BigPanda: The Power of Autonomous Operations

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Mohan Kompella, Senior Director of Product, BigPandaMohan Kompella, Senior Director of Product
The business world is in the midst of a digital revolution and organizations that turn a blind eye to automation run the risk of becoming obsolete. Even when it comes to IT operations and service management, given the data deluge, manual methods and rules-driven solutions just don't fit the bill. What organizations need is advanced, intelligent automation to manage ITOps, backed by cutting-edge technology. In such times, breaking new ground with their one-of-a-kind Autonomous Operations platform is California-based BigPanda. BigPanda’s main goal is to automate and scale the ability of ITOps teams to meet the current demands of digital transformation using a very advanced and unique form of Machine Learning called Open Box Machine Learning.

In an engaging conversation with Mohan Kompella, Senior Director of Product at BigPanda, CIOApplications had the opportunity to get a clear idea as to how this next-gen company with its unique solution is redefining ITOps and ITSM while empowering enterprises to lower operating costs, improve service performance and availability, and reduce the risk of digital transformation.

Can you throw some light on the current challenges in the ITSM landscape?

Over the last five years, IT both in terms of software and infrastructure has become more modernized but also significantly more complex. The sheer amount of data that an ITOps team has to ingest, process, and correlate in order to understand an IT incident is unimaginable. This is largely because most ITOps toolsets have failed to keep up with the evolving IT infrastructure. In ways, ITOps is still held captive by inflexible rules-based systems, which suffer from major shortcomings at a time when organizations are expected to be agile and nimble. Outdated tools for ITOps, or incident and problem management, from an ITSM framework perspective, also mean lengthy turnaround times to resolve issues, which negatively affect user experience, revenue, and ability to innovate.

In what ways is BigPanda curbing the challenges?

Different vendors are trying to modernize IT Ops using AI. Some call this new class of AI and ML-powered IT Ops AIOps. Unfortunately, it’s a broad and nebulous moniker because of which organizations don’t know where to begin and how to do it successfully. At BigPanda we focus on a much more well-defined part of AIOps called Autonomous Operations.

BigPanda Autonomous Operations platform reduces IT noise, automates the incident management process, and unifies fragmented IT Operations.

BigPanda lets organizations see their Machine Learning logic in plain English, incorporate their tribal knowledge and test the logic

Using BigPanda, IT and NOC teams inside organizations can not only detect the root cause of an issue or an outage, but also gain insights into how to minimize its impact. Since the BigPanda Autonomous Operations platform automates the entire IT incident management process, organizations can use it to augment their existing workforce to act as a force multiplier. In other words, while we take care of the hard part by turning IT noise into actionable insights, organizations can achieve 10 times more with the same ITOps team.

What is the one factor that makes BigPanda's offering stand out from others in the marketplace?

While ML has become a ubiquitous term in the industry, most modern ML systems are "black boxes." Although organizations are able to see the results of using ML, they are in dark about how a certain set of correlation patterns came into being or why a particular conclusion was derived. This lack of transparency prevents firms from developing the trust necessary to rely on the ML-powered ITOps tools. BigPanda changes that with our state-of-the-art Open Box Machine Learning. Now organizations have complete visibility into what correlation patterns look like, they can edit the patterns, and they can incorporate tribal knowledge into the logic. On top of that, firms can also test the pattern to make sure there are no unintended consequences in production and deploy it once they are fully satisfied. Needless to say, BigPanda’s Open Box ML fosters a deep sense of trust along with full transparency and control.

Can you elaborate further on the features and functionalities of the BigPanda Autonomous Operations platform?

BigPanda’s Open Integration Hub is a critical element of our platform. Our Open Integration Hub comes with a broad set of connectors and APIs that makes it fast and easy to integrate with the 25-50 tools that organizations typically use. As and when new tools are added, BigPanda can easily connect to them, continuing the inflow of deep, contextual information.

Another unique feature is BigPanda’s customizable Operations Console. It has a highly-intuitive user interface that allows ITOps teams to easily visualize incidents, identify the root cause and bi-directionally share information with helpdesk, ticketing and other teams.

Can you share with us a case study to highlight your value proposition better?

A good example is that of TiVo, a leading cable service provider, broadcaster, and advertiser. With changing viewer preferences which translated into ever-increasing complexity for the ITOps team, TiVo was on the lookout for a solution that would proactively detect and resolve issues before their customers were impacted. Once BigPanda came onboard, we implemented our Autonomous Operations platform across their global operations within four weeks. The platform autonomously detected and escalated critical incidents to the appropriate teams and through a Unified Console, TiVo’s IT Operations and Development teams had a single pane-of-glass view, which ensured collaboration and rapid remediation of issues. TiVo can now not only respond more proactively to issues but they are able to achieve their aggressive SLA targets more consistently. To get down to the specifics, TiVO now has 80 percent of alerts correlated into actionable incidents, accelerating incident resolution.

What’s in store for BigPanda in the near future? Are there any expansion plans in the pipeline?

In 2018, in the course of just one year, we expanded into a number of new markets, including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, and Denver. 2019 will see a similar trend as we expand further into North America and Canada. Clearly, the future of ITOps is autonomous, and BigPanda is well on its way to becoming the autonomous ops platform of choice for organizations the world over.

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