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Innovation

IBM is working on an alternative to AIOps

The field of AIOps is mostly hype at this point, says IBM’s head of artificial intelligence products; Big Blue is working on an alternative to automate CIO chores.
Written by Tiernan Ray, Senior Contributing Writer

The phenomenon of AIOps, a software movement that combines artificial intelligence with IT management tasks, is less than it appears, according to IBM, and the company intends to fill the void with a future product offering.

"AIOps is an interesting catchphrase, but there's not a lot of reality to it today," said Rob Thomas, who holds the title of general manager, IBM data and Watson AI, in an interview with ZDNet at the company's Data And AI Forum conference in Miami on Tuesday. 

"There is a new frontier we are attacking with some alpha clients now," said Thomas, who presided over the three-day conference's discussion of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and big data. 

"We are focused on the most obvious thing you can imagine: We want to leverage AI to help every company that uses information technology to use AI to run a better IT organization." 

Asked to elaborate on that rather general description, Thomas asked, rhetorically, "Can you automate a lot of what we ask a CIO to do today?" 

What might be the goal of that? Thomas replied, "To do more with less budget."

Asked to offer more details, Thomas stated, "We will have more to come on that in future," and he declined to offer a time frame. 

Thomas, a 20-year veteran of IBM, has served in a number of the company's divisions, including its analytics group, "Global Engineering Solutions," and "Global Business Services."

AIOps has attracted new as well as established firms in recent years, including application performance monitoring tools vendor New Relic and IT infrastructure monitoring tool vendor Virtual Instruments

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