More than 60 percent of business and MSP help and support desk operations saw an incident ticket cut with artificial intelligence (AIOps) help, claims a 57 page OpsRamp research report that seems to indicate that AIOps doesn’t kill support desk jobs. HPE is buying OpsRamp and so enabling GreenLake to have an ITOM presence.
Using artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) involves collecting performance data from applications and the IT infrastructure – system software, compute, storage, network. This is analyzed using machine learning, statistical analysis, heuristics and expert systems to automatically detect and respond to issues in real time. IT operations Management (ITOM) supplier OpsRamp, founded in 2014 and with $57.5 million in funding, says its SaaS-based IT operations platform discovers, monitors, manages and automates hybrid IT infrastructure.
Suresh Vobbilesetty, EVP Engineering at OpsRamp, said: “The study shows that AIOps is real and is delivering tangible benefits for enterprises and MSPs. But it also shows that organizations’ AIOps initiatives remain a work in progress and have a ways to go before they can realize the full potential of the technology.”
Introducing AIOps to support desks, both for enterprises and for managed service providers (MSPs), is not a simple task. It requires business to understand that mapping applications to their underlying infrastructure remains the key challenge, especially as more workloads move to the cloud and applications can draw on hybrid resources. Support desks need to find the root causes of incidents and fix them fast. The application-function-to-infrastructure-component-map is a vital aspect of that and part of AIOps’ appeal is that it can help prepare and then use such a map, and realize that multiple incidents are aspects of the same problem, cutting the number of support tickets.
AIOps introduction can take months, with the OPsRamp research finding 43 percent of businesses needed one to three months to implement it and 31 percent needing three to six months. For MSPs the percentages were 42 and 31 respectively.
The benefits, according to OpsRamp, are shown in two charts on the report, one for enterprises, the other for MSPs:
These are quantitative measures of qualitative concepts; as in we don’t know how many fewer open tickets were made under the AIOps regime, or by how much the mean time to discover (MTTD) and mean time to respond (MTTR) were reduced.
The research report doesn’t actually tell you how much you will save by using AIOps but it does give insight into how many users found support calls were fixed faster, and by how much:
What it also appears to say is that AIOps is not a support desk staff killer. In fact much of the time new staff had to be hired and/or existing staff retrained, the report indicated. In the enterprise camp:
- Hire – 11 percent
- Retrain – 33 percent
- Both – 47 percent
- Neither – 8 percent
For MSPs the numbers were:
- Hire – 16 percent
- Retrain – 20 percent
- Both – 61 percent
- Neither – 3 percent
In other words, AIOPs helps support desk staff be more effective, but not by so much that you can reduce their numbers.
HPE OpsRamp acquisition
HPE has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire OpsRamp, and so be a bigger player in the ITOM Market, which Gartner estimates to be worth approximately $39 billion. HPE says it will integrate OpsRamp’s hybrid digital operations management tech with its GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform, supporting it with HPE services, to reduce the operational complexity of multi-vendor and multi-cloud IT environments that are in the public cloud, colocations, and on-premises.
The OpsRamp capabilities extend the HPE services portfolio – across Advisory, Operational and HPE GreenLake managed services – into delivering support for hybrid and multi-cloud IT environments. HPE CTO Fidelma Russo, said: “Customers today are managing several different cloud environments, with different IT operational models and tools, which dramatically increases the cost and complexity of digital operations management.”
“The combination of OpsRamp and HPE will remove these barriers by providing customers with an integrated edge-to-cloud platform that can more effectively manage and transform multi-vendor and multi-cloud IT estates. This acquisition advances HPE hybrid cloud leadership and expands the reach of the HPE GreenLake platform into IT Operations Management.”
OpsRamp was part of Hewlett Packard Pathfinder’s venture capital investment in 2020. The transaction is expected to close in the third quarter of the HPE 2023 fiscal year, subject to regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions. OpsRamp’s technology will be integrated with HPE GreenLake platform, available standalone as-a-service, and embedded within HPE’s compute, storage, and networking hardware. HPE refused to disclose the purchase price.
Bootnote
The OpsRamp State of AIOps 2023 study was conducted in December 2022 by a third party research firm. It includes input from 265 respondents who work at the general manager, director or vice president level at enterprises and MSPs in North America, Europe or Asia Pacific. All respondents have budget decision-making responsibilities for IT monitoring tools, and work at firms with at least $25 million in annual revenue and more than 500 employees.
