they occur and automates inventory management and lifecycle management of physical devices to free up more time to innovate.

BMC Helix Edge

Creating the best solutions to fit your needs

We are excited about these announcements and the other updates and features we are unveiling at BMC Connect 2024. Additionally, you can keep up to date on the latest research from BMC—a co-sponsored study with Forbes on the current state of how IT leaders view AIOps, our just-released 19th annual State of the Mainframe survey, with 1,000+ respondents from 12 industries, and the second annual Value of Data survey, which explores how organizations can assess and enhance their data maturity to help overcome challenges in using data for competitive advantage.

BMC helps enterprises maximize value from their data, transform operations from reactive to proactive, and deliver amazing customer and employee experiences, all with the power of AI. We are building on decades of innovation to empower organizations across the globe with the technology to excel and to create the best platform for your organization—your own.

We’re just around the corner from BMC Connect, BMC’s annual premier customer event, featuring an extraordinary lineup of customer speakers, technical sessions, educational and skills enhancement offerings, networking opportunities, and content and conversations that will enlighten, entertain, and inspire. Here’s a sneak peek at just some of what’s coming when we take over 50,000 square feet of the new Fontainebleau Las Vegas October 14–16. Come join us for the absolutely free event and discover the new BMC.

Get free training and get certified

This year, all attendees will receive a free code to take one of our 150+ web-based, on-demand courses, compliments of BMC Education, and we’ll have free BMC Certified Associate testing for over 30 BMC products. You could also be among the first to get certified on BMC HelixGPT, our generative AI-powered BMC Helix capability that caters to IT, HR, ESM, and ServiceOps use cases. The free course includes a web-based fundamentals module that attendees complete before the event, followed by a four-hour instructor-led training onsite and a certification exam that can be completed at the event or online later.

Gain practical insights about use cases that matter

We’ll have solution-specific sessions that reveal how enterprises are achieving successful outcomes every day, including:

• “Using BMC Helix to Meet FFIEC/DORA Requirements”: Explore the BMC solutions that can help you meet the compliance requirements of the European Union’s Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) and the U.S. Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC).
• “The Strategic Value of KPIs for Development Managers”: Learn how to improve velocity, quality, and efficiency in mainframe application development with KPI measurement.
• “AI-Powered Change Risk Advisor: Elevating Decision-Making in Complex IT Environments”: Meet the new BMC Helix AI/ML-driven Change Risk Advisor decision support system that saves time and enhances process efficiency by accelerating the approval process.
• “Unleashing Innovation: BMC AMI DevX with Generative AI”: Learn how Gen AI in solutions like BMC AMI DevX can help drive transformative change in mainframe application development.
• “Optimize and Modernize Your Key SAP S/S4HANA® Processes with Control-M”: See how Control-M eliminates the need for specialized knowledge requirements, and securely manages dependencies and silos between SAP and non-SAP systems.
• “Orchestrating Data File Transfers in a Hybrid Landscape”: Learn how Control-M innovation can help you deliver data-driven business services in a hybrid landscape without jeopardizing established practices.
• “Orchestrate Complex Data Pipelines into the Data Cloud to Superpower BMC HelixGPT Use Cases“: Explore how BMC HelixGPT and Control-M together enable a unified approach to AI, but without tool or cloud lock in, and empower enterprises to manage diverse data environments and maximize AI’s potential while ensuring compliance with data strategies.
• Hands-on workshops: Bring your laptop, elevate your expertise, and get even more from your BMC solutions with a unique blend of guided instruction—work at your own pace while receiving personalized support.
• Discover the Expo: Check out immersive BMC solution demos! Learn about new product releases and chat with the experts in zones for resiliency, experience, orchestration, and modernization, plus a zone for developers.

