Financial regulations exist to ensure stability and trust in global banking systems. They protect customers, preserve systemic integrity, and help mitigate the risk of financial crises. However, even in a heavily regulated industry, banks and financial institutions (BFSIs) worldwide routinely fail audits, often paying steep penalties amounting to billions of dollars.

While many penalties have historically addressed financial misconduct, regulatory bodies are increasingly targeting failures in operational resilience—penalizing lapses in the critical systems and services that underpin modern banking operations.

Two regulatory frameworks, the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) in the European Union (EU) and the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) guidelines in the United States, underscore the increasing emphasis on IT operational resilience. These regulations mandate strong risk management and incident response frameworks to safeguard financial operations against escalating technological threats. Meeting these requirements necessitates a shift in how CIOs, CTOs, and IT leaders manage their IT ecosystems, making comprehensive IT management platforms like BMC Helix essential.

Why operational resilience matters

Although DORA and FFIEC share a focus on operational resilience, their approaches differ. DORA mandates explicit compliance measures, including resilience testing, incident reporting, and third-party risk management, with non-compliance resulting in severe penalties. Meanwhile, FFIEC offers broader, non-binding guidelines, enforced selectively by regulatory bodies like the Federal Reserve and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC).

Despite their differences, both emphasize the interconnected nature of increasingly complex and evolving financial systems. Failures in one institution can cascade globally, underscoring the importance of strong information and communication technology (ICT) risk management. Compliance involves addressing issues such as cybersecurity threats, service disruptions, and third-party dependencies, which makes an advanced IT management platform like BMC Helix indispensable.

BMC Helix: A holistic solution for DORA and FFIEC compliance

BMC Helix is an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered platform that enables compliance with DORA, FFIEC, and similar frameworks. The platform automates IT operations (ITOps), integrates service and operations management, and provides real-time visibility into critical systems. By aligning IT processes with regulatory expectations, BMC Helix empowers financial IT leaders to meet the stringent demands of operational resilience.

Key features include:

• Comprehensive service mapping: IT leaders must first understand their service and application dependencies, including new dependencies from mergers and acquisitions, to prevent disruptions. BMC Helix automates the mapping of technology components to business services, creating real-time, dynamic service maps. These maps show interactions and dependencies across on-premises systems, cloud environments, mainframes, and third-party services, giving organizations a clear picture of their operational landscape.
• Risk management through real-time monitoring and modeling: Regulatory frameworks emphasize proactive risk management, requiring constant monitoring and vulnerability assessments. BMC Helix provides real-time alerts for emerging threats and uses predictive analytics to recommend corrective actions. Automated remediation processes restore services quickly while minimizing operational risks.
• Incident and recovery management: Both DORA and FFIEC highlight the importance of swift incident response and recovery. BMC Helix enables organizations to quickly detect, respond to, and report incidents efficiently. AI-driven insights help predict and mitigate risks, while automated recovery workflows minimize service disruptions and deliver faster recoveries. Additionally, the platform generates comprehensive reports to meet audit requirements.
• Governance and compliance reporting: Meeting governance standards is vital for avoiding fines and reputational damage. BMC Helix automates key governance processes, including reporting and change management, to ensure institutions are ready in the event of an audit. And dashboards tailored to DORA and FFIEC compliance provide actionable insights into vulnerabilities so organizations can proactively address gaps.
• Mainframe integration for enterprise visibility: Many financial institutions rely on mainframes for critical operations. BMC Helix integrates with BMC’s mainframe resiliency suite, providing unified monitoring and security across all systems. This cross-platform integration is critical for compliance, ensuring operational visibility and continuity.

The future of operational resilience

DORA and FFIEC represent a broader trend in regulatory frameworks, where operational resilience is intertwined with financial stability and is no longer optional. It’s mandatory to ensure trust is maintained and to avoid significant penalties.

With its AI-driven insights, automated workflows, and comprehensive service and operations management, BMC Helix is at the forefront of this transformation. The integrated solution empowers financial organizations to meet regulatory requirements, reduce risks, and enhance operational efficiency, positioning them for success in a time when resilience is paramount.

Contact BMC Helix to learn more about how we can help you meet the IT resiliency requirements of DORA, FFIEC, and other financial regulations.

Today’s communication service providers (CSPs) are facing an inflection point. With customers demanding more for less, greater competition from traditional and new players, and core services becoming commoditized and causing margin erosion, CSPs are looking to increase their revenue streams by launching new and innovative services and reduce costs while preparing network operations to handle even more data-intensive technologies of the future. Additionally, telecommunications companies need to deliver a differentiated customer experience with faster, easier, more personalized customer support. To do that, many leading CSP are optimizing and automating their IT operations (ITOps) with agentic AI to increase their organizations’ level of maturity in reference to the TMF AN (Autonomous Network) Framework.

