BMC CEO Aman Sayed is predicting that as the global economy after several years continues to stabilize, there are now enough signs to suggest the company year will see a wave of growth that will require IT teams to start shifting gears now if they hope to be prepared to meet new challenges.
Speaking this week at a BMC Connect 2024 event, there is now enough light at the end of tunnel to determine the next year will be one of recovery and growth. IT leaders, as a result, should expect to see a significant expansion in the number of initiatives their organizations are prepared to launch. In comparison, during the last few years organizations have been more focused on simply trying to survive during a sustained economic contraction that, as interest rates continue to decline, is starting to ease, noted Sayed.
IT teams, despite the complexity of their IT environments, are going to soon find there will be greater emphasis placed on the speed at which they can deliver new applications infused with artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, said Sayed.
Providing the IT support required to help drive those initiatives will require organizations to rely more than ever on automation, because organizations are not going to hire armies of people to drive those initiatives, added Sayed.
The challenge is that much of the data needed to drive those applications is not only in multiple formats, but also strewn across multiple platforms. The IT world, by definition, is heterogeneous, noted Sayed.
An upturn in the economy bodes well for DevOps engineers that play a pivotal role in accelerating the pace at which applications are both developed and deployed. Many DevOps teams have spent a significant amount of time over the past few years optimizing and modernizing existing applications. but as the overall economy continues to improve, the number of new projects should steadily increase. Many of those projects will involve various types of highly custom language models that have been trained to automate tasks within specific domains, noted Sayed.
Of course, while the size of some DevOps teams might increase as a result, the general expectation is that IT organizations will be relying more on AI to build, deploy, secure and manage applications.
Each DevOps team will naturally adopt AI as they best see fit, but it’s no longer a question of whether to use AI as much as to what degree to rely on it. While AI coding tools make developers more productive, there are issues that need to be addressed before the code being created is thoroughly reviewed, before incorporating it into a production environment. AI platforms such as ChatGPT were trained using samples of code of varying quality collected from across the Web. In some instances, the code generated might therefore include a vulnerability that could be easily exploited.
Fortunately, the next wave of generative AI platforms is being trained on data for specific domains that have been closely vetted. Additionally, AI agents that have been trained to automate specific tasks will soon be incorporated into DevOps workflows. As these tasks become increasingly automated, DevOps teams will soon be orchestrating multiple agents that will enable them to build and deploy software at levels of scale that not too long ago would have been deemed unimaginable.
The issue now is determining how best to employ those capabilities in advance of a wave of economic growth that will require DevOps teams to automate many more tasks across the software development lifecycle (SDLC) than they already have.