Engage 1:1 with BMC experts and peers

On top of sessions designed to engage, inform, and delight, we’ll have a variety of immersive experiences on tap:

• BMC Collective Customer Lounge: New this year! Network with your peers in an intimate, exclusive setting and learn how our dedicated Customer Success and Customer Advocacy teams support you at every stage of your BMC journey.
• “Birds of a Feather” lunches: Chat with industry peers to dive deep on topics relevant to your business.
• Ask the Experts: Visit our product specialists at the myBMC Resource Bar in the Expo and get an immediate response to your most urgent questions.
• AMA: Ask members of our BMC executive team—CIO Scott Crowder, CTO of the Americas Amanda Blevins, and VP of Pre-Sales Melanie Vogel—anything!
• Pizza with Engineers: Grab a slice with your fellow developers, engineers, and R&D folks during the Tuesday happy hour!

Enjoy all the extras

Build your soft skills, learn how to create a culture of innovation, and get a sneak peek at how our customer support experience is evolving based on customer feedback with:

• “The Brave One”: Become the bravest person in the room with Iona Holloway’s five-step Brave One Method in this blunt and heartfelt session hosted by BMC’s Women in Sales Network.
• “Crafting Your Narrative”: Join us for an interactive session and learn practical steps to be credible, authentic, and ruthless in the pursuit of building your personal brand.
• “The Innovation Playbook”: Explore the dynamic landscape of innovation and learn a proven process to ensure its success in your organization.
• “Customer Love”: You asked and we listened. Get an exclusive preview of our new, comprehensive customer success and support portal with AI-driven tools.

And that’s just the tip of the 45+ sessions that await. Make plans now to attend! Register here, reserve your hotel room at a phenomenally low price, and start customizing your agenda! You don’t want to miss it!

At BMC, we are dedicated to helping our customers transform their businesses throughout the ever-changing needs of the global market with industry-leading solutions in service and operations efficiency, workload optimization, and all things hybrid cloud. But, simply put, transformation does not “stick” if it’s not sustainable.

BMC is on an iterative journey towards sustainability, constantly seeking ways to integrate corporate citizenship into our business practices and transformation efforts. Through BMC Cares and by fostering a holistic commitment to improve greenhouse gas emissions across the business, we are advancing our own sustainability agenda and empowering our customers to do the same.

One of the ways we are making this connection more visible to the market and our customers is through our clean water restoration efforts with Seabin^™, a clean-tech start-up that has revolutionized the way the world tackles ocean pollution. Seabin’s innovative technology collects debris and microplastics from the surface of oceans and waterways, filtering water through a catch bag. This technology, capable of filtering up to 55,000 liters of water per hour, is a testament to the power of innovative solutions in addressing environmental challenges.

Each Seabin unit makes a significant impact in our fight against ocean pollution. To show our professional services customers that we are doing good beyond our business, we honor them and commemorate our bin sponsorships with an official Seabin^™ thank you certificate. This initiative highlights the intersection of responsible business practices and exceptional customer experience.

Since the beginning of our partnership, our sponsored Seabin units have filtered 1.385 billion liters of water and removed over 3191.1 kilograms of marine litter. These achievements are more than just numbers; they represent our commitment to creating a cleaner, healthier planet for future generations while making transformation sustainable in the long run.

Being a responsible business is good for business. It drives innovation, builds trust, and strengthens relationships with customers, partners, and communities. As we leverage our expertise and resources to become a net-zero enterprise by 2030, we remain dedicated to leading by example and empowering others to join us in positively impacting the world.

This World Oceans Day, let’s all take a moment to appreciate the beauty and importance of our oceans and waterways. Let’s commit to making smarter decisions that protect our environment and ensure a sustainable future for all. Together, we can drive meaningful change, make a tangible difference in protecting our planet, and ensure a sustainable future for all.

BMC begins and ends with the customer, and the BMC Customer Success Management team brings that vision to life with a “#OneBMC” commitment to deliver the best experience across the BMC and partner ecosystem every day. We’re proud to announce that the team has just been recognized with a 2024 Pulse GameChanger Award in the Dream Team category, presented at the recent Gainsight Pulse conference. The award “celebrates the extraordinary achievements of a cross-functional team that has redefined collaboration and united behind the common goal of customer success.