5G networks: The first wave of change for telecommunications service delivery

5G networks have revolutionized the telecommunications industry. They have also had an impact on other industries including healthcare, transportation, and manufacturing. Use cases include becoming the backbone for smart traffic systems deployed in major metropolitan areas, enabling robotic automation in manufacturing, and allowing ultra-low–latency implementations like remote surgeries and self-driving rideshare vehicles. 5G networks have also changed how CSPs need to structure their infrastructure to deliver services—from adopting cloud platforms and cloud–native technologies and new, open digital architectures to achieve the economies of scale for bandwidth–intensive use cases and faster, more reliable, redundant, and glitch–free networks.

Customers are demanding more

As telecom providers support new and innovative technologies with 5G networks, customers want a frictionless, personalized experience with zero trouble, zero touch, and zero wait. To keep up, telecoms must deliver more proactive and responsive customer service, including:

• Proactive issue resolution: Proactively monitor network performance and address potential issues before they impact customers.

• Accelerate resolution times: When incidents cannot be avoided, or when IT and network configuration changes are necessary, the time required to resolve the incident (mean time to repair, or MTTR) or perform the change should be reduced as much as possible. 

• Faster response times: Reduce wait times for customer support interactions and provide quick resolutions.

• Clear communication: Inform customers about service disruptions or planned maintenance to build trust. 

Autonomous, customer-centric operations are quickly becoming the norm

The speed and methods of customer support have changed. Calling into a service center and speaking to a human (who probably needs to work with another team to resolve the issue) takes too long and is longer acceptable. Instead, today’s telecom customers expect:

• Self-service options: Online tools, mobile applications, and self-serve kiosks that allow independent account management and resolution of common issues. 

• Chatbots and AI-powered assistants: AI-powered chatbots using natural language that can handle routine inquiries and provide instant support 24x7x365.

• Support across multiple channels: Multi-platform support options that include email for non-urgent issues, social media direct messages, and even traditional telephone support for customer who still want a human to help them.

The future of telecommunications operations is agentic AI

Instead of inefficient, manual processes that involve form completes and emails, agentic AI can meet ITOps end users and customers where they are, delivering a single, integrated hub for all requests, and allowing engagement through platforms they’re already familiar with, like Teams, Slack, or social media channels.

For IT and network operations center (NOC) staff stuck in a “swivel chair” rut maneuvering through time-consuming, multi-system processes, agentic AI offers smart, agent-like assistants that free up staff to focus on critical, high-value tasks instead of repetitive actions.

In many current environments, collaboration is impeded by silos, with systems of record disconnected from communication channels. Agentic AI can break down these barriers by integrating systems of record with communication tools. This creates a collaborative, adaptive environment where information flows smoothly.

Another issue that could be impeding efficiency is the restriction of data analysis to a few individuals, with insights detached from IT and network operations staff, who need to wait in line to get important insights. Agentic AI democratizes data access, enabling team members to ask questions, create dashboards, and explore complex queries.

BMC HelixGPT is the agentic AI solution for telecoms

BMC HelixGPT AI agents take generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) beyond the “call and response” mechanism familiar to many users from their early interactions with GenAI. BMC Helix now has agents that work autonomously across areas that include: 

• Knowledge curation: A relevant and updated knowledge base can add substantial value for CSPs. BMC HelixGPT Knowledge Curator uses AI to enhance knowledge management by improving readability, reducing redundancy, and ensuring relevancy. It helps identify and address issues like duplicated content, obsolete information, and inconsistencies, ultimately leading to a more reliable and usable knowledge base.

• Custom dashboards: Building and accessing business-relevant dashboards is integral to the work of IT and network operations. BMC HelixGPT Insight Finder provides a natural language chat interface that helps service owners and site reliability engineers (SREs) dynamically generate dashboards and reports with information about issues impacting service health or service-management-specific topics like tracking service level agreement (SLA) breaches and their related penalties.

• Change risk evaluation: Configuration changes can disrupt service and negatively impact the customer experience. BMC Helix GPT Change Risk Advisor assesses the risk of changes before they are implemented by analyzing operational and service management data, historical change data, and current operational data to provide a change risk score. 

• Collaboration tool integration: Multi-channel collaboration is a must-have for service and operations teams. BMC HelixGPT Ops Swarmer allows them to work together in Microsoft Teams sessions launched directly from an incident record in the BMC Helix ITSM solution. The BMC HelixGPT platform evaluates previous responses to similar issues and quickly recommends the most appropriate team members and Teams chat participants to ensure the best response.

The newest entry in the BMC HelixGPT portfolio, BMC HelixGPT Agent Builder, goes one step further by empowering CSPs to create their own custom AI agents to automate their unique workflows. These custom agents can be integrated with various systems and processes, enhancing automation capabilities and flexibility. Click here to learn more about BMC HelixGPT AI agents and what they can do for you.

The Mobile Economy 2025 report from GSMA provides critical insights into the telecommunications industry’s trajectory through 2030. These findings, as well as those of Telecoms operators share their visions for Operations of the Future, a Mobile World Live (MWL) report on a telecoms.com survey developed in partnership with BMC and Amazon Web Services (AWS), highlight key opportunities and challenges for telecom providers seeking a competitive advantage in today’s market.

