Vladi Shlesman

My name is Vladi. I'm with Automic.

I've been with the company for a while, done my fair share of startups and bigger enterprises, and I'm running the pre-sales team. So it's all these techies who you see come together with the sales guys, trying to make sense out of what those sales guys say. So I run that team.

Automic, we're automation guys. We've been around for probably 25, 30 years now, originally from Austria, and automation is the only thing we do. We do automation on mainframe, we do automation in the cloud, we do automation on mobile, we do automation in DevOps, and you name it, we automate something there.

We're probably close to 3,000 customers right now, so in very different verticals. We have these big German manufacturers like Siemens, Bosch, companies like FedEx, and companies like eBay, and companies like Netflix, and even Facebook is a customer somewhere. So, a really good mix of different customers, and we do different things for them.

One of the latest additions lately was Walmart, probably a year or so ago. As you know, Walmart is this massive grocery store in the States. And we helped them actually to introduce DevOps to their point of sales. It was a really good story just on the sheer scale of it, where automation required us to deploy code on over 100,000 endpoints. It was an interesting project.

So, many different customers, different areas. Bet365 is a good customer here in the UK. Again, very agile. Probably over 100 deployments in production a day that we automate with.

And lately, we've been really focusing on two major things. Really, digital transformation. Sounds like a cheesy buzzword, but if you think about it, what it's all about, it's really creating new channels for your typical business on selling their products or services using digital channels, using mobile phones, using web, using social media. And it's really all about, obviously, bringing the applications closer to those digital channels, their core application, but also making the application experience and application agility close to those of the big digital players.

And again, this is something we all heard before. Everybody has to be a bit more like Amazon, a bit more like Facebook, a bit more like... So your given bank now has to have similar behaviors in the digital world as everybody else.

And that's what makes us very busy these days, because automation is really a core enabler for any of those activities, or at least that's what we believe.

And with automation come, obviously, agility and speed, and those words, again, have been probably mentioned a few times today and in general. But also automation gives that kind of unparalleled visibility and control, governance, into all this agility and all the speed that we're bringing.

So the idea is not just, obviously, run faster and break things, but also being able to control, recover, interact with them in flight, and generally being in control to further improve and get things better going forward.

Okay, so this has been in play for a while. And automation is not just a nice buzzword, and it's not about really convincing you that automation is good. It's all about talking about what sort of automation, or what automation qualities, and how to go about them, and what's the right way of really picking maybe the right automation strategy.

Okay, that's what I want to talk about.

As I opened up, it's probably four or five years ago, my life was all about convincing people, "Hey, you need to automate more," or, "You need to automate this," or, "DevOps is about automation," and so on. I think today this message is very clear.

So I just want you to look about what really Automic offers in that space. And I know it may sound less academic, but this is exactly the angle that I want to take here, just talk about what exactly we do.

So my personal opinion, again: you can be only as agile as your automation platform. Automation should not be a bottleneck.

Who experienced here that it's easier to leave your automation alone, just do it manually, quickly, or script something? Anybody had those experiences where automation works against you as becoming yet another kind of dinosaur there, or a slow-moving part?

Automation shouldn't be like that. Automation should be as agile, or more agile, really, than what you do. It should be easy, it should be automated, it should be smart.

And this is what I want to talk about.

So the world is changing constantly. I was saying even today, we're in a much better space. So things are already quite advanced, already quite automated.

We see a world today in four different areas. I'll start from the bottom.

We typically need to help to provision infrastructure. Everything has to run on something. So there's a lot of automation in that space being already implemented. We provision our virtualization, we provision databases, we provision middleware, we provision even networking. We do all sorts of automation today in that infrastructure space.

And there's a lot of tools there already. These things are covered by enterprise software or by open source or by some smart guys in every organization that write scripts and things, and it sits fairly there already.

Application deployments: again, it was very revolutionary, I don't know, three, four, five years ago with all the new players coming along, including us and open source. And I think today everybody gets the automation of DevOps. We want to move our code from one place to another quickly, as error-free as possible, potentially promote code easily as well, close the loops, do all the good things that all the good DevOps books are teaching us to do.

