>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE,
covering AWS re:Invent 2017.
Presented by AWS,
Intel
and our ecosystem of partners.
>> Welcome back, we are live here in Las Vegas,
located at the Sands.
Day three of our coverage here at re:Invent.
AWS starting to wrap things up, but still,
I think, making a very major statement about the progress
they're making in their making in their market.
45,000 plus attendees here, thousands of exhibitors
and exhibit space being used here
in hundreds of thousands of square footage.
Sort of a reflection of the vibrancy of that market.
I'm with James Kobielus, who's the lead analyst at Wikibon
and we're joined, once again,
second appearance on theCUBE in one day, how 'bout that
for Nayaki Nayyar, who is the President
of Digital Services Management at BMC.
Glad to have you back, we appreciate the time.
>> Thank you, John, thank you, Jim.
Great to be here and I'm becoming a pro at this, right?
>> You are.
>> My second time of the day.
>> We'll punch your card and you win a prize
by being on theCUBE more than once a day.
>> Twice in four hours, I mean,
that's a pretty good track record.
>> We'll pick up your toy, you know.
>> Tell me about, first off, just your thought
about the show in general.
I mean, you've been in this environment for some time now,
but I'm kind of curious what you think about
what you're seeing here
and the sense of how this thing's really taking off.
>> So, first of all, it's just the energy, the vibe,
the fun that we're having here is just amazing.
But, I do want to drop to the
keynote that Andy did yesterday,
it's just phenomenal the pace at which AWS is innovating.
Just to be releasing over 1300 features
in a year, that is phenomenal.
>> James: I think he said innovations in a year.
>> Features a year.
>> Did he say features, okay. >> Yeah, I think so.
But, independent of that, I'm just saying the pace
at which, and their model of new stuff
that they're bringing to the market is just phenomenal.
For customers like us, vendors, it's just phenomenal.
>> We hear a lot about, I mean, it's the buzzword,
digital transformation and all that.
So, what does it really mean to service?
What transformation is happening in that,
what is that pushing you on that side of the fence
to have to be thinking about now?
>> You said the word, digital,
and sometimes it's very hyper-used.
And what we have done at BMC,
since our core is service management,
we have defined what service management looks like
for our customers in this digital age.
And we have defined it, because we were primarily
in I.T. service management for the last 10-15 years,
the future of the service management in this digital world
is what we call cognitive service management.
Where service management is no longer just reactive,
it is proactive and it is also a conversational
through various agents like chatbots, or Alexa
or virtual agents.
So, it's a complete transformation that we are experiencing
and we are driving most of that change
for our customers right now.
>> And, of course, the word cognitive signals the fact
that there's some artificial intelligence going on
behind the scenes,
possibly to drive that conversational UI.
With that in mind, I believe that, at BMC,
you are one of AWS's partners for Alexa for businesses,
is that true?
And you're bringing it
into an I.T. service management context.
That's sounds like an innovation,
can you tell us more about that?
>> Absolutely, so we announced partnership with AWS
on multiple fronts.
One of them is with Alexa, Alexa for Business,
where we do integrate with Alexa for providing
that end user experience.
So, Alexa was known for consumer world,
my son used it all the time. >> Tell me the temperature?
>> But now, we are looking at how we could bring it
into the enterprise world, especially to provide service
to all employees.
So that, you don't actually have to send an email
or pick up the phone to call a service agent,
now you can actually interact with Alexa or a chatbot
to get any service you need.
So that's what we call omni-channel experience
for providing that experience for end users,
employees, customers, partners, anyone.
>> So, do you have, right now, any reference customers,
it's so new?
Or, can you give us a sense for how this capability
is working in the field in terms of your testing?
Do business people understand, or are they comfortable,
with using essentially a consumer appliance
as an interface to some serious business infrastructure?
Like, being able to report a fault in a server,
or whatnot.
There's a risk there of bringing in a technology,
like a consumer technology, before it's really been accepted
as a potential business tool.
Tell us how that's working.
>> That's a very interesting.