The mobile economy and revenue pressure

According to the GSMA report, mobile technologies and services generate 5.8 percent of the global gross domestic product (GDP), contributing $6.5 trillion in economic value. By 2030, this contribution will reach nearly $11 trillion (8.4 percent of the global GDP). However, mobile operators face significant revenue pressure, with average revenue per user (ARPU) projected to grow at just one percent in high-income countries and three percent in low- and middle-income countries through 2030.

This limited revenue growth is driving operators to diversify services and develop new revenue streams, particularly in the enterprise segment. The GSMA Open Gateway initiative, which aims to leverage network capabilities through common APIs, represents one such effort, with 72 operator groups (that comprise 78.5 percent of global mobile connections) signed up as of February 2025.

Three critical areas for operational transformation

AIOps and automation

The telecommunications industry is increasingly applying artificial intelligence (AI) across all operations, including network, energy optimization, customer service, and retail. While early AI deployments have focused on internal solutions to improve performance, the GSMA report identifies a growing shift toward developing AI solutions for external customers, particularly enterprises. Examples include China Mobile’s AI integration with financial industry processes, Singtel’s AI cloud service partnership with Scale AI, and Telefónica Tech’s generative AI (GenAI) platform for business process optimization.

The Mobile World Live report found that AIOps was either the first or second priority for approximately half of respondents for their future operations, sharing, “The possibility to harness automation to reduce workloads, eliminate repetitive tasks, and ensure error-free network operation is a compelling driver, opening up the possibility to both reduce cost and improve customer experience.”

Implementation challenges

Despite clear strategic imperatives, operational transformation remains challenging. Respondents to the telecoms.com survey identified skills development as the greatest barrier to successful delivery of improved operational performance (43 percent of respondents), followed by cost pressure (32 percent) and time pressure (25 percent).

Two-thirds of respondents reported having a strategic corporate plan for enhancing operations, suggesting growing leadership buy-in for transformation initiatives. However, approximately 60 percent indicated they would use partners for both strategic operational direction and implementation, highlighting the need for external expertise to fully leverage technologies like AI and autonomous networks.

With expertise in the telco industry, and experience with major communication service providers (CSPs) as part of its service assurance stack for four decades, BMC Helix is well-positioned to support CSPs in their transformational journey—especially with many telcos migrating workloads and network functions to the cloud.

Operational convergence of IT and network operations

As migration to cloud continues, and both operations and service management shift from being technology-centric to customer-service-centric, the conventional boundaries between IT and network are blurring. Consequently, we see major CSPs driving towards IT and network convergence as a strategic imperative rather than an efficiency measure.

BMC Helix Service Management for Telco is based on the principle of service centricity. As the Mobile World Live report highlights, service management is a critical telecom operator function within service assurance that needs extensive modernization so operators can be in a position to increase their operational excellence and improve the customer experience.

GenAI at the center of CSPs’ future ambitions

In the MWL report, GenAI was a top three technology priority for about half of its respondents, making it a prioritized technology across the widest selection of respondents, where it will automate processes and free up thousands of human hours. That’s just one of the ways it will be a foundational enabler of the “Operations of the Future.”

Strategic imperatives for telecom operators

The Mobile Economy 2025 report makes clear that telecom operators must transform their operations to remain competitive. With limited revenue growth projections and increasing customer expectations, maintaining the status quo is not sustainable. Successful “Operations of the Future” will be defined by AI-powered service assurance, autonomous operations, and operational convergence. Telecom providers that embrace these changes will be better positioned to operate and manage the services that enterprises and consumers demand—while operating more efficiently and sustainably.

To learn more, download Telecoms operators share their visions for Operations of the Future.

The financial sector is at a crossroads. Financial enterprises must balance the need for innovation with increasing regulatory scrutiny. New entrants are redefining customer expectations, while government regulators strengthen compliance requirements in response to past financial crises. Navigating this evolving landscape requires a strategic approach that combines agility, resilience, and insight into every operational corner.

To thrive, banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI) organizations must harness the power of AI-powered automation and insights. Using advanced service and operations management (ServiceOps) solutions such as BMC Helix, BFSI IT executives can better understand and modernize their environments, drive innovations, and meet growing regulatory requirements with confidence.

Digital disruption is reshaping financial services

In 2025, the job of a finance industry CIO is not easy. A wave of digital-era startups has usurped the old order and directly attacked the hegemony of incumbent banking, insurance, and financial services. Their new wave of digital-first products has made a rapid and profound impact.

The new pressures on such a storied and traditional market sector have been intense. Customer expectations have changed. Many transactions that previously took days, such as money transfers, stock purchases, or insurance claims, are now expected to be rapid or even instant. Markets have shifted: one digital-only bank in the USA founded in 2012 now has well over 20 million customers in 2025.