And again, some organizations made very good progress there already, and we have probably dozens and dozens of customers doing just that part with our technology, and these things are becoming very mainstream.

I'm just coming from our largest European event in Dusseldorf last week, where we had mostly German and Austrian, Swiss customers. And this is a relatively conservative crowd, and you would be surprised how much automation already is there, how much our customers are already utilizing our software to deploy the application, manage the infrastructure.

Once things are running, we typically, again, as Automic, help them to manage the workloads. Execute all these jobs, all this end-of-the-day batch, whatever business processes are there. Everything is about business process.

Look at eBay, for example, one of our customers. Once you submit your bid or you won your bid, there's some process taking place all the time. You need to send some emails, you need to confirm your credit card is valid, and you need to make sure things are paid in time. We do a lot of that behind the scenes.

We enable organizations to do those processes without changing their core application platform, because tomorrow things may change. They just would change the process, so they don't necessarily need to develop.

So a lot of those workloads are taking place in every bank, in every retail. All those updates that retailers push to their point of sales, or to Disney, for example, one of our big customers as well.

So when you go to the Disney park and you touch your badge against the lever door, Automic will then pick up the information and will feed all the systems there to make sure Disney takes full advantage of you being in a certain place, and so on and so forth.

So workloads, again, have been our bread and butter for many years now, and we've been quite successful doing that.

And then obviously the last one, which again was the theme for the last couple of years for us, is the process orchestration. It's basically, the way I see it, bringing all this business process mentality into the IT.

Say, "Hey, IT is full of processes." Scheduling a backup is a process. Testing failover to the disaster recovery site is a big process. As we know, British Airways has just experienced that probably themselves. Automating password reset is a process, and everything, provisioning storage or onboarding a new employee, it's an interesting process where you need to create all sorts of users now.

So we start to bring that kind of business process mentality into the IT, making IT more business-like. Again, with the automation center of excellence.

And that's where we are today, and things are going well. And we started also to kind of converge and merge these processes together. And this is where I believe the future will see more.

So you can actually go beyond the boundaries and say, "Okay, for me to execute this business process, I need to provision that infrastructure, put those applications, run those IT processes, then I will have that business process." So becoming kind of together.

And this is where real creativity comes out of automation. I think this is where the more advanced organizations, they can really be creative with their automation platform and then stand up more, or provide more automation to their business out of their automation platform.

But things have been changing. So what we start to see is the perimeters get smaller. All these applications that we used to have in-house now moving out. All the ERP systems, even core banking platforms now running in the cloud. I don't know if you guys work with Temenos, also heard about all these newcomers in that world.

Who could imagine 10 years ago that we'll be running our core CRM systems or core banking platforms or core business platforms outside of our data center? So it's already happening.

And as a result, the challenges, or the other way around, automation opportunities become broader. Because now it's not just about putting some scripts or writing a piece of code to do something in your data center. Now you can truly connect the dots that go way outside of your data center, way outside maybe of even your organization, going through to your partners, to digital channels, and so on and so forth.

So where we are today is that the integration of your applications and the speed that you can stand up new business processes and new services is becoming critical.

One of our interesting customers is UPS. So they, in this competition, it's a very difficult place to be at today. Massive competition. There's a lot of crowdfunded, Uber-like deliveries now. They really need to think ahead of time, constantly offering new services, constantly thinking how their customers want to interact with them.

They realized most of their customers want to talk to them using automated chats, or Facebook Chat, or those pop-ups on the website. They don't want to sit on the phone, wait for the rep to explain to them when they're going to pick the package. And how quickly they pick the packages, or how accurately within the window they pick the package, becomes an issue.

So for them, ability to draw this process, connect that Facebook Chat or whatever the new app that the specific target audience like to use to their core legacy old systems that may still be in mainframe or even something like that, this becomes a real challenge and a real opportunity for us.

