With its investment in OpsRamp, HPE looks to open a new chapter in IT operations management

Consider this: when you drive a car, how would you know whether the car needs maintenance? You might look for status indicators like a check engine or change oil light. Similarly, when a pilot flies an airplane, they rely on a multitude of metrics and data to ensure the plane is running smoothly. Managing IT infrastructure is similar in nature.

IT Operations Management (ITOM) solutions have been around since the mainframe days. The market had been dominated by big tech names of the past—IBM Tivoli, BMC Software, CA Technologies. According to Forrester Research, 86% of enterprises use at least one legacy tool and 37% exclusively use such tools. The problem for customers is these legacy vendors have been slow to adopt the cloud and therefore failed to maintain a rapid pace of innovation.

This leads to an ITOM market ripe for disruption. For the HPE Pathfinder team, it means opportunity. It is why we recently invested in one of the most promising startups in this sector: OpsRamp.

We recently invested in one of the most promising startups in the ITOM sector: OpsRamp

ITOM: A $28bn Market in Transition

In today’s complex IT environments, ITOM software remains as important as ever: every enterprise needs to monitor and manage resources effectively across their vast infrastructure. Visualizing server and storage resources, correlating alerts, managing capacity utilization and more are still essential parts of day-to-day IT operations. So, why have the legacy names in ITOM failed to keep up?

Modern IT environments have fundamentally changed. According to Gartner, by 2022, enterprises will allocate 28% of IT spend toward the public cloud. Monitoring workloads across public, private, and hybrid environments requires an entirely different approach, yet users still expect the same level of visibility as with traditional on-premises environments. With the increasing prevalence of cloud-native environments and container architectures, how IT organizations create and deploy modern applications change as well. When workloads move between physical locations at ease and applications spin up and down in mere seconds, you end up with a more dynamic IT environment that requires new monitoring capabilities.

Enter OpsRamp

Given the state of legacy solutions, it is no surprise that several new startups are shaking up the ITOM space. Many start at the top of the stack, taking an application-first approach to monitoring. By recognizing the pressing need for effective infrastructure management, OpsRamp takes a fresh approach.

At the core of OpsRamp’s solution is a powerful AI engine to solve IT operations problems at scale

OpsRamp stands apart in the ITOM market in three key ways:

• Service-centric artificial intelligence: At the core of OpsRamp’s solution is a powerful artificial intelligence engine, OpsQ. Designed to cut through the avalanche of alerts that traditional monitoring platforms generate, OpsQ uses proprietary machine intelligence and novel computational approaches to solve IT operations problems at scale. It provides a much more intelligent, accurate, and faster way to correlate and escalate alerts, conduct root cause analyses, and speed mean-time-to resolution—eliminating 95% of the effort human operators typically spend on event management.

• Hybrid cloud approach: OpsRamp is built to provide a digital operations command center to monitor and manage events and information in modern hybrid environments, where enterprises need to keep tabs on resources in multiple locations: on-premises data centers, public and private clouds, colocation facilities, etc. The ability to manage infrastructure using a single-user interface, but extending them to cloud and virtualized resources, is a huge benefit to enterprises.

• Multi-tenant architecture: In the old days, an enterprise’s IT organization managed resources for the entire company, so a single, monolithic platform worked fine. Today, more IT responsibilities are flowing to individual departments and lines of business. With that in mind, OpsRamp uses a multi-tenant architecture, making it easy to manage different fragmented environments as tenants.

Looking to the Future

Combining those three attributes, OpsRamp’s ITOM solution is well-suited to address the broader technology transitions unfolding in the market today. As IT architectures and infrastructure evolves, fundamental concepts like where applications run and where data is stored and processed are changing. Flexible hybrid IT monitoring are core enterprise requirements. And, given the ever-escalating complexity of modern enterprise environments, AI will play a growing role in streamlining day-to-day IT operations.

For these reasons, we believe OpsRamp is well-positioned to capitalize on this market transition and become a leader in this space. We expect them to make big waves in the $28 billion ITOM market. We also think OpsRamp fits perfectly into HPE’s vision of the future. Hybrid cloud and AI, for example, are core tenets of our strategy moving forward. As we continue to expand our hybrid IT market position and explore new solutions adjacent to our GreenLake as-a-service platform, we view OpsRamp as a natural partner.