We are actually seeing a very fast pace
at which customers are adopting it.
As we speak, I have three customers I'm working
with right now, who not only wants to use a chatbot,
or a virtual agent, for providing service,
not just to employees but to the end customers,
also want to use Alexa inside their company
for providing service to their employees.
So, it's starting the journey,
we already have the integration that is working with Alexa.
Customers have gotten very excited about it,
they're doing POCs, they're starting their journey.
I think in the next couple of years,
we'll see a huge uptake with customers wanting
to do that across the board.
>> Well, give me an example, if I'm working
and I need to go to Alexa Business, how deep can I go?
What kind of problems can be solved?
And then, at what point where does that shut off
and then we trip over to the human element?
>> James: Don't forget where the A.I. fits in
to the picture.
If you could just have a little bit of the plumbing,
not too much.
>> So, let me give you like two segments,
one is the experience through Alexa,
the second one is, where does deep learning
get embedded into the process.
So, usually every company has level one,
level two service desk agents who are taking the calls,
are responding to emails for resetting passwords
or fixing foreign issues, laptop issues.
So, that level one, level two service desk process is
what is being replaced through a chatbot or an Alexa.
So, now you can take the routine kind of a task away
from having a human respond to it,
you can have Alexa or a chatbot respond, do that work.
The second piece, for high-complex scenarios,
is where it switches.
So, being able to automatically switch between an Alexa
to a live agent, is where the beauty comes in
and how we handle the transition.
It has all the historical interaction
through the whole journey for the customer.
>> But then, Alexa forwards any information it has gained
from the conversations-
>> That interaction history we call it.
>> To a human being who takes it to the next step.
>> Nayaki: So when I-
>> Can a human kick it back to Alexa at some point?
>> No, no, we haven't seen that go back.
It's usually, level one, level two is where Alexa takes care
and then level three is where the human takes care
and goes forward.
Now, the second piece, the A.I.-ML piece.
In a service management, there are a lot of processes
that are very, I would say, routine and very manual.
Like, every ticket that comes in, customers
have millions of tickets that come in on a periodic basis.
Every ticket that comes in, how you assign the ticket
to the right individual, log the ticket
and categorize the ticket is a very labor intensive
and expensive process.
So, we are embedding deep learning capabilities
into that so we can automate, customers can automate
all of those.
>> James: Natural language processing, is that?
>> With NLP embedded into it.
Now, customers can choose to use an
NLP engine of their choice, like Watson,
or Amazon, or Cortana.
And then, that gets fed back
into the service management process.
>> In fact, that's consistent with what AWS is saying
about the whole deep learning space.
They are agnostic as
to the underlying deep learning framework you use
to build this logic, whether it be TensorFlow or MXNet,
or whatever.
So, what you're saying is very consistent
with that sort of open framework for plugging deep learning,
or A.I., into the, in this case,
the business application.
Very good.
So, developers within your customer base,
what are you doing, BMC, to get developers
up to speed on what they'll need to do to build the skills
to be able to drive this whole service management workflow?
>> So, all this work that we're doing with,
what we call these cognitive services,
they're all micro services that we are built
into our platform.
That, not only we are using in our own applications,
like in Remedy, like in, what we call digital workplace,
but also we have made it available for all the developers,
partners, ecosystems, to consume it
in their own applications.
Just like what Amazon is doing
with their micro services strategy,
we have micro services for every one of these processes
that developers can now consume
and build their own special use cases,
or use cases that are very unique to their business
or to their customers.
>> So who, I mean we were talking about this
before we started the interview,
about invent versus innovation, so, on the innovation side,
what's driving that?
I mean, are these interactions that you're having
with customers and so you're trying to absorb
whatever that input is, that feedback?
Or, are you innovating almost in a vacuum,
or in space a little bit, and are providing tools
that you think could get traction?
>> No, in fact, no, we are not just dreaming in our labs
and saying, "This is what we should go do." (laughing)
>> James: Dreaming in our labs.
>> That's not where the driver is.