Simplifying those business processes is another key. As we know, these organizations develop their processes constantly, and they mushroom, and they become really complex.

I actually had an interesting conversation a few years ago with one of the CTOs of a large investment bank. And I was on my pitch about how automation is beautiful and important. And he said, "Listen, I hear what you're saying, but I believe the main problem are the people."

I was like, "Yeah, that's why we want to automate."

He said, "No, no. People are creating a lot of business processes. And then we need to pay for the people, and then you come selling me tools, and we need to automate those processes they create. So if we just get rid of the people in the first place, there'll be no problem to automate anything."

So the point is, obviously it's half a joke, but making those processes simple and manageable, and abstracting the complexity of everything we do today in IT, in DevOps, or in the business is becoming another challenge. And again, something that automation, I believe, deals very well with by, again, abstracting that or having kind of a partition between the real world, the real matrix, if you like, and what can be done.

IT as a service, another area that we like talking about. A lot of conversations today we are talking about is how to make IT more approachable.

I'm having the same issues in our internal IT. So we, in pre-sales, we like to consume a lot of environments. We like to consume a lot of applications, constantly build something for our customers. So we stand up pilots and proof of concepts, and I always need more middleware, more databases, more power.

And obviously our IT is doing their best to provide me with all this, but if they're a little bit behind, I'll just take my credit card out and I go on Amazon, and it's all done in seconds. In fact, we're so good in it, we can just stand up, using our technology, whatever we need, so quickly that IT virtually has no chance.

And the same thing happens a lot in the enterprises today, where IT is really trying to keep up and provide better service. And we believe by making IT services more self-consumed, more simplified, again, more accessible there while retaining the governance and control is one of the key conversations that we are driving today.

I don't need to go too deep into DevOps again. This is the mainstream story today. It comes without saying that ability to deliver applications quicker is one of the key advantages of automation, or the whole drive to, obviously, DevOps.

And our objective is to push the envelope there and say, "What's really release automation? What do you mean by that? Is it just deploying the code? Is it deploying the binaries? Is it deploying your middleware with it? Or is it providing the whole full-stack infrastructure? Or is it orchestrating the entire process, including approvals, or including the security, including testing orchestration?"

Maybe it includes also provisioning of the feedback back, of course, in developing your ticketing system. Make sure this application has been through all the right stages of release and through all the environments, through all the testing.

Maybe it's about running some audits as well, to provide compliance and say who authorized what, what the application configuration looked like at each stage, and be able to compare it.

So the opportunities there for automation become unlimited, and I think that's where we kind of try to lead this conversation of DevOps. Not about providing your application release automation. This is kind of obvious today. It's what can be done within that space and how quickly it can be done.

Analytics is another area that we're very interested in. Analytics means really correlating and giving you unparalleled visibility into whatever data you like while automating.

So one of our customers is Vodafone. I don't know if you guys used Vodafone before, but we had a story with them where, as the new iPhones started to appear, you remember they had the smallest SIM cards. So we had the situation, I don't know, seven years ago, six years ago, when people were queuing day and night to buy this new iPhone, and they couldn't use it because they needed a different SIM card.

So they had this SIM swap process, where you go to the shop, you request it. It's taking them around two weeks to deliver the SIM card. It's not too bad, but still. During those two weeks, people were on the phone calling the customer care, saying, "Where's my SIM card?"

These guys couldn't tell them anything because it was going through six different systems, and they couldn't tell physically in which stage that order is. Where is the SIM card? They could just say, "Oh, it has been accepted." So the customer satisfaction was going down. We're not in a happy place.

So somehow we saw an opportunity there, and we explained to them, "Listen, we can not just automate the whole process," which that's what we do, "but we can give you a very clear visibility on that process."

Our services implemented a very nice dashboard that shows you where exactly in the chain your order is. So if the customer would call them, they will tell, "Hey, you just passed the credit check. You should get it in three days."