Receiving the GameChanger recognition is a validation for the team. “We’re excited to be recognized by the customer success industry and presented as an example to follow. We put a lot of effort into it, and it’s paying off. We want the customer journey to be as frictionless as possible,” explains Carol Keyes, Senior Manager of Customer Success Operations at BMC.

The winning formula

BMC Customer Success Management is intensely focused on empowering customers to achieve their goals through a unified approach to our products and services that aligns with the BMC vision, strategy, execution, and measurement (VSEM) framework. BMC Chief Customer Officer Colin Murphy has had a singular focus on a more customer-centric journey, sharing, “We must embrace #OneBMC if we want to differentiate our service with customers. That means operating as one team with shared objectives aligned to clear metrics, taking an ‘outside-in’ approach to continually reinforce the customer journey.”

Driven by data, the team leverages robust Gainsight reporting and dashboards to enhance data integrations and collaboration across platforms, teams, and the entire company; accurately measure goal progress; and glean insights from customer data to ensure the best possible experience. This unified approach facilitates customer adoption and success by ensuring that every BMC team member is aligned with and actively participating in achieving common goals.

Gainsight integration provides a single, holistic view of the customer and delivers insights into the overall sentiment or health of the account. It is also the single source of truth for cross-functional risk identification and risk mitigation activities across BMC, seamlessly connecting insights from renewals, support, surveys, product, and sales. Through this big-picture view, both issues and opportunities become apparent, enabling the Customer Success Management team to leverage their expertise and intervene, resulting in an elevated customer experience.

Collaborative data breeds results

Highlighting the importance of internal collaboration, Keyes adds, “We’re connected end to end internally to make it as seamless as possible for [customers] externally, so that they don’t even notice that there are multiple teams when they’re onboarding and implementing the product to when they’re adopting and managing and utilizing the product to when they’re renewing. They just know they’re working with BMC.”

“We are really emphasizing the #OneBMC mindset by bringing all the teams together, combining our knowledge, and avoiding duplication of effort. Everybody understands how what they’re doing is contributing to the overall goal, which is our customer,” says Victoria Barry, Director of Operations for Customer Success at BMC. “It sets a clear direction and puts the customer in the center of everything we do. It’s so important for us to be recognized because we’ve spent a lot of time building internal relationships to bring everybody to the same table with the same focus.”

Joel Skaggs, VP of Customer Support Operations at BMC, says connecting the data is key to the team’s—and customers’ success. “When we work together effectively, sharing our information, and pulling teams together across BMC and across product areas, the customer wins because more people understand context,” he explains. “When we provide more insights for our customers, we can service them better and ultimately help them get more value from our software. That’s the goodness for our customers.”

BMC continuously strives to deliver a best-in-class customer success offering that provides customers with the best insights, innovations, and enablement to ensure the successful adoption of BMC solutions. To learn more about how you can build an even stronger engagement and bold outcomes with BMC through the BMC Customer Success Management team, check out our guide, BMC Customer Success Management: Our Promise to You.

As customer data breaches continue to happen—and get larger and larger, customer privacy concerns are again front page news. It seems an opportune time to bring some good news to the table and announce that BMC has obtained binding corporate rules (BCRs) in the UK, in addition to the EU BCRs that we’ve held for almost a decade. Data privacy is no longer a nice to have. It’s a business imperative in today’s always-on digital world, and one that BMC takes very seriously.

What BCRs are

BCRs are a privacy compliance framework derived from European, and now, UK, privacy laws since the UK exited the EU. They are the permission and legal instrument given to global organizations by European and UK regulators to transfer data outside Europe in accordance with the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

BMC extended our BCR certification from 2015 to satisfy the UK regulation post-Brexit. The new authorization applies both to our own data, like HR, finance, and procurement data, and most importantly, our customer data. Recent research shows us that more customers want to know what companies do with their information, and it’s becoming integral to their brand loyalty.

