Last week, we attended the BMC Helix Roadshow London event for customers and partners. As we reported, the new company, following a two-way split in the BMC Software business, is aiming to boost its sales in agentic AI through partner expansion.
Here’s more news from the show. Ryan Manning (pictured), BMC Helix chief product officer, told hundreds of customers and partners at the event: “We are resetting the economics of enterprise IT. AI will see the commoditisation of many enterprise software systems.
“We are going from apps with a small chunk of AI, to AI and a small chunk of apps.”
Manning said BMC Helix had 30 agents to offer partners and customers to help them manage their service operations, “not hundreds”, but was gradually increasing their number, with new ones we previously covered.
He added: “There is a fear about jobs as a result of AI deployments, but AI is not deflationary, it is a workforce multiplier.” He took the view of other software vendors in the AI space, that software developers and IT departments generally could use AI to complete basic operations, and help them more efficiently deal with trickier operational tasks.
On AI costs, Manning said: “Customers choosing vendors should look to ones that have ‘AI-evolved’ their pricing models. AI is not a terror, and we are not going to SKU [stock keeping unit] you to death. AI has to be included in the product prices.”
Drew Jarett, team lead for customer engineering at Google Cloud, joined Manning on stage, and explained that even a rich company like Google was trying to sweat its assets using AI. “With the help of AI agents, we are doing more with what we have under cost constraints.
“Large Language Models are the brains, and a lot of investment has gone into the data in them, but they’re cheap to run. The agents are responsible for making the clever decisions from that data quickly. No-coding, easy-to-deploy systems at organisations to control these agents is the key to success.”
On AI deployment, and as part of a customer panel, Ken Bourn, head of service at the Bank of England, said: “The bank has 6,000 staff, and 10% of them are in IT. Technology is fast-moving, sometimes it’s like trying to drive an F1 car, while changing the tyres. But you have to find the time to make changes that will benefit the organisation long-term.
“With AI, you have to make sure the data is right and the right systems are in place before you make those changes though.”
On AI agent deployment, he added: “We have a small talented team working on this, but to succeed we need a strong partnership relationship. We need BMC Helix to come in and augment what we have internally. We know we have to work together, as things will move quickly in this area in the future.”
BMC Helix was already carving a niche for itself in agentic AI before it split from the larger mainframe services and cloud data management portion of BMC Software. Now, with a clear focus on operations and service management software, as a standalone business, it is hoping more companies will take notice.
