Transcript
Hi, I'm Mike Matchett with Small World Big Data and we are here today talking about some of my favorite topics again. We've got AI on the table, but AI is applied to IT operations, particularly with ServiceNow, which at some customers is growing large and I dare say unwieldy. Sorry, ServiceNow, but you need some help. We've got Dyna here today to talk to us about how they're applying DevOps techniques on AI and some other goodness to your biggest ServiceNow deployments. So hold on just a minute. We'll get right into it. Hey, Ron, welcome to our show today. Mike, thanks for having me. Let's, let's talk a little bit about, you know, before we get too far into it. You're talking about your background. You, we share some, some background in system management, uh, going, going way back. System management is not a new thing. But tell us a little about your background and then sort of bring us into today. And like, what's kind of new in, in that space? What's, what's, what are the new trends? What should people be aware of if they're, if they're not really up to speed on it? Yeah. For sure. Well, I guess my, my background, um, going back to, to late 90s or early 2000, um, service management sort of in ITIL boom, got into some of these different, different types of platforms and stuff, learned that, um, owned, operated a number of number of different items. Um, around probably about 2014, uh, 2013 got into service now, um, you know, saw some big differences in terms of how it could, uh, execute basically, uh, some of those different process needs workflows, you know, a number of different elements. Um, eventually got into consulting on that space. And then about the last eight years or so, I've been really focused on building software for, um, the ServiceNow platform. I'd say in the last five years, um, lots of growth trend from an enterprise usage is number one. And certainly in the last 2 to 3 years, we've seen a lot of AI introduction and really trying to scale. Capabilities on the platform and find certainly better ways to work smarter. Uh, in terms of that sort of, uh, sort of space. With that though, lots of challenges. Um, so ServiceNow is really graduated into an enterprise space. Um, and able to do that. You've got a platform that has to interconnect with a lot of different, different elements. And certainly early adopters of ServiceNow are seeing different pains and challenges in terms of technical debt, um, having to deal with replatforming, you know, and other types of situations that certainly are slowing down, uh, innovation and certainly creating more costs in terms of managing, supporting and, and growing. Um, but you know, today's state, lots and lots of enterprise usage and, you know, we're seeing that, that growth trend in terms of AI capabilities being introduced to the platform. I mean, really, as complexity has continued to grow in it between the fact that now we're not just operating in one location, we're operating in hybrid environments. We've got a plethora of applications, each with its own architecture and databases, even AI itself, if you try to stand up infrastructure for that can be complex. Uh, so, you know, ServiceNow is probably one of those things that you look at its growth over time and say, hey, we went from just monitoring, you know, something up and try to keep it available and alerting us to something that's really more automated and operating, uh, the infrastructure. And that requires a level of development and complexity, which some people might not be aware of has evolved today, right? You've got your own people assigned to develop things to, to write code, to test it and release it. And when things go wrong with, you know, route administration level code, everything can go haywire. So there's a lot, a lot of risk and steak on the table in some of these enterprise customers that are using this. Um, so, you know, do you see, do you see other problems you want to call out here with what's, what's going on in, in those, those larger environments? Uh, well, it's all, it's all connected to, to what you sort of highlighted there. Um, adjacent ones though, are things where if you're trying to scale and get more out of the platform, um, getting creative with how you're doing development. So things like federated or distributed development start to add more complication to that whole picture. Uh, different individuals building, um, having the visibility of what's being built. Um, some of the challenges are, I'm going to say less about, um, the stuff being built and more about what it means against things that ServiceNow themselves are doing. So something new feature getting introduced, something getting fixed. Um, and if that comes into conflict with something that's gotten built, um, then you've got certainly challenges and troubles and things not working, you know, technical debt or even not being able to use some of these new fancy features, uh, that start to come out. So the velocity that people are wanting to get out of the platform start to create some of these different challenges. If you don't have something strong that's sort of connected to your development capabilities that can sort of underpin that and create that sort of safety layer in terms of governance and visibility and, and understanding of what's the impact of stuff being done and introduced. I'm glad you brought up the word governance because I want to dive into that just a bit. To some people, it's a word. They don't consider that that much outside of the sort of regulation compliance kind of factors, but, you know, governance of a internal program that is, uh, large, that affects everything that has root access to everything that has developers maybe working across purposes that, as you said, service now as sort of the upstream vendors making changes and updates that have to be applied to your, to your environment. So tell me, tell me, tell me about what good governance should be doing in an environment like that. Yeah, great. Great question Mike. Um, I, um, certainly lots of philosophy, uh, around that aspect. Um, one thing I'd maybe highlight about governance is the well, first and foremost, it, it's not usually the interesting, cool thing. Um, it's usually going to be. This is red tape that slows us down. You know, that perspective of this is really bad control. And when you've got business pressures and business needs now it starts to become roadblock in terms of the perception. Really good governance though creates continuity and allows you to actually move way faster. The key things about it though, is making sure you've got something that's enabled and dealing with your whole sort of development or DevOps lifecycle. A lot of times, uh, governance or controls will get put into sort of siloed spaces that start to sort of upstream create those roadblocks. But if you have something that's creating that continuity and you've got something that's got proactiveness to it and something that's automated, you start to reduce basically those load areas where you typically encounter the roadblocks and create a situation where you accelerate the result of actual development and fulfilling business needs, as opposed to constraining or controlling, you know, those, those types of elements. Yeah. And