Dimensional Data

Speaker 1: This is Techstrong TV. Mitch Ashley: With great pleasure of being joined by Andrew Colby. Andrew is VP of AIOps at Vitria. Welcome, Andrew. Andrew Colby: Good afternoon, Mitch. And thank you. Mitch Ashley: It’s a great topic. I’m excited to talk with you about it. We could go down the share war stories in telco experience, which really could be about 10 episodes of a different show, but today in the telco environment, or just in the business environment in general, the economic conditions, competitive pressures, looking for areas where we can get more for less, there are a lot of different parameters that have shifted or changed or maybe tightened that we’re currently working within. I’d love to get your perspective on that. Andrew Colby: Certainly, and thank you. Yeah, I’d say we see cautious optimism. Obviously, I’m based in the US in the DC Metro area, Maryland. And the US, the government entities and quasi-governmental entities have been tightening the economic structure in order to tame inflation. Fortunately, that has not driven our economy and had the potential recessionary effect that was feared, but people are still cautious, businesses are still cautious. That said, it’s hard to hire people and it’s really hard to hire technical people. So a lot of companies are continuing to look towards how to leverage technologies and automation to build efficiency so that they can do more with either the same number of people or re-task their people to higher value purposes, and let the technology do some of the more menial and mundane tasks. And we can explore this a little bit, especially in these new complex service delivery and network environments. It’s very difficult for me to imagine how an engineer who’s gone through anywhere from two to eight years of college education is going to really be happy going and spending their days collecting a lot of data across network, container management VM and other infrastructure systems to figure out what’s going on. I mean, really that’s where a lot of the automation provides a significant amount of value to let the engineers do the smart, difficult things that we want humans to do. Mitch Ashley: And a lot of pressures around meantime to recovery, even looking at resiliency, how do we stand up under a test-full situation, whether it be a security attack that might be going on or some unobserved condition that our systems and networks have never been under? Andrew Colby: Oh, there’s so much of that. So much is changing. It’s not just a person like you or me behind a smartphone that can actually report that there’s a problem, but it’s sensors and equipment that won’t necessarily report right away, so it needs to be detected. So that’s a whole nother additional dimension that service providers, large enterprise IT organizations are under, which is to be able to have this kind of real-time awareness of what’s going on. Whether the service is real time, like the video conference that we’re on or not, there really is a desire and expectation to have real time awareness of the service delivery to be able to detect what’s going on, react to it, address it before the user, whoever that is, the customer, the employee […]