Why BCRs matter

According to the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP) Privacy and Consumer Trust report, 64 percent of consumers surveyed said their trust is enhanced when companies provide clear information about their privacy policies. On top of that, the 2023 MediaMath Consumer Privacy Survey found that 65 percent of consumers said misuse of personal data would be the top reason they would lose trust in a brand.

By establishing BCRs in the UK and Europe, BMC assures customers that we are treating their data with the utmost care and attention to security. BCRs are special because they’re an explicit recognition by regulators that we have established a comprehensive compliance program not only in the EU and the UK, but across the board. Regulators consider BCRs the gold standard because they require a much more labor-intensive process to pursue than alternative legal instruments such as standard contractual clauses (SCCs), which are much easier to attain and are in use by most companies operating in Europe.

The number of companies that have obtained both EU and UK BCRs is extremely small (15 to date)—and BMC is the first US-based IT company to do so with such a comprehensive scope, applicable both to its own data (as a “data controller”), and to its customers’ data (as a “data processor”). Having both EU and UK BCRs is an official seal, validating that BMC is enforcing the same protections for handling and retaining our own data and our customers’ data in the 40 countries where we operate and wherever we transfer it.

Going the extra mile

Attaining the UK BCRs was a very collaborative effort across BMC and with our outside legal partners. We were required to assure regulators of a full governance framework, with a consistent level of compliance for our customer and vendor agreements, maintained with internal training and audits across the entire organization. As part of our submission process, we shared the very specific details and operational processes around personal data handling to demonstrate our compliance with the regulators’ obligations.

We have established internal data governance processes that span legal, information security (InfoSec), information systems and technology (IS&T), marketing, and procurement, as well as other departments, so that it has become embedded into the business. We have quarterly meetings with our executive leadership team, and conduct annual employee data privacy training.

There is also a special, expedited process for handling any customer privacy complaints. And we will keep the BCRs continuously updated, amending them regularly as needed and notifying regulators every year to inform them of any changes.

We are particularly aware and mindful of the important responsibility to secure data against threat, and to treat it in a manner that is not just compliant but also responsible and transparent to our customers and employees, so our BCRs are publicly available online here.

We’re proud to comply with both the EU and UK BCRs as part of the BMC commitment to deliver service excellence and support our environmental, social, and governance (ESG) initiatives. We have gone the extra mile to provide our customers with the highest, most recognized certification for privacy because privacy is a fundamental right and an essential duty for organizations in the digital era.

Enhancing the BMC Helix Observability and AIOps solution with application and network management capabilities

It is my pleasure to welcome the Netreo team to BMC. Netreo is a software company that helps organizations deliver digital experiences through real-time visibility into performance and availability of applications deployed in the cloud, on-premises, and within hybrid networks and infrastructure.

Full-stack open Observability and AIOps on the BMC Helix platform

The acquisition marks a strategic leap forward for BMC as Netreo products will accelerate our OpenTelemetry-based observability capabilities and enhance the full-stack, open BMC Helix Observability and AIOps solutions with Network Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics and application performance management capabilities. The combined power of the BMC Helix platform and Netreo solutions provides IT Operations, DevOps practitioners, developers, and network teams with comprehensive insights spanning applications, infrastructure, and networks, helping them increase the overall reliability and performance.

Netreo’s strong presence within developer and DevOps teams, coupled with standards-based OpenTelemetry tracing (including logs and metrics), positions BMC to effectively lead the observability segment, facilitating deeper visibility into modern microservices-based applications. In addition, Netreo’s approach to network performance and diagnostics is noteworthy, extending beyond conventional methods such as SNMP, NetFlow, and sFlow to incorporate API-based insights from network elements alongside SD-WAN monitoring. As a result, networking teams can deliver new network services, increase customer satisfaction, and maximize overall network performance.