you can take governance from something that some people consider, as you said, is boring and dull and maybe even just a cost of doing business into some place that's really has some bright lines between the benefits you're getting out of imposing good governance and the returns your ROI are pretty clear sometimes, especially with with this kind of implementation where you can say, hey, our availability is improved, our remediations have gone down or our staffing requirements are back to normal. People don't have to work overtime. You know, you can, you can draw some, some pretty decent lines. And as you said, expand on the licensing that you've already paid for and really make more use of it. So, um, with that, let's, let's dive into a little bit then about what Dyna is doing to help with that governance. Maybe you can even tell us a little bit about what the AI parts are in there. But you know, when, when I, when I, when I go to deploy, Dyna, what am I going to see for sure. So, um, our sort of flagship software, um, is called guardrails. Um, and it really is, uh, sort of a one of a kind, um, automated, uh, AI enabled, um, governance for, for the platform, um, really focused on DevOps. So we target all the typical stages, uh, of, uh, DevOps loop. Um, we create a situation where, like I was mentioning earlier, you have that proactive components, you have the right sort of mechanisms or controls in the right areas. Um, so that you have this continuous sort of loop that's really, really strengthened from a governance perspective. Um, what we really tried to focus on with our product is making things simple. Uh, so, um, my co-founder, uh, Diana Wang, um, obviously he's the smart person. He's the one that got to name the company. Um, but, uh, we, uh, we really looked at our own practical usage when we were owner operators of the ServiceNow platform and try to create something, uh, that was embedded on the platform fully. That didn't introduce, you know, odd things or other elements of concern that took advantage of native things that you're already paying for and created really good linkages to sort of enable that whole end to end sort of sort of view and visibility. Um, we really focus on sort of four key elements in terms of alert management, meaning as a developers working on stuff, um, they're getting immediate, um, real time awareness of things related to that configuration or that code object that they might be working on. And that's related to high support records in terms of problems or other elements that might be important to be aware of in case you introduce something that's going to get fixed later or changed, um, best practices and a number of other very specific ServiceNow definitions that tie in there. Um, we've also got forensics capabilities that allows you to see historical, uh, technical debt, you know, challenges or other issues. Um, and really about contextual to your instance and what you need to focus on. Um, some of the big challenges today are just the volume of built up technical debt. And how do you address it? So many customers at a large enterprise scale now are sort of getting advised, just replatform meaning throw, throw that out and just start fresh. For some, that's just not reality in terms of the total cost and the time frame, the business disruption. Um, guardrails is a way to really create visibility on what should you deal with in a pragmatic approach that aligns with business need. Um, we also get into our automated code deployment and enabling, um, the movement of code in sort of a one click method integrated to all the change pieces and everything else. And then finally sort of our AI components, which really is where we've started to emphasize our efforts in and starting to differentiate ourselves. That's from an upgrade perspective, being able to sort of one click see and understand, what do we really have to deal with in terms of remediation development? Um, in terms of validation checks, if ServiceNow has changed something. Making sure that that it's still working properly on your system. And then certainly from a testing perspective, If something is in direct conflict that you need, uh, you know, um, uh, QA type testing on, on those elements. Um, we've also looked at some other key problem areas in terms of cmdb and csdm or the common service data model. Um, and really trying to help customers once again, sort of one click do that analysis. Um, back in my consulting days, um, efforts to really look at seem to be into that analysis. You're talking upwards of 200 grand plus just to get, you know, the understanding of what's there, let alone, you know, the plan to, to align to where servicenow's direction is, um, a great way for, for, um, customers to really take advantage of that if they're dealing with those, uh, types of challenges. And then the last piece, which we've really spent a lot of time on, um, is enabling that alert mechanism I was mentioning earlier, uh, with AI features so that you've got basically on screen all the remediation necessary and uniquely in that space, we've really focused on our AI capabilities truly being about remediation, not a wide open sort of space on, you know, create different code and things like that. We've really tried to create something that's very safe and very focused, um, to, to really reduce that risk in terms of using AI on, on your system. Right, right. It's almost worth having you come back and give us a little demo at some point of the features on there. Uh, but we're running out of time today. Uh, I do think this is something, you know, if I, if I'm considering this and given my background where I used to work at systems management, large systems management company, um, there are levels of complexity that you grow to. And at some point you reach those and you have to have this kind of governance in order to continue to harvest ROI out of what you're doing in the bigger project. Uh, and having something like this that gives you that governance around the edges and bring it all together and keep it running smoothly is well worth the investment. So if someone, if someone's interested in this, Ron, if someone wants to, says, hey, I've got a huge investment in ServiceNow and it's, it's got problems. We got issues. We've got challenges. Uh, what would you have them look at first? Go to your website or what? Yeah, for sure. You can find us on on our website, Dynasoftwareinc.com. You can also find us on the ServiceNow store. Just simply look up and search up guardrails, all one word and you should see our listing, uh, pop up there. And if you have a ServiceNow account rep, certainly ask them. They should be well aware of, uh, of us and be able to make the connection for you. All right. Thank you so much, Ron. This is fascinating little dive into, into into ServiceNow and what's going in service management, ITSM, it all things that I was part of a while back and coming, bringing it back up to the surface. We'll have to dive more into this going forward because it's clearly a growing, growing field still. And there's lots of things going on that are kind of cool to pay attention to. So folks, take a look at Dyna, take a look at guardrails and, um, have fun with your ServiceNow implementations. Take care.