With such rapid disruption impacting their market share, CIOs have come under extreme pressure to modernize quickly. The threat of being outflanked by digital services has forced the rapid adoption of newer infrastructures, such as public cloud, and rapid innovation methodologies, such as DevOps, which conservative financial IT strategies previously discouraged.

This speedy digital transformation has largely been additional to rather than in replacement of legacy infrastructure. Even where financial institutions hoped to replace older technologies, the pace of change has prevented it. As a result, many financial interactions now traverse multiple layers of technology. A simple transaction fulfilled in an instant for the consumer may touch multiple subsystems across multiple geographies. Even the latest AI-driven mobile consumer experiences may result in COBOL code executing on mainframes at the backend.

Innovation at this pace and scale is impossible without a solid understanding of an organization’s infrastructure. However, the pace of change has left many enterprises stuck in the old world of IT management, reliant on isolated legacy tools and even spreadsheets. For CIOs, this poses a substantial personal and organizational threat. Furthermore, this situation is increasingly compounded by another growing challenge: regulation.

Regulatory pressures complicate modernization

In the wake of successive incidents of global financial turmoil and high-profile technology failures impacting major organizations, government regulators have increasingly focused on the digital resilience of BFSI companies. Financial sector companies are being held to ever-escalating standards of robustness, transparency, and accountability.

There are many global examples, but two recent high-profile ones are the USA’s significantly updated Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) IT handbook, published in August 2024, and the European Union’s Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), enacted in early 2025. These regulatory reinforcements impose very stringent technology accountability requirements—and severe potential penalties—on BFSI companies and even the IT service providers who work with them.

How does a CIO ensure that their organization can maintain “an enterprise-wide understanding of the architecture and interoperability of systems and components” and the “products, processes, applications, infrastructure, and interconnectivity” supported by them, as defined by the FFIEC handbook? How can they meet the stringent operational resilience goals of DORA? And how can they maintain such knowledge and capability even through rapid ongoing transformation?

How BMC Helix powers innovation and compliance in BFSI organizations

In January 2025, a bank listed in Global Finance’s top 50 banks worldwide by size stated that it had— in partnership with BMC— achieved 100 percent compliance with its primary digital operational resilience regulations. To deliver this objective, the bank unified IT processes across eight separate regions, and transitioned from 16 fragmented systems to a global, unified ITSM and ITOM framework built on BMC Helix. In addition to its compliance achievements, the bank has seen further operational improvements, such as a 56 percent reduction in incidents caused by changes.

For executives seeking to establish greater digital agility without compromising operational resilience and compliance, the discovery, AIOps, capacity optimization, and service management solutions of BMC Helix are the best answer. Using state-of-the-art agentic generative AI, BMC Helix bridges the gap between innovation and regulatory compliance.

BMC’s solutions provide BFSI organizations with service visibility, operational resilience, capacity optimization, and service management excellence in a number of ways, including:

• AI-powered visibility and resilience: BMC Helix AIOps delivers discovery, mapping, and optimization of complex financial services. By proactively identifying and resolving operational issues, it enhances operational resilience and system performance. It also supports system evolution by enabling agile risk management for existing systems and proposed changes, enabling innovation and increased confidence in agile DevOps practices.
• Optimized resource management: BMC Helix Continuous Optimization enables large financial organizations to optimize the capacity and utilization of their digital resources. Proactively modeling resource requirements for growth, innovation, and cloud transformation elevates operational resilience and optimizes the allocation of financial resources to services.
• Intelligent service management: BMC Helix ITSM provides highly automated, AI-driven service management for IT and non-IT business lines. A set of agentic AI trained bots work with human experts, identifying underlying problems, detecting major incidents early, monitoring CMDB data for accuracy and completeness, and optimizing workflows. This enables faster and more accurate resolutions to issues.
• Deployment flexibility: The BMC Helix solution is available not just as a SaaS offering, but also as a containerized option that can be deployed and run on your chosen infrastructure. This provides additional flexibility for BFSI companies with stringent requirements for on-premises or isolated cloud operations.

As financial institutions continue to evolve, AI-driven ServiceOps solutions will be critical for staying competitive and compliant. Solutions such as BMC Helix enable BFSI enterprises to drive innovation while maintaining high levels of resilience and governance.

Next Steps

To learn more about the importance of BMC Helix to banking, financial services and insurance enterprises, contact BMC for a conversation with our specialists.

Market pressures and operational demands are reshaping telecommunications. Communication service providers (CSPs) face mounting challenges as networks grow more complex and customer expectations rise. This evolution demands innovative strategies that use advanced technologies like generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) to sharpen competitive advantage and meet rapidly changing market demands.

The current operational landscape

Service differentiation drives growth, yet organizations face resource constraints from ongoing network modernization investments. Rising expectations for service quality and responsiveness create additional demands on operations teams, who must balance these competing priorities effectively.

