Basil Faruqui, BMC Software: How to nail your data and AI strategy

BMC Software’s director of solutions marketing, Basil Faruqui, discusses the importance of DataOps, data orchestration, and the role of AI in optimising complex workflow automation for business success.

What have been the latest developments at BMC?

It’s exciting times at BMC and particularly our Control-M product line, as we are continuing to help some of the largest companies around the world in automating and orchestrating business outcomes that are dependent on complex workflows. A big focus of our strategy has been on DataOps specifically on orchestration within the DataOps practice. During the last twelve months we have delivered over seventy integrations to serverless and PaaS offerings across AWS, Azure and GCP enabling our customers to rapidly bring modern cloud services into their Control-M orchestration patterns. Plus, we are prototyping GenAI based use cases to accelerate workflow development and run-time optimisation.

What are the latest trends you’ve noticed developing in DataOps?

What we are seeing in the Data world in general is continued investment in data and analytics software. Analysts estimate that the spend on Data and Analytics software last year was in the $100 billion plus range. If we look at the Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence & Data Landscape that Matt Turck at Firstmark publishes every year, its more crowded than ever before. It has 2,011 logos and over five hundred were added since 2023. Given this rapid growth of tools and investment, DataOps is now taking center stage as companies are realising that to successfully operationalise data initiatives, they can no longer just add more engineers. DataOps practices are now becoming the blueprint for scaling these initiatives in production. The recent boom of GenAI is going make this operational model even more important.

What should companies be mindful of when trying to create a data strategy?

As I mentioned earlier that the investment in data initiatives from business executives, CEOs, CMOs, CFOs etc. continues to be strong. This investment is not just for creating incremental efficiencies but for game changing, transformational business outcomes as well. This means that three things become very important. First is clear alignment of the data strategy with the business goals, making sure the technology teams are working on what matters the most to the business. Second, is data quality and accessibility, the quality of the data is critical. Poor data quality will lead to inaccurate insights. Equally important is ensuring data accessibility – making the right data available to the right people at the right time. Democratising data access, while maintaining appropriate controls, empowers teams across the organisation to make data-driven decisions. Third is achieving scale in production. The strategy must ensure that Ops readiness is baked into the data engineering practices so its not something that gets considered after piloting only.

How important is data orchestration as part of a company’s overall strategy?

Data Orchestration is arguably the most important pillar of DataOps. Most organisations have data spread across multiple systems – cloud, on-premises, legacy databases, and third-party applications. The ability to integrate and orchestrate these disparate data sources into a unified system is critical. Proper data orchestration ensures seamless data flow between systems, minimising duplication, latency, and bottlenecks, while supporting timely decision-making.

What do your customers tell you are their biggest difficulties when it comes to data orchestration?

Organisations continue to face the challenge of delivering data products fast and then scaling quickly in production. GenAI is a good example of this. CEOs and boards around the world are asking for quick results as they sense that this could majorly disrupt those who cannot harness its power. GenAI is mainstreaming practices such as prompt engineering, prompt chaining etc. The challenge is how do we take LLMs and vector databases, bots etc and fit them into the larger data pipeline which traverses a very hybrid architecture from multiple-clouds to on-prem including mainframes for many. This just reiterates the need for a strategic approach to orchestration which would allow folding new technologies and practices for scalable automation of data pipelines. One customer described Control-M as a power strip of orchestration where they can plug in new technologies and patterns as they emerge without having to rewire every time they swap older technologies for newer ones.

What are your top tips for ensuring optimum data orchestration?

There can be a number of top tips but I will focus on one, interoperability between application and data workflows which I believe is critical for achieving scale and speed in production.  Orchestrating data pipelines is important, but it is vital to keep in mind that these pipelines are part of a larger ecosystem in the enterprise. Let’s consider an ML pipeline is deployed to predict the customers that are likely to switch to a competitor. The data that comes into such a pipeline is a result of workflows that ran in the ERP/CRM and combination of other applications. Successful completion of the application workflows is often a pre-requisite to triggering the data workflows. Once the model identifies customers that are likely to switch, the next step perhaps is to send them a promotional offer which means that  we will need to go back to the application layer in the ERP and CRM. Control-M is uniquely positioned to solve this challenge as our customers use it to orchestrate and manage intricate dependencies between the application and the data layer.

What do you see as being the main opportunities and challenges when deploying AI?

AI and specifically GenAI is rapidly increasing the technologies involved in the data ecosystem. Lots of new models, vector databases and new automation patterns around prompt chaining etc. This challenge is not new to the data world, but the pace of change is picking up. From an orchestration perspective we see tremendous opportunities with our customers because we offer a highly adaptable platform for orchestration where they can fold these tools and patterns into their existing workflows versus going back to drawing board.

Do you have any case studies you could share with us of companies successfully utilising AI?

Domino’s Pizza leverages Control-M for orchestrating its vast and complex data pipelines. With over 20,000 stores globally, Domino’s manages more than 3,000 data pipelines that funnel data from diverse sources such as internal supply chain systems, sales data, and third-party integrations. This data from applications needs to go through complex transformation patterns and models before its available for driving decisions related to food quality, customer satisfaction, and operational efficiency across its franchise network.

Control-M plays a crucial role in orchestrating these data workflows, ensuring seamless integration across a wide range of technologies like MicroStrategy, AMQ, Apache Kafka, Confluent, GreenPlum, Couchbase, Talend, SQL Server, and Power BI, to name a few.

Beyond just connecting complex orchestration patterns together Control-M provides them with end-to-end visibility of pipelines, ensuring that they meet strict service-level agreements (SLAs) while handling increasing data volumes. Control-M is helping them generate critical reports faster, deliver insights to franchisees, and scale the roll out new business services.

What can we expect from BMC in the year ahead?

Our strategy for Control-M at BMC will stay focused on a couple of basic principles:

Continue to allow our customers to use Control-M as a single point of control for orchestration as they onboard modern technologies, particularly on the public cloud. This means we will continue to provide new integrations to all major public cloud providers to ensure they can use Control-M to orchestrate workflows across three major cloud infrastructure models of IaaS, Containers and PaaS (Serverless Cloud Services). We plan to continue our strong focus on serverless, and you will see more out-of-the-box integrations from Control-M to support the PaaS model. 

We recognise that enterprise orchestration is a team sport, which involves coordination across engineering, operations and business users. And, with this in mind, we plan to bring a user experience and interface that is persona based so that collaboration is frictionless. 

Specifically, within DataOps we are looking at the intersection of orchestration and data quality with a specific focus on making data quality a first-class citizen within application and data workflows. Stay tuned for more on this front!

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