Expanded Observability and AIOps add even more value to BMC ServiceOps, which includes industry-leading service management capabilities. It enables teams to predict incidents and disruptions from changes and continuous releases, helping customers reduce risk while accelerating innovation.

We are excited to offer our customers full-stack, open observability and AIOps to increase reliability and performance of their entire IT environments.  Building on top of our ServiceOps, innovative AI and ML technologies such as the BMC HelixGPT solution, BMC is uniquely positioned to help enterprises transform the way they deliver critical services, helping them prevent incidents, and accelerating their journey to becoming an Autonomous Digital Enterprise.

Jasmin Young, CEO of Netreo, is excited to join forces with me at BMC. We share excitement about seeing Netreo’s observability vision come to fruition within the BMC family as both organizations have bold plans for observability, AIOps and applying machine learning across the portfolio.

With this acquisition, at BMC, we continue to accelerate our focus on investing in strategic innovation and technologies that drive IT and digital transformation, furthering the adoption of machine learning and observability across the enterprise.

Netreo offers both on-premises and SaaS solutions. To learn more about Netreo, follow www.netreo.com, and to learn about the BMC Helix Observability and AIOps solution, follow www.bmc.com/it-solutions/bmc-helix.html.

As the first vendor to embed generative AI, and specifically, BMC HelixGPT across the entire service and operations management portfolio, BMC continues to make significant advances with the technology to remove friction and augment human intelligence. In this blog post, learn how the BMC Helix Service Management 23.3 release is delivering conversational virtual agent experiences with BMC HelixGPT; enabling more personalized workplace portals; reducing HR complexities; and improving security response handling.

Save time training chatbots

The use of generative AI to power chatbots is going to play an even bigger role in the workplace, driving higher levels of employee self-service and automation. BMC HelixGPT provides prompts and guardrails to significantly reduce the time spent on training large language models (LLMs). BMC Helix Virtual Agent, powered by BMC HelixGPT, ingests company owned PDFs, Confluence and SharePoint files, and knowledge articles to give BMC Helix Virtual Agents the best source of company information. Live chat is a powerful way for an agent to engage with the end user in real time to resolve an issue quickly. BMC HelixGPT automatically generates a high-quality summary of the live chat once the issue has been addressed, saving the agent time and accelerating productivity.

Redefine workplace portals

Every time an employee engages with a workplace portal or process, it’s an opportunity to reinforce the company’s culture, values, and priorities. BMC Helix Digital Workplace can be easily customized without complex coding. Within this release, it is now easier than ever to fine-tune the workplace portal so different employee types only see the content that is most relevant to them. This saves the employee time, improves self-service, and reduces delays from rerouting tickets to the right teams.

Reduce HR onboarding and offboarding complexities

A smooth and positive experience for onboarding and offboarding makes employees feel welcomed, motivated, and valued from the time they start to the time they leave. The BMC Helix Service Management 23.3 release provides an out-of-the-box solution to automate onboarding and offboarding processes from pre-boarding to everyday employment to offboarding and alumni status. The solution includes a detailed manager view and out-of-the-box dashboards to improve reporting activities. HR teams now can filter by country and location, assess new hire statistics, and have a drill-down view per employee with data on their tasks and statuses.

Respond to security events quickly

BMC Helix Security Incident Handling is a ready-to-use solution within the BMC Helix Service Management 23.3 release that tightly aligns with industry and government standards based on NIST 800-61 and ISO 27001. Security events are automatically created through integration with security information and event management (SIEM) tools so that each phase of the incident management lifecycle—identification, investigation, response, and remediation—is methodically addressed. Preconfigured runbooks address common security scenarios and help standardize the activities in each phase. The solution shortens the duration of breaches to minimize associated impacts, reduces manual tracking activities, and provides a way to formally track lessons learned. It enables teams to share critical information around prevention, corrective actions and associated policies and controls.