Network environments have grown increasingly complex as organizations must integrate traditional infrastructure with modern architectural approaches. The widespread adoption of cloud services has transformed both network operations and service delivery models. This transformation has dissolved the conventional boundaries between IT and network operations teams. Industry leaders recognize that operational convergence is no longer simply about improving efficiency—it represents a strategic imperative for maintaining competitive advantage. This convergence emphasizes streamlined tooling and end-to-end service delivery capabilities to meet evolving market demands.

The emergence of network operations

BMC Helix Service Management for Telco offers a comprehensive solution for optimizing service management processes within the complex ecosystem of CSPs. Unlike traditional systems that focus mainly on IT infrastructure, this solution extends operational excellence to network operations, ensuring continuous service delivery across diverse network domains.

By aligning with ITIL and eTOM process frameworks, BMC Helix Service Management for Telco integrates workflows specifically designed for network operations center (NOC) activities. This integration ensures thorough service management across the organization. Additionally, embedded AI-powered workflow automation streamlines operations, reduces complexity, and enhances service assurance outcomes.

AI and GenAI power customer-centric operations

The use of AI as an enabler elevates service management by automating and enhancing critical processes, leading to more efficient and customer-focused operations. This technology empowers NOC and security operations center (SOC) agents to interact with virtual agents in a fully conversational manner, assess risks in configuration changes, and summarize incidents upon resolution. These advances reduce manual work and accelerate service delivery.

AI and machine learning (ML) accelerate IT operations by simplifying incident resolution through data analysis to finding patterns in historical data, including recurring issues, root causes, and impacted services. This provides precise recommendations and next-best actions to speed up ticket resolution and prevent future incidents. By automating analysis and response, operations are optimized with reduced manual effort.

BMC integrates AI into BMC Helix Service Management for Telco to prevent costly service level agreement (SLA) breaches while improving service quality and efficiency. This integration delivers reliable, high-quality network services that build customer trust and loyalty.

Strategic implications for leadership

For executives and senior leaders, embracing automation and AI as foundations of their network operations strategy is no longer optional—it’s imperative. Traditional network management methods cannot address the complexity of modern service assurance. The integration of AI-powered solutions and automated workflows is a fundamental shift in how networks are managed.

This technological evolution enables better service quality, lower operational costs, and enhances customer experience, setting new standards for IT and network operations.

Key benefits of BMC Helix Service Management for Telco

• Reduce manual toil in incident, change, and problem management while minimizing risk
• Improve customer service disruption management with real-time impact analysis for faults and changes
• Cut the need for complex customizations by using out-of-the-box workflows aligned with CSP operations.

Next steps

BMC Helix Service Management for Telco delivers these capabilities through a proven approach that aligns with your infrastructure. Let our team of experts guide your transition to AI-powered network operations.

Contact BMC today.

With the constant influx of product innovation, news, and user case studies shared about generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in the past 12 months, it deserves to be named “Technology of the Year” for 2024.

GenAI is only just beginning to realize its full potential, according to a recent study conducted by Dimensional Research on behalf of BMC. When coupled with agentic AI, which can take autonomous actions, GenAI can help enterprise IT teams transform their approach to IT operations and service management in 2025.

Our main goal of the recent study was to take the pulse of GenAI and agentic AI use across organizations of varying sizes and industries. We polled 424 global IT practitioners and decision-makers and realized most of them have already incorporated GenAI into their strategic operations and service management plans.

According to our findings, we are in the early stages of GenAI adoption, with 83 percent of respondents pointing to pilot projects and experimentation with standalone solutions, such as chatbots and simple use cases. Despite early stages, the majority of organizations surveyed anticipate achieving high-value returns on their investment in GenAI and agentic AI.

GenAI helps IT organizations do more

According to our research, the growth of IT organizations is far outpaced by the growth of the data, infrastructure, and applications enterprise IT teams are expected to manage. Using GenAI and agentic AI is a promising approach to bridge this gap.

Agentic AI is composed of autonomous agents that use advanced reasoning to take independent action, adapt in real time, and solve multi-step problems. It works alongside human experts to improve IT organizations’ productivity, user experience, and service reliability, delivering benefits that include reduced troubleshooting time and better data analysis. These agents go beyond the “call and response” mechanism, performing actions such as:

• Knowledge curation: Updating and maintaining knowledge bases.
• Proactive, in-context insights: Providing faster, real-time data analysis and best action recommendations.
• Change risk advisory: Understanding and mitigating the impact of service changes.

More than two-thirds (68 percent) of respondents are using GenAI for chatbots, which are popular for automating customer service and reducing the number of Level 1 tickets that human support agents must manage. This allows IT teams to focus on higher-level more complex issues.

The survey also revealed that the majority of IT organizations are using more than one GenAI provider and are experimenting with between three and five use cases, while more mature organizations are piloting eight or more use cases. Of those respondents with successful GenAI use cases in production, respondents are already seeing the benefits of their GenAI applications.

• Reduced manual work: 46 percent reported less need for manual investigative work, such as data correlation, to identify root causes and system impacts.
• Increased productivity: 41 percent noted higher IT team productivity.
• Accessible information: 34 percent found more accessible, human-readable information, such as log data which helps IT teams resolve issues faster and onboard new team members easier.

