Takeaways from BigPanda 24

Last week saw several big milestones for BigPanda. We launched several new AI-driven capabilities (see below). And we had the privilege of meeting with more than 40 IT operations leaders from customers, including Disney, Nvidia, Autodesk, Lucid Motors, Intel, and Blue Shield, at our customer event, BigPanda 24.

Representing some of the most innovative organizations in business and technology, these influencers joined us as part of our customer and technical advisory boards. Their insight will help shape the future of IT operations across industries.

In her keynote, Rama Akkiraju from NVIDIA made it clear: “Generative AI is here to transform pretty much everything that’s happening in any company.” That is certainly the case for IT Operations!

BigPanda 24 allowed us to share our product roadmap and demonstrate upcoming capabilities. Most importantly, it allowed us to listen to our customers and get their feedback. This invaluable insight will help us define our strategies to meet the needs of IT Operations teams.

It’s an exciting time to be in AIOps. In the previous decade, IT execs were measured by their ability to bring their enterprises to the cloud. Over the next 10 years, IT execs will be measured by their ability to bring their enterprises to AI. And BigPanda will help them succeed.

Reflecting on our conversations at BigPanda 24, I want to share a few thoughts.

Modern IT requires full-context operations

When IT incidents occur, it can take ages for IT teams to gather all the information needed in order to make smart decisions. Operators must sift through mountains of machine data and institutional knowledge to find relevant data. Then, they have to connect the dots to develop enough context to be able to answer essential questions like:

• What’s happening?
• What services are impacted?
• What changed recently?
• Has this happened before?
• What to communicate to stakeholders?
• How to restore service?

Gathering all this information manually and turning it into context is a slow, disruptive, and inefficient process.

That is the problem BigPanda was born to solve. Our founding vision is to transform noisy and fragmented ops data into full-context operations so that ops teams can make faster, smarter decisions and drive context-aware automation. We are excited that GenAI is enabling us to turbocharge that vision.

AI is expanding the breadth of full-context operations

To date, BigPanda has focused mostly on transforming mountains of machine data — like observability, topology, and change data — into full context. That provides tremendous value to IT teams. It’s why many of the world’s largest enterprises use BigPanda.

Machine data, however, is only half the story. To resolve IT incidents, ops teams must also assemble and understand organizational knowledge to make smart decisions. Unfortunately, much of that organizational knowledge is hidden in hard-to-find silos across the enterprise or trapped in people’s heads. That’s why IT incidents can still require painfully long bridge calls with 50 to 100 people on the line in order to gather information from across the enterprises.

At BigPanda 24, we unveiled our exciting vision for expanding our data reach across organizational knowledge. Using Gen AI, BigPanda can now surface organizational data that is trapped in silos across the enterprise and operationalize it into full-context operations. This includes multiple categories of organizational knowledge:

• Historical knowledge: Imagine, when an incident occurs, being able to look back several years to surface similar incidents that happened in the past. You would likely find very useful information, including What caused this issue? What business services did it impact? Who resolved this issue? Having this knowledge at the start of an incident greatly accelerates time-to-context and resolution. We’re very excited to have launched this offering last week, called Similar Incidents.
• Institutional knowledge: At some point in the past, someone may have gone to the trouble of creating a runbook, knowledge article, standard operating procedure, or some other form of institutional knowledge relevant to a particular problem you are dealing with at the moment. However, institutional knowledge is often buried in some dark corner of your organization; it takes precious minutes or hours to find and operationalize it. AI can help by surfacing that institutional knowledge and automatically operationalizing it into full context.
• Human knowledge: The biggest repository of organizational knowledge — and the most difficult to operationalize— is human wisdom. Human knowledge is hard to gather and operationalize because it’s trapped in people’s minds! Using AI, BigPanda is harnessing human knowledge from unstructured chat threads, meeting transcripts, informal notes, and other sources and transforming it into enduring organizational knowledge that anyone in the organization can use. Imagine instantly putting the knowledge of your most senior SMEs at the fingertips of everyone in operations!

AI is breaking down accessibility barriers

Data accessibility is one of the biggest bottlenecks in IT operations. Critical data is often trapped in tools that are accessible only to specific people, or that may require deep expertise to be use. With GenAI, we can not only surface that data but also make it easily accessible to anyone who may need it.

The BigPanda AIOps Copilot, currently in private beta, is a powerful and easy-to-use ITOps assistant that provides critical insights and automation to everyone on your team. It has been purpose-built for ITOps use cases and leverages the wide breadth of BigPanda machine data and organizational knowledge.

Codenamed Biggy, our AICopilot enables:

• Knowledge discovery across fragmented enterprise silos
• AI-driven insights that deliver full-context operations
• Analytics about trends and problems in your IT environment
• Recommendations for fast action
• Automation of manual and time-consuming tasks

IT operations is a very complex field with unique challenges. We are excited to be bringing to market an AI-powered copilot that is developed specifically for the needs of this industry.

Looking forward

At BigPanda 24, we shared our vision and gained invaluable insights into ways to help organizations achieve faster incident resolution, better service availability, and higher efficiency. It made me smile when one of our customers said, “I can finally see how AI is really transforming ITOps.”

The pace of change is exponentially faster. The velocity and the quality of innovation are incredible. BigPanda remains committed to riding the crest of the AI innovation wave. We hope you’ll join us!