Or even better, then we added automated communication back to the customers. So you just passed that stage; they just get a text message saying, "Hey, your SIM card is on the way." So it was fantastic ability for them to get visibility and to get kind of understanding how their process is working.

So later on, when I talked to the Vodafone guys, they said, "Can I get dashboards like that?" They didn't even know that there is automation behind the scenes. It was less important, just to see where the things are.

And the same thing applies to your DevOps and to your IT. Wouldn't it be great to know how many applications have been deployed this morning? How many changes have been through an environment? Who touched what? What's the average deployment time? How many rollbacks did you have to run? All these kind of things that you can then learn and continue to improve.

Automation's all about that as well. It's not just about making things faster. This is an important point.

And obviously the cloud part is, again, since getting more into the cloud, a slightly different mentality there. But the idea is, again, make cloud more accessible. Doesn't matter if your internal cloud, I know some organizations struggling to sell it internally. Don't go Amazon, like example I gave you with Automic. Don't go to Amazon, go to Automic Cloud. I was like, "Yeah, it's too slow. I don't have time to wait." So making that as fast as anything else.

So as automation is progressing, some of our more advanced customers build centers of excellence around automation. Since the automation becomes more invisible, more behind the scenes, more sophisticated, you don't need to train each and every IT guy, developer, or business user on what the automation is. It can be done by center of excellence.

And these guys can then offer more and more automated services through the automation platform. It could be anything from, again, customer onboarding. It could be an IT process like, I don't know, delivering a new cloud application. It could be your disaster recovery processes. It could be your employee onboarding. It could be your financial close, or it could be any DevOps-related process or end-to-end, obviously, continuous delivery orchestration.

We also built a marketplace around our technology. So think about it like App Store for automation. So there's a lot of people using our technology. There's a lot of customers and a lot of professionals, both on Automic and partners, who continue improving some automation templates, some automation objects, we call them actions, some dashboards, some pre-built processes that can be just used out of the box.

And all this now being shared through the marketplace. And we have, again, hundreds if not thousands of people there. And we also started to deliver this marketplace as a private vault to the organization to increase the speed of sharing of automation.

Like anything else, anything good, you want it to be accessible and easily shareable. So whenever one of my technicians builds, let's say, a new integration to, I don't know, a new Toshiba or very old Toshiba point of sales in Walmart, he can immediately share it, so every other technician doing similar project doesn't need to do it again. And the same thing can happen within the organization, making the automation highly reusable, again decreasing the time to value.

That is very important. Remember, automation is not just about being able to automate something, it's being able to automate it quickly. Otherwise, it kind of wasn't the point of automation.

So that's gaining momentum and, again, creating this kind of center of excellence of automation for IT also makes IT more relevant and more business-like. There's nothing else that your execs would like to hear better than, "Hey, we can automate it. You don't need to invest time in building it or doing it manually." And this is something that automation center of excellence is capable of doing.

Okay. So since we're in a DevOps event, let's talk for a second, what do we do in DevOps and how does it work?

Going years back, we said, how do we bring all this knowledge and all this vast kind of experience of automation we have into this new and shiny world of DevOps?

And we say, of course, we can do a lot of things. We have agents that can run on every single platform, virtually from mainframes to BS2000 to all the way to your newest cloud platforms. And we say, we can probably execute anything you like on those machines, and we can deploy things, and we can run scripts, and we can do all sorts of interesting stuff.

But then what we saw is all these tools mushrooming there. In each team, even within one organization, we have their own preference of tools. And these guys would like Puppet, and the other guys would like Chef, and these guys will use Ansible. These guys would use some IBM tool they bought years ago, and they're happy with. Some other guys would use spreadsheets and emails, right? And some other guys would just sit and script things all the time. They already had the scripts developed over the years, and they don't want to touch them.

And we said, "You know what? You don't need to change it. You don't need to break it. You can put it, as I say, on steroids."

Whatever tools you have already, orchestrate them, pass parameters dynamically, make them run in parallel, put all the dependencies, really add proper overarching orchestration to whatever tool sets you have today or will have in the future. Because things are moving too fast in this space. You don't want to lock yourself into something.