High hopes for GenAI and agentic AI for IT organizations

GenAI and agentic AI are poised for even more success, according to survey respondents. More than half of organizations that have GenAI projects in process expect them to yield high value, while only one percent or less across all groups believe the technology will have a negative impact.

Nearly all of respondents have tasks they would like to see performed by AI so they can focus on other priorities. For example:

• System performance analysis: 54 percent want AI to detect issues and optimize performance.
• IT operations tasks: 52 percent would like AI to handle root-cause analysis and incident routing.
• IT service management: 51 percent would delegate Level 1 support requests and incidents to AI.
• Vulnerability management: 49 percent want AI to detect, prioritize, and resolve vulnerabilities.

The positive outlook IT practitioners have toward GenAI, and agentic AI is reflected in the number of future use cases they hope to apply AI to, such as:

• Proactive problem management: 50 percent want to see GenAI and agentic AI used to proactively manage recurring incident resolution.
• Incident management: 47 percent want to use GenAI and agentic AI to manage incidents by rapidly analyzing data, identifying root causes to quickly resolve critical service disruptions.
• Automated vulnerability risk resolution: 43 percent expect that agentic AI will automatically alleviate the risk of vulnerabilities and resolve the most critical ones first.

Common challenges with GenAI

Our study also revealed the most common challenges IT practitioners encounter with GenAI and agentic AI adoption. As these technologies are in the early adopter stage for many, we believe the challenges will become more manageable, particularly with training and the deployment of innovative solutions developed to address them.

Almost half of our respondents reported that they are struggling to manage the volume of data across multiple repositories, making it difficult to ensure quality data is collected, normalized, cleansed, and correlated. And 35 percent cited that lack of integration across GenAI tools, workflows, and data, would negatively affect the GenAI effectiveness.

In terms of cultural issues, 43 percent of those surveyed pointed to a lack of understanding from business stakeholders and 35 percent cited a lack of time and resources to gain the necessary expertise for proper GenAI and agentic AI implementation.

Despite these challenges, a vast majority of respondents believe that GenAI automation is best used across functional areas in an enterprise, such as IT operations, security, and service management.

BMC’s GenAI and agentic AI: Transforming enterprise IT work

We are embracing GenAI across our BMC Helix platform, innovating with agentic AI to reduce the workload on IT practitioners and deliver IT services more efficiently.

BMC HelixGPT is a GenAI toolset built into the BMC Helix platform, offering true agentic AI functionality. It provides a set of autonomous AI agents that transform enterprise IT work, making it easier for IT teams to troubleshoot faster, predict and prevent incidents, and get the insights they need, even when information is spread across multiple repositories.

BMC HelixGPT simplifies data access, improves productivity, and enhances the user experience through conversational interfaces and proactive insights, supporting intelligent IT operations and service management. The goal is to equip IT organizations with personal digital assistants that change how they interact with networks, systems, and applications and conduct IT work.

For more detailed findings and additional recommendations around whether your organization should invest in and explore GenAI and agentic technologies, read the full report and see our webinar, where we share the full results and recommendations.

Contact BMC

Telecommunications operators are caught between two seemingly irreconcilable pressures: the demand for a better customer experience and the need to reduce costs. Choosing one or the other isn’t an option. To compete effectively, they must transform the way they operate—embracing autonomous, customer-centric services that simultaneously improve service availability, reliability, and proactivity while materially decreasing their total cost of operations.

In meetings with over 100 communication service provider (CSP) leaders over the last six months, BMC has gained deep insights into the challenges facing the industry today. In this blog, we’ll outline the objectives the modern CSP is driving toward and an operational and technology vision for achieving them.

Achieving differentiation in a commoditized market

As telecommunications markets reach saturation, CSPs seek growth by capturing market share from competitors. Since they can’t set themselves apart through core connectivity services, which have essentially become commoditized, they must instead seek differentiation through the experiences they offer—and that means meeting the expectations of a highly demanding generation of consumers.

Millennials and Generation Z (Gen Z) customers have a firm perspective on what digital services should feel like. As digital natives, they’ve grown up with slick, seamless, real-time experiences on apps like Facebook, Netflix, Google, and Amazon. To compete effectively and grow market share, CSPs must now meet the same standard—without increasing prices or undermining already razor-sharp profit margins.

CSP leaders shared with BMC three key themes that are defining their response to these challenges:

• Operational excellence—Improving overall customer experience through service availability, reliability, and proactivity
• Cost-effectiveness—Reducing total operational costs by an average of 30 percent
• Autonomous operations—Delivering autonomous operations and zero-touch event management by the end of 2026

Achieving this future vision will hinge on a set of interrelated shifts across internal and customer-facing technologies.