Start your journey today

Learn more about the exciting developments in the BMC Helix Service Management 23.3 release by watching the latest webinar. Speak to your account manager to start your journey today.

During the month of March, we celebrate International Women’s Day and Women’s History Month. “Inspire inclusion” is the International Women’s Day theme for 2024, and in honor of that, we surveyed members of the BMC Women in Technology and Business (WiT&B) employee resource group (ERG) about inclusion and mentorship. Establishing ERGs is a powerful way to foster open discussions and promote inclusion by creating safe spaces for employees to have open, authentic conversations, and the WiT&B ERG has had a significant impact on its members.

For Brianna Steensen, who manages the BMC Champion Academy sales training organization, it’s been integral to building a stronger and broader network. “I’ve made great connections with female leaders and have been able to tap their time and expertise for my program,” she shares. She also appreciates the support that comes with that, specifically, “seeing female leaders like myself being supported and promoted by others in the organization. Recognition for hard work goes a long way, even if it’s on a call or in an email.”

Gina Fevrier, a senior program manager in the Beta program at BMC, highlights communication as key ingredient of inclusion. “Inclusion, for me, means being listened to and being asked for my input during meetings. It’s about being invited to meetings, including lunch and extracurricular activities, and not feeling left out due to my gender,” she explains. “It’s being given opportunities to lead and participate in special projects. It’s being asked for my feedback on team, organizational, and corporate initiatives.”

Fevrier also appreciates the inclusion that the WiT&B ERG affords her as a remote worker. “I’ve liked our live webinars with internal and external speakers, like Carla Harris, who talk about their real-life experiences in their careers,” she says.

“I loved our book club, where a smaller group of us met on a monthly basis to talk about the books’ themes and how they relate to our lives. These smaller, non-recorded groups are really helpful to people like me who work from home and miss out on the “water cooler” and lunch conversations in the office. I like being kept up to date on women’s work issues and opportunities.”

Deepak Chopra, a senior manager of product development at BMC, says the ERG has helped broaden his understanding and awareness about issues related to inclusion, and where he can help foster discussions. “Inclusion is including anyone and everyone in [the] mainstream, everywhere, which can be home, community, workplace, etc. There is no reason not to follow inclusion,” he shares.

“I started becoming more vigilant towards inclusivity and making sure I remain supportive and help in this area. [Through the ERG I have] learned lots of best practices, which I am implementing in my day-to-day life.”

ERGs give their members a safe space for genuine dialogue, and Rebecca Beatty, a senior solution engineer at BMC, says that’s the very definition of inclusion for her. “Inclusion in the workplace means that I get to show up to work as my authentic self and be comfortable with it,” she explains. “[I have a] community of coworkers who I know I can reach out to for mentoring or advice, as well as [gain] access to information and meet new people.”

Sheila Mullen, a global strategic account manager at BMC, shares that inclusivity spans everything from elevating your presence where key business decisions are made to sharing and learning from diverse views, including, “celebrating our differences and actively learning about people who are different from you.”

She adds that the ERG helped her grow personally and professionally. “No matter what is going on in my world, every time I join a WiT&B call, I am energized, inspired, and in awe of the talented women at BMC. I leave the call knowing anything is possible,” she says. “Participating has allowed me to advocate for myself, be a sphere of influence in my piece of BMC, and positively support the promotion of women in the workplace.”

Rosie Huth, a global alliances manager at BMC, says inclusion is about “collaboration and mutual respect for your professional counterparts.” “No one has to prove why they should have a seat at the table because we are already here together,” she shares. “[With the ERG], I have built a community with professionals that span region, departments, and roles, which, by default, helps to foster a rich sense of inclusion across traditional silos.”

Each of the members also shared how mentorship relationships have been instrumental for them. “I have an incredible mentor at BMC! She is someone who listens, gives great advice, and continuously advocates for me,” says Steensen. “We’ve had crucial conversations about career trajectory and paths, which have helped shaped my own professional goals.”