But at the same time, being an enterprise, you want to have this ability to govern, to reuse things quickly, to put controls and metrics around whatever you do, and make it obviously secure and auditable from a compliance perspective.

So that became our approach to the things. You have Docker, fantastic. Let's model your application. Include Docker as an underlying component of your application. You use WebSphere, WebLogic. Let's include best practices for that in the system and use whatever tools you have. You have Jenkins. Pretty much every single customer of ours has Jenkins. Why replace it? Let's, again, orchestrate it. Let's give it proper power to run to its full potential.

So we start to orchestrate and automate whatever toolchain out there. And obviously, if there is a gap or there's nothing in place, we can execute the last mile as well if needed. As I said, we have native support for pretty much any OS or any platform out there.

And now, by the way, I didn't mention, but we also got acquired by CA, this big company, a few months ago. And we already built a lot of integrations with a lot of CA tools. These guys have fantastic tools for service virtualization or test data management and some SecOps tools. And we could all bring them together, again, providing basically the same story out of the box.

So today, Automic sits in a massive content library of all these integrations that you can basically, whatever your landscape looks like, whatever your continuous delivery pipeline looks like or will look tomorrow, you just, again, put it on steroids. Put another engine on top, and then just connect the dots and make it work in whatever order you like and with all the capabilities that I will talk in a second.

So we built this platform. We call it One Automation. The reason it's called One Automation, because hopefully this is the only one automation platform that you will ever need. And it's been around for a while, and we built it over 25 years now. So there is a lot of evolution, a lot of logic, a lot of scalability.

Some of our customers execute... I just heard the Bosch presentation. The guys in Germany, they do eight million jobs with us a day. So it can be quite chunky as well, and quite critical.

And we obviously put a lot of effort making it easier and more modern. And today it can obviously run in the cloud as well, if you would like to consume it that way. We do not provide software as a service ourselves, but some of our partners do, and I presume with CA now going forward, something that we'll have as well on our roadmap again.

It's also multi-tenant, which again helps you to kind of slice and dice one engine between multiple teams. Let's say your developers want to use it to deploy the new web application or the new mobile application, but your IT guys also want to use it to manage their containers or provision their cloud application.

So you can really create a copy of their world and give it to a specific team without them overlapping the others, but enable them to share content if needed. Somebody said, "This is how we run update DB in our database," so everybody can then use that object to chain into their workflows.

So it really also helps you in a shared IT environment or IT-as-a-service environment, or if you're a service provider, really have this automation platform then that you can offer to your customers without breaking security or compliance. So that's an important part.

We use this object-oriented... I keep talking about objects all the time. So basically, we believe that any task, any job can be turned into an object as you would use in programming. That can have embedded security, can be managed in a hierarchy, can be easily shared, can be easily reused, can pass parameters from one to another.

So once you start using those objects, the task of automating things becomes much easier. It's pretty much like dragging and dropping objects into the blank canvas, connecting the dots, and obviously there's more sophistication you can apply, but it's as simple as building a workflow in Visio that actually runs.

And you can obviously give it even to your business users with pre-canned objects that they can build their own processes without bothering you with any questions. That can be done as well.

Another thing that's interesting to mention here is the zero-time upgrades. It's like drinking your own champagne in a way. So we offer our customers orchestration capabilities that allow you to really orchestrate your releases so tightly that you can avoid the downtime.

We first time did it with a big Siebel system. You heard about this old CRM system. We had a big telco in Netherlands who really was suffering from the long downtimes. KPN, they're called. And virtually, the customer care was shut down for eight hours every time they had to update something in Siebel.

And so our guys thought about it and said, "We can actually make it work. We can upgrade the entire Siebel system without bringing it down just by tightly orchestrating things that go up and down and doing that."

And we said, "Why won't we use the same feature ourselves?" So we build now upgrades of Automic system, because it can really run across the organization and constantly in use. So we can in-flight upgrade ourselves as well.