Efficient and frictionless operations at scale

Traditional IT and network operations are often slowed by the need for admins to navigate a complex ecosystem of monitoring tools and data silos. Evolving toward fully autonomous service operations will remove these bottlenecks for:

• Zero trouble—Eliminating trouble and disruption before it affects customers through self-healing and elastic technology, reducing operating costs while improving service
• Zero touch—Automating the entire resolution chain when disruption does occur, from detection through to remediation, to fix problems faster
• Zero wait—Eliminating manual handoffs and activities to enable real-time fulfillment for new service requests

Empowering customers with self-service

For customers, self-service provides a sense of control, autonomy, and immediate gratification. For operators, allowing customers to take on operational tasks can reduce cost while improving the customer experience. This capability can take three forms:

• Self-serving—Being able to order new products and services directly without having to speak to an agent
• Self-fulfillment—Executing these requests and changes without waiting for operations personnel to handle it
• Self-assurance—Gaining transparent, real-time access to metrics for the services that are meaningful to them

Four key technology tenets for future CSP operations

Realizing this vision for fully autonomous service operations and customer empowerment will depend on four principles:

• Removing human bottlenecks—Leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) throughout operational systems will both increase responsiveness and remove the time and staffing required for human decision-making.
• Taking an SRE approach to risk—Site or service reliability engineering (SRE), a foundation of operations for most digital companies, seeks to balance the need for change with its potential impact on service. Instead of relying on manual, ticket-based workflows and change assessments, operators will rely on AI to make these risk calculations faster and more accurately.
• Operationalizing AI—Deploying AI isn’t simply a matter of buying a product. CSPs will need to feed the system with data, train and assess their models, and ensure traceability and explainability for the decisions being made. This represents a new set of capabilities to build out within the organization.
• Building data pipelines—Data is the life’s blood of autonomous operations. CSPs will need to ensure that they can deliver the right data to the right places at the right time, and do so with the right levels of quality and transparency.

In our next blogs, we’ll discuss these tenets in depth and explore the role of BMC solutions in making this vision a reality.

I am pleased to share that BMC received a strong placement in GigaOm’s Radar for Cloud Observability this year by Ron Williams, Principal Analyst at GigaOm, in a very competitive category. This placement is a testament to our commitment to and investment in the observability category and our innovations in the BMC Helix platform.

For this report, we positioned the BMC Helix IT Operations Management (BMC Helix ITOM) suite, our observability and AIOps solution, and we were recognized as a forward mover and a platform player in the cloud observability domain.

The report rated 21 vendors across various criteria, including key features (table stakes, key features, and emerging features) and nonfunctional requirements (business criteria) outlined in GigaOm’s companion Key Criteria for Evaluating Cloud Observability Solutions report. Please refer to the image below for BMC rating.

BMC Helix received a strong rating for the following key features:

• LLM support
• Ease of creating, using, and customizing dashboards and reports
• Multi-cloud and private cloud coverage with observability
• Predictive analytics
• What-if simulations

The following business criteria were rated highly, as well:

• Flexible deployment in SaaS and on-premises with containers and deployment managers
• Agility and flexibility of the overall solution with low-code, no-code customization and out-of-the-box (OOTB) integrations
• Extensive ecosystem with better-than-average support for users

The report also states that BMC Helix Edge, combined with synthetics, would make strong edge observability possible.

In some areas for improvement, the report notes the lack of built-in synthetics at the time of submission and the lack of contribution to OpenTelemetry. Since the report was published, we have announced the acquisition of Netreo, which includes Stackify, increasing our dedication to synthetics and OpenTelemetry.

To download the full report, please click link.

New Island Technologies, in its relentless pursuit to nurture talent, drive innovation, and dismantle barriers, has launched the groundbreaking Newtons program. This initiative empowers interns by immersing them in automation concepts with a strong emphasis on BMC Helix Control-M, as well as application and data workflow orchestration capabilities. Swiftly becoming a symbol of inclusivity, diversity, and empowerment in the tech industry, the program boasts that 90 percent of its interns come from previously disadvantaged backgrounds, and 60 percent are women.

Andre Esterhuysen, Vendor Success Manager of BMC Digital Business Automation at New Island Technologies, highlights the significance of the Newtons program. Named in honor of Sir Isaac Newton’s monumental contributions, the program epitomizes the company’s dedication to discovery, learning, and transformation within the tech sector. “At New Island Technologies, our faith in the power of innovation and the potential of fresh minds to advance the technology landscape is the bedrock of our internship program,” he asserts.

Regional Talent Development

The Newtons program, specifically designed for the Sub-Saharan Africa region, is a comprehensive talent development initiative for New Island Technologies’ partners and customers. This strategic focus ensures access to a highly skilled pool of technical professionals ready to tackle the digital challenges of tomorrow and drive innovation within their organizations and the broader Sub-Saharan African tech ecosystem.

A Curriculum Tailored for the Future

The program’s curriculum is meticulously designed and continuously refined to equip interns with cutting-edge skills in application and data workflow orchestration. Covering a wide range of topics, from the fundamentals of automation to advanced strategies in process optimization and technological innovation, the program ensures comprehensive learning. Interns also have the opportunity to actively apply their knowledge to pioneering projects and initiatives, fostering practical experience and innovation.