Fevrier has had a mentor for two and a half years and been a mentor for two years, and both have been enriching experiences. “My mentor has helped me affirm my value at this time of my career where I’ve had some self-doubts, and she helped me rebuild my self-confidence. She has helped me with networking across the company, which has led to new opportunities at BMC that match my skills and interests,” she explains.

“As a mentor, I’ve been there to listen and provide career guidance. My mentee knows that she has a safe place to talk about her concerns. There have even been moments of reverse mentoring, which I’ve really appreciated. My mentee has been someone I could rely on for confidential discussions about any work issues and career advice.”

Chopra is also on both sides of mentoring, explaining. “I am mentoring individuals for their personal and professional growth, including their career and helping them in their day to day life.”

Beatty benefitted from mentoring earlier in her career, sharing. “[Years ago], I had the opportunity to complete a leadership training academy at a previous employer and be mentored by my then manager, who was also the only female leader in my organization.”

Mullen is both a mentor and mentee and she loves it. “I have mentored several women. I love to see them grow and progress in their careers. I have been mentored and supported by some amazing professionals in my career. Each one added to my professional toolbox. I am the woman I am today because of each of their gifts. I am truly fortunate and grateful,” she says.

“[As a mentee], I learned that I did not want to be a leader or manager, in a see-try-learn way, where I found out that my strong skillset and what motivated the best version of me was in the weeds working with customers versus leading a team of people who do that. I feel very fortune to have a supportive mentor willing to grow with me and help me figure out which direction I wanted to go, even if it wasn’t the same path they were on.”

Huth has enjoyed being a mentor, particularly for women transitioning into the tech sector. “I have had the absolute pleasure of mentoring professionals at BMC [to whom] I can transfer my knowledge, insights, and experiences,” she explains. “Especially where they have come from non-tech backgrounds or veterans. It has been a joy to help them recognize they have a fresh perspective to business discussions and the industry because it’s not all they have known. They don’t have to unlearn anything and their resiliency to adapt is what is most valuable.”

If you’re looking for ways to expand inclusion across your business, and build employee resource groups, check out our DEI blog series on these topics and more, and to learn more about International Women’s Day, visit www.internationalwomensday.com.

BMC is committed to environmental, social, and governance (ESG) practices that create a more sustainable future. We are guided by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and believe that our business success is intrinsically linked to the well-being of our planet and people.

We have a long-standing commitment to environmental sustainability, and we take concrete steps to reduce our environmental impact. We are also actively engaged with several organizations that promote environmental responsibility, including:

• EcoVadis: We are proud to participate in EcoVadis’ annual sustainability assessment, consistently achieving a gold rating.
• Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP): For the past three years, we have participated in the CDP’s annual climate change disclosures, demonstrating our transparency and commitment to measuring and reducing our greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
• Science Based Targets Initiative (SBTi): We submitted our 2023 GHG reduction goals for validation by SBTi, with the aim of exceeding their GHG reduction mandate of 50 percent by 2030.
• ISO 14001 certification: We maintain ISO 14001 certification, an internationally recognized standard for environmental management systems. This certification demonstrates our commitment to continuously improving our environmental performance and reducing our impact on the planet.

As part of our commitment to continuous improvement, we are actively working towards achieving certification in two additional ISO standards, ISO 45001 to manage occupation health and safety risks, and ISO 50001, which will ensure our current energy management system aligns with the ISO global standard for energy consumption, carbon footprint reduction, and overall energy efficiency.

BMC is on track to achieving our net-zero target by 2030 and continues to demonstrate that commitment through partnerships with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, Reforest’Action, One Tree Planted, GreenThumb, Vashundara, Seabin Project, Ocean Conservancy Project, and TeamSeas.

You can read more about our commitments to ESG and environmental sustainability in the 2023 BMC Corporate Citizenship and ESG Impact Report.