So we use that capability and it's critical for, as you know, some organizations upgrading their automation sometimes is quite a complex task and sometimes goes wrong as well, and then we have queues of people near ATM machines and things like that.

So that's another interesting part.

And the whole idea of open and API-driven is very important as well. As I said, often our philosophy is to put automation in place in a very transparent or even invisible way. Like that Vodafone story I told you, nobody knows there is an Automic engine behind.

The guy in the shop who sends the request, he doesn't know that it's picked up by Automic. He just sends a request to change something to the contract. And we will pick up that request, parse it, and then execute against all the systems, and then return back.

So being able to drive Automic from the outside, let's say you use Jira, use Jira. You don't need to see Automic ever if you're a developer. Or you're using, I don't know, Remedy, or using ServiceNow, or whatever it is you're using. We can sit behind it, be invisible, or really offer services through a very simple interface that, again, we provide through the service catalog and things like that.

Okay. So let's talk about the future a little bit. How are we progressing from here?

So, the usual stuff of having infrastructure and applications and business processes separated in three different areas. So here are some product names as we use the Automic Service Orchestration, Automic Release Automation, and Workflow. Today it's almost like separate teams, separate... It's the same platform, but separate license, if you like.

And so what we see is things changing. So applications become full stack. Infrastructure becomes applications. Docker, everybody heard about Docker? Becomes almost everywhere now. And we, using our application modeling capabilities to onboard new applications for automation, we just add it in infrastructure way.

So Docker or VMware or whatever you use there, it's part of the application now. So when you deploy an application, our automation engine says, "Well, we need to provision whatever virtualization or infrastructure you need." It becomes very closely coupled together.

And then obviously business process, you layer on over on that. Now, as things are progressing, we can see the business process starting to take over.

Netflix, one of our customers, they use us for their recommendation engine. You probably watched Netflix. Say, if you watch that, you also like this. So we feed all this data to their Hadoop, to their big data, and we execute things in there automatically.

They don't need to tell Automic that, "Hey, I need to provision this infrastructure, put this code in it, and then I'm going to run all these data feeds for Hadoop." We just say, "We just need the recommendation engine," and Automic will then provision the whole thing and, just based on whatever requirements in the business process, will stand up all the environments.

And they start to use it also in a kind of elastic cloud way story. So if they know that there is a rain in a certain area and there's no football game, and they know people watch more, let's be proactive, stand more environments and more and more applications.

So this is another story. Business process starts to dictate the behavior of applications and infrastructure. It's happening now already.

And then what we see is, again, the applications become, or the deployment of application becomes, less of an issue. But we want automation to become more automated, more autonomous, make its own decision often based on whatever parameters or whatever intelligent choices the automation should take.

And this is the future. And this is where we're putting a lot of effort right now to progress.

Just a quick story. So this is AMC, American Movie Theatres. It's the guys who acquired Odeon now, if you use the UK analogy. So massive movie theatre company. This is what it looks like. This is kind of a high-level business processes that they rely on.

And basically what we've done, we said, "Okay, we can now apply a lot of automation, enable you to implement new business processes in virtually hours."

So one of the things they've done, and this is what it looks like, they created a process that automatically creates concession bundles and promotions based on the type of audience, type of the movie, type of the habits of the subscribers that come to those movies, and automatically putting it in Twitter or social media.

So what you see here is just one process that basically starts with ServiceNow, somebody requesting that. Using ServiceNow, let's say we want to run promotion to show. It then goes into Hadoop, does all sorts of intelligent stuff in there. I mean, each process can drill in there. Then it goes into SAP system to check the stock and goes checking all sorts of things. In the mainframe systems there, or AS/400s in use. Yeah, so all sorts of databases. It ends up in Twitter, just here.

And it's fully automated process with some marketing analyst starting that in ServiceNow, requesting.

So it really can go from this to something that can be executed using... We even played with it, had a bit of fun, and we had Alexa as a starting point. We just had this demo where you can really call Alexa and say, "Start the promotion," and it will walk you through that. It can be as simple as that.