Success Stories and Future Leaders

The Newtons program’s impact goes beyond education and skill development; it is about shaping the future leaders of the Sub-Saharan Africa tech industry. The interns have achieved remarkable successes, with many securing full-time positions at New Island Technologies and other leading tech firms. Their stories of growth, resilience, and achievement serve as an inspiring testament to the program’s value.

A Commitment to Ongoing Growth

As we celebrate the achievements of the Newtons internship program, BMC and New Island Technologies remain steadfast in our dedication to expanding our reach and welcoming more talented individuals from Sub-Saharan Africa into the dynamic world of BMC technology.

Continuing our efforts to nurture talent and foster innovation, New Island Technologies is launching new internship programs that encompass additional BMC technologies. These initiatives will empower interns to delve into various cutting-edge technologies and domains.

Our journey to build a more diverse, skilled, and innovative tech community in the region continues, brimming with limitless possibilities.

Join Us in Shaping the Future

BMC is proud to have New Island Technologies as a valued partner in our network. Our commitment to fostering a diverse, equitable, and inclusive tech environment is exemplified by the Newtons program. This initiative not only addresses future digital challenges but also stimulates innovation within the broader technology ecosystem. Together, we empower aspiring tech professionals and students through internships and training, building a more inclusive and dynamic tech industry in Sub-Saharan Africa.

To learn how to start your own Newtons-like programs in your region, contact us or visit newisland.co.za/newtons to learn more about the Newtons program.

Artificial intelligence for IT or network operations, or AIOps, is an approach to managing complex IT operations that optimizes service availability and delivery, predicting and preventing problems before they occur. AIOps runs on multi-layered technology platforms that harness machine learning (ML), predictive analytics, and AI to automate, enhance, and improve business operations. At BMC, AIOps is integrated across our BMC Helix Operations Management solution. As a communication service provider (CSP), how can BMC AIOps benefit your daily operations? It comes down to:

1. Improved efficiency by automating event correlation, network monitoring, and performance analysis to eliminate manual toil.
2. Proactive incident resolution by analyzing vast amounts of real-time data across devices, applications, and network infrastructure to identify, predict, and detect root causes before these incidents can impact service delivery.
3. Faster incident response by diagnosing network and service anomalies. By integrating BMC HelixGPT generative AI, CSP IT and network operations teams can receive situation summaries, best action recommendations, and more.
4. Optimized resource utilization by providing insights into network traffic patterns, application performance, and infrastructure capacity management.

If you are a CSP, all of this sounds great. The difference is that BMC continues to advance observability, monitoring, and automated remediation. In fact, BMC has received two industry recognitions for its AIOps solution. First, BMC was honored with the Outstanding Catalyst Showcase Award at DTW 2023 for its pivotal role in revolutionizing CSP service assurance through AIOps. Second, BMC Helix was named a leader in The Forrester Wave™: Process-Centric AI for IT Operations (AIOps), Q2 2023.

Here are just a few capabilities BMC AIOps deliver to help CSPs realize the benefits I mentioned.

1. Service blueprints: BMC AIOps is the only solution on the market to offer CSPs and enterprises out-of-the-box service blueprints, which make creating and maintaining dynamic service models easier. With support for microservices, Kubernetes, cloud, and application performance monitoring (APM), these dynamic service models are automatically updated, ensuring accurate service models are used in today’s ever-changing IT environments.

2. Situation explainability powered by causal AI: This capability sets a new standard for incident resolution by correlating incidents with similar current and past occurrences to generate the best action to resolve the incident swiftly. User-driven feedback for situations provides greater contextual understanding and allows additional situation information to be added by a user for faster root cause isolation. This empowers CSPs and enterprises to recover from service outages and other potential risks more quickly—without manually scanning multiple incident logs. The BMC HelixGPT capability streamlines the process with concise, plain-language summaries of how issues were resolved. Probable root cause reports can be created and “remembered” for future use.

3. AIOps situation fingerprinting: Powered by advanced causal AI, situation fingerprinting automatically identifies whether a similar situation has previously occurred, eliminating the need to (re)diagnose it. This helps CSP network operations teams ease future identification to help speed mean time to repair (MTTR), reduce noise and staff toil, and improve service performance.

4. Improved deep container auto-detection: With the BMC Helix platform’s advanced discovery capabilities, all users can benefit from automated detection and an in-depth understanding of their containerized environments. This capability enhances knowledge-sharing among CSP network operations, site reliability engineers (SREs), services owners, and field teams responsible for modern, dynamic containerized environments. By enabling deeper container visibility, users will speed up MTTR while significantly reducing traditionally manual efforts. For CSPs, event and incident data and service prediction user interfaces (UIs) can analyze and predict service outages and remediate an issue before it escalates.

As we get closer to Mobile World Congress 2024, beginning February 26, BMC will share more exciting news for CSPs.

I welcome the opportunity to meet you in Barcelona in a few weeks.