What's really happening, independent of the industry,
you pick any industry like telcos or financial industry,
any industry is going through a major transformation
where they are under competitive pressure
to provide a service at the highest efficiency,
highest speed, at the lowest cost.
So if I'm a bank, or if I'm a telco,
when a customer calls me and they have an issue,
the pace at which I provide the service, the speed,
and the cost at which I provide that service,
and the accuracy at which I provide that service,
is my competitive advantage.
So, that is what is actually driving the innovations
that we are bringing to market.
And, all the three things that I talked about,
end user experience through bots or through virtual agents,
how we are automating the processes
inside the service management, and how we are also providing
it for the developers.
All these three, create a package for our customers
in every one of those industries, to address the speed,
the efficiency and the cost for their service management.
>> John: Go ahead James.
>> At this show, AWS, among their many announcements
that are building on their A.I.,
they have a new product called, and it's related to this,
the accuracy, it's called Amazon Comprehend.
Which is able to build on Polly, their NLP,
their Natural Language Processing,
to be able to identify in a natural language,
entities like, "Hey, my PC doesn't work
"and I think it's the hard drive," those are entities.
But, also identify sentiment,
whether the customer is very angry, mildly miffed,
and so forth.
Conceivably, you could use, or your customers could use
that information in building out skills
that are more fine-grained in terms of handing off
to level two or level three support,
"Okay, we've identified with a high degree of confidence
"that the problem might reside in this particular component
"of the system, the customer is really out of joint,
"you need to put somebody on this right away."
So forth and so on.
Any thoughts about possibly using this new functionality
within the context of Alexa for Business
as you were deploying it at BMC?
In the future?
Your thoughts?
>> Absolutely, in fact that was what I was very excited about
that, when they announced that.
You know, in an NLP, NLP has been around for many years now
and there's been a lot of experiments around NLP.
>> The first patent for NLP was like in the late '50s.
>> But the maturity of NLP now, and the pace at which,
like Amazon, they're innovating is just phenomenal.
And the real beauty of it would be,
when an NLP engine can really become intelligent
when it can understand the sentiment of the customer,
when the customer is saying something,
it should detect that the customer is angry, happy,
or on the edge.
We are not there yet, I'm really excited
to see the announcements from AWS on the Comprehend side.
If they really can deliver on that understanding sentiment,
I think it would be phenomenal.
>> I don't want to get us off the tracks,
but it's a fascinating point.
Because, as you know words, in a static environment
can be misinterpreted one of 50,000 ways.
So, how do you get this A.I. to apply to emotional pitch,
tone,
agitation?
How do you recognize that?
>> That is where NLP, the maturity of an NLP,
is what's gonna be game changing in the long term.
For it to be able to know what the underlying sentiment.
>> Anger, excitement, joy, despair, I mean, all those things.
"I've had enough," can be said many different ways.
>> And that's when we'll switch to a live agent,
if it's not able to do it, we will quickly switch
to a live agent. (laughing)
>> The bot gives up, right? (laughing)
>> Or is it emotion threshold where a human being
might be the best immediate front-line support.
>> Just curious, it's fascinating.
Well, thank you for the time, we certainly appreciate that.
And, we promise, this'll be it for the day.
(laughing)
All right, no more CUBE duty.
But, we certainly wish you all the best down the road.
And, like you, I think we've certainly seen,
and have a deeper appreciation for what's happening
in this marketplace with what we've seen here this week.
It was extraordinary. >> Fascinating.
>> Thank you, John, it was a pleasure.
And really excited to have two CUBE interviews in a day.
>> John: How 'bout that?
>> But, I think it's a great forum for us
to get our message out and get the world to know
what we are doing as BMC
and the innovations we're beginning.
>> We're excited to talk to real innovators
in the business world, so, all power to you.
>> Thanks for the time. >> Thank you.
>> Nice to meet you.
Back with more, we are live here at re:Invent AWS
in Las Vegas.
Back with more live here on theCUBE right after this break.
(upbeat music)