So what's the future look like? It's all about really making the right intelligent choices for what's happening. Giving more freedom may sound a bit scary, but giving more freedom to the system to decide what should be the next move, rather than us prescribing, building those workflows I just showed you.

Let's give it more heuristic approach, give it more intelligent approach, give it more experience from what happened in the past. And this is what's happening. So we're building a pipeline around taking it to the next level, where the automation is done automatically. It's data-driven. It's based on some previous experiences that we collected, and I'll talk about in a second.

It's something that runs efficiently. It finds the most cost-efficient and most effective way to execute. Going through the right infrastructure or through the right environments. And continue and implement artificial intelligence or machine learning to really make this automation self-sufficient.

And there are a number of use cases if you think about it. So have more policies in place rather than workflows. Have, say, "This is what my environment should look like. This is what my point of sale should look like. This is what my ATM should look like." And automation will take care of that.

Or, I want to put this change to this environment, and automation will know where your environment is and how to put this change on it, because it's done it before many times. You don't need to explain it again.

And make sure, again, your workloads are positioned in the most cost-effective way. Sometimes cheaper to run internally, sometimes cheaper to run it externally. Again, automation will do it for you.

And if we continue that, automation will become even more dynamic. In-flight, as you execute in a business process, it may change based on the situation, based on parameters happening. We already have it today.

We have this complex event processing mechanism that can say, okay, if the web service returns a certain value, like weather changes, and there is another situation happening, like there's performance issues coming from another place, and somebody requested something in the Salesforce, it will correlate all those three events and will execute automation right away.

And we also provide, obviously, endpoint management and removing that complexity from remediation, inventory management, and all these manual tasks today that are just time-consuming and not helping us to focus on our core business, to be honest.

So we already started to collect the data. Again, with obviously customer consent, we build this data lake. And this was a scientific pro-- It's like using big data, putting the right instrumentation in the system that today we start to learn how our customers are using the automation, how they deploy the application, what's happening after they put a piece of code in a WebSphere. What's the next step? How long it takes? What typical commands are embedded?

So all this has been already collected, or we're starting to collect it, and we're planning to really create this automation data lake. And we put a lab in Austin, Texas, and we really have a number of data scientists there, and we'll start, not different to Netflix and Google, to start using this data in a smart way, then offering customers more intuitive automation.

Really, call to action is, again, take automation to your site. Don't be scared of it. And pick the right automation.

And again, if you want to talk to us in more details, and again, today it's all about details, less slogans. So if you want to see specific use cases, specific demo, or just to talk about somebody who did some of those customer stories I mentioned, come see us downstairs.

And that's pretty much my presentation. So automation is here and it's growing. So we have all this future of automation here.

Q&A

Any questions?

Anybody is doing any automation initiatives right now?

Yes, please.

Sure. All right. So what we have today, we already have complex event processing engine, so you can really correlate multiple events or patterns, find things, Splunk, if you like. In the same kind of way where you can correlate a number of totally different events of different nature.

An example is a large utility company we have in the States, forgot what they're called, American Electric Power, I think they're called, AEP. So they use us to correlate the events from the grid monitoring system to the customer request or customer complaints on the power outages, and they combine that and they send massive text messages to their customers saying, "We know you have a problem. We're fixing it. Just be proactive about it."

So those things are already in there, and we keep working on them and improving them. We also started to implement this data lake thing I mentioned. It's already in there. It's been rolled out. It's on the new version.

The more kind of intelligence or AI systems is in the pipe for the future. So some things are there, some things can work.

Q: So what AI technology are you using?

A: I think we're looking into developing something ourselves. Correct. Yeah. So we kind of set up a different development center, or it's in progress. We have a number of people already, and we try to separate them from the core engineering, and they'll be working on it.

Okay. Yeah.

Any more questions, guys?

All right. Well, thanks. I hope you enjoyed it. If you want any more details, come and talk to us, and enjoy the event. Thank you.