What’s New at DRYiCE? How Do They Fit In the Emerging Multi-Cloud Enterprise?

Source: https://gigaom.com/2021/01/18/whats-new-at-dryice-how-do-they-fit-in-the-emerging-multi-cloud-enterprise/
January 18, 2021 at 07:51PM

I attended the DRYiCE analyst day to look in on the progress of this relatively young part of HCL. Clearly, no moss is growing on their developers as they push a number of products in the marketplace, including an AIOps offering that is growing in popularity and sales, according to Amit Gupta, EVP and Global Head at DRYiCE.

The company has experienced almost 50% year-over-year growth, with DRYiCE Lucy, MyCloud, iAutomate, and iControl rounding out the best-selling products. Currently, Lucy has 2.1 million active users, and over 3,000 use cases, just to look at one of their products.

One can explain the success of DRYiCE around the emerging need for operationally focused tools, including those supporting emerging AIOps concepts. This will continue to grow through 2021 and 2022 as applications and data migrate to the cloud—most from organizations lacking a good understanding as to how they will deploy and operate these workloads effectively.

Companies today need to deal with widely distributed systems that are connected via a wide range of ISPs. When 10% of employees were traveling or working remotely from time to time, the task of managing systems was not that difficult. Today, with the vast majority of employees working from home, the complexity of IT operations has grown ten-fold, and that complexity is not going away. IT operations have had to adapt to a new normal where the environments they manage are often not under their direct control.

At the core of the journey is the simplification of IT operations and recreating them using an AIOps tool. This means we are no longer married to manual processes. The cost center becomes proactive instead of reactive, as the tool can pragmatically predict the future.

When using AIOps, the focus is on the business and the elimination of higher risk delays and inconsistencies to achieve fully automated processes that reduce risk. The journey requires that we move from inefficient processes to automated processes that are consistent. Finally, there’s a move to self-service models, where IT is not dependent on people and functions that are likely to fail.

Also presented during the analyst day was a case study highlighting how a pharmaceutical company leveraged DRYiCE products as force multipliers. Specifically, Clayton Ching introduced a new product called ROAR, a data-oriented path to advanced operational management of distributed data.

This product does a few things that are emerging in the market but not yet in other systems, including:

• Robust computational engine, meaning it has the ability to scale.
• Single source of truth, which aggregates data from siloed multi-sourced data to a single reference record.
• Database for billables, which maps Contractual RU against golden datasets to create a single source of truth here as well.
• Out-of-the-box reports, enabling the use of standard analytics within the product.

If there was one suggestion I would give DRYiCE, it is to normalize their products a bit. The company seems to have too many (10 in total), and those attempting to figure out which product does what can find it confusing.

If that’s all there is to complain about, that’s not bad. Indeed, HCL’s innovative, operationally focused companies are leading the way to better operations both inside and outside of the cloud. Indeed, as deployments grow more complex, this kind of capability is no longer an option but table stakes.