Moogsoft is an AIOps incident management company for engineering teams responsible for maintaining high availability. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Field CTO Andrew “Spike” Hepburn to learn more.
Spike’s Background
Spike has nearly 3 decades of experience selling, deploying, and operating complex solutions.
“You could say I’ve run the gamut in terms of customer size. I’ve helped scale early-stage startups like Riversoft and large enterprises like Tivoli and IBM. For the last nine years, though, I’ve dedicated myself exclusively to Moogsoft and its mission: advancing enterprise availability with AIOps. I also love to cycle — when I’m not working through the sales cycle, that is” said Spike. “As Moogsoft’s AIOps and Field CTO, my remit concerns pre-sales, post-sales, and some engineering input (AKA code contribution). I also have input as a subject matter expert during the product management phase. In a sense, I’ve become a conduit between the field, engineering, and product management teams.”
Core Products
What are Moogsoft’s core products and features? “Moogsoft is the leader in artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps). AIOps is an AI and ML-empowered solution that synthesizes disparate data sources, identifies issues and escalates concerns to the appropriate parties. The result is better uptime and availability, which boosts system productivity and customer loyalty, especially in the digital age,” Spike shared.
Spike also cited the benefits of AIOps:
Continuous availability — Data errors and outages are the enemy of revenue generation. However, trying to monitor modern systems without the proper technology is impossible because there’s just too much data to quantify. Think of the number of SaaS tools a single organization uses, then add in their cloud infrastructure and consumer-facing interfaces. Each touchpoint generates a lot of data; under the right (or wrong) circumstances, those data can destruct and create downtime. AIOps patch errors before they reach that point, providing superior continuous availability.
Optimized digital experience — Organizations aren’t stagnant, and neither are their digital experiences. But when developers tinker to improve customer experience (CX) in the background, users should never experience blips or outages. AIOps identify possible issues during the development process before they become breaking points, allowing a seamless customer experience even as their digital interfaces continuously improve.
Agility to navigate disruption — Moogsoft’s AIOps platform is designed for in-person, hybrid, and remote site reliability engineer (SRE) teams. So, regardless of where your employees sit, they’re plugged in and ready to proactively address data errors.
Evolution Of Moogsoft’s Technology
How has Moogsoft’s technology evolved since launching? “As employee 20, I’m highly qualified to answer this question. Let’s not beat around the bush: Moogsoft invented AIOps. When we launched in 2012, the Internet of Things (IoT) comprised 8.7 billion devices, compared to 14.4 billion devices in 2023. Naturally, global data’s complexity has altered how we approach DevOps. And as our AI and ML-backed systems ingest more data, they become capable of flagging data errors more quickly, accurately, and efficiently,” Spike revealed. “We’ve also streamlined our platform to make it exceptionally remote-user-friendly. Arguably, the pandemic necessitated this; but as a remote-first team, we truly believe in the power of teamwork from afar.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of Moogsoft’s biggest milestones? “When I joined Moogsoft, our customers were primarily cutting-edge, early adopters of new tech. One of our first milestones was selling to a more traditional customer: a national bank. We replaced this client’s existing infrastructure (which had been in place for over a decade!) and significantly improved their ITOps posture,” Spike pointed out. “Why do I see this as a milestone? ‘Old money’ customers like traditional financial institutions — are traditionally more risk-averse and slower to adopt emerging technologies. Closing this deal signaled that we’d achieved maturity and garnered credibility. Moogsoft’s exponential growth and the sector’s increased acceptance of AIOps as a domain are also significant milestones. But I see our biggest accomplishment thus far is our shift from an on-premises product to a cloud-native technology. This change mirrors our customers’ transformations, and it has accelerated our potential, allowing us to leverage cloud technologies at a previously unimaginable scale.”
Customer Feedback
When I asked Spike about a customer success story, he answered: “Each customer’s view and measurement of success is different. I consider a customer successful when they are inventive with the product — for example, when customers mold Moogsoft’s AIOps solution to their environment, going beyond initial deployment to find new value-adding areas. We’ve seen this self-service milestone reached by both greenfield and brownfield customers.”
What has been some of the customer feedback that Moogsoft received so far? “Feedback about toil reduction is immensely gratifying for me. Many customers have communicated with our team about how Moogsoft has made their job easier on micro and macro scales: from making daily tasks less onerous to helping solve complex operational issues much faster than they previously could. These ‘wow’ moments are one of the best parts of the job,” Spike noted.
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates Moogsoft from the competition? “Many of our competitors tout their solutions as AIOps, yet in reality, their tools employ a logic-based algorithm informing systems how to react in specific situations. The difference is substantial because true AI compensates for unknown situations (and there are many — especially when dealing with data!),” Spike affirmed “Moogsoft’s platform, on the other hand, is backed by intelligent, automation-driven AI and ML. Consequently, our platform reacts to emerging threats in real-time and uses predictive analytics to understand which data events are benign — or dangerous.”
How AIOps Addresses Complex IT Infrastructures
Then I asked Spike about how AIOps address complex IT infrastructures. “AIOps is the fabric connecting disparate data sources and systems. We ensure highly complex IT infrastructures — which, in the modern working environment, includes all IT infrastructures — function at 100%, 100% of the time,” Spike answered. “Moogsoft’s AIOps solution ensures continuous availability by ingesting and processing all data types, flagging any potential downtime-causing errors that naturally occur when operating on varied, complex data and raising concerns to system administrators to address. Equally important, Moogsoft sifts through non-error-causing events to prevent red herrings from distracting your team.”
How AIOps Could Reduce Costs And Improving Productivity
Plus I also asked Spike how AIOps could be used for reducing costs and improving productivity.
“Cost reduction is a leading ROI for AIOps adoption. Consider this: You’re broadcasting a national sporting event with 500 million watchers. Under these circumstances, downtime would be devastating. Consumers would form negative impressions of your brand and could very well choose to stream from a competitor in the future. Alternatively, imagine you’re a Fortune 500 e-commerce company launching an exclusive line of sought-after sneakers. When the launch window opens, consumer activity crashes your checkout portal, preventing you from making any sales for 90 minutes. Both of these scenarios are highly possible — and, with AIOps, highly avoidable,” Spike responded. “During tough economic times, AIOps’ cost-reduction potential skyrockets. Why? Because consumer loyalty is much more expensive during challenging economic times when consumers become more selective about spending. We also see many benefits to AIOps for productivity. Our earlier examples concerned consumer-facing digital systems, but what about IT operations management (ITOM) processes? AIOps ensures that internal systems run smoothly, providing uninterrupted access to critical digital infrastructure like project management software and communication channels. And for DevOps and SRE teams, Moogsoft’s solution reduces repetitive tasks by orchestrating the incident escalation process.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of Moogsoft’s future company goals? “I’ve been in this domain for nearly 40 years and have seen the first and second evolutions of event management, the move from manual monitoring to automation, and the shift to an AIOps-based model. Moogsoft aims to spearhead the next evolutionary step: accelerating toward intelligent operations,” Spike concluded.
