BMC is positioning its Control-M platform as a central hub to turn generative AI experiments into measurable business impact. McKinsey says agentic AI is the way to 'break out of the gen AI paradox.' Nearly four in five companies are using generative AI, according to the consultancy giant’s research, but comparatively few are getting any bottom-line value from it.
Some experts describe orchestration as 'the point when agents become agentic.' That idea has drawn attention from vendors that build workflow and automation layers. Control-M is sold as a tool to automate scheduling and processing of business workflows across disparate platforms and applications from one control surface, with the aim of reducing operational friction and letting organisations run mixed cloud, on-prem and SaaS processes in a coordinated fashion. Last month BMC was named as a leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for service orchestration and automation platforms.
BMC casts Control-M, in the words of director of solutions marketing Basil Faruqui, as the 'orchestrator of orchestrators', connecting multiple tools together. Faruqui predicts that, potentially within 12 months to two years, this orchestration will move from applications and APIs to agents. Salesforce, for example, has Agentforce, which it calls a 'digital labour platform', enabling companies visibility and control in scaling AI agents; and for Faruqui, that is where the puck is going. “Whether it’s a data warehouse, whether it’s a CRM like Salesforce or SAP, all of these things will be automating their functions using agentic AI,” he says. “[The orchestrator’s role] is going to change; it’s going to be automating and connecting agents across systems.
“That’s really where we see our future in this ‘agent economy’, so to speak,” adds Faruqui. “We see Control-M playing the role of, really, being the orchestrator of agents across systems.”
Faruqui tells a recent story from a meeting with the CTO of a major healthcare organisation that handles north of $10 billion each month in claims. Early tests of generative AI and large language models were described as 'transformative'. Applying gen AI to claims processing, the CTO said, could cut processing time in 'orders of magnitude.' Faruqui stresses a practical point: technology creates business value only when it is deployed and running in production. Operational limits and governance concerns remain a principal barrier for many enterprises, and orchestration products aim to narrow the gap between prototypes and steady operation.
“[For] sponsorship, a lot of these projects are not at the CIO or CTO level. It’s really coming from the board,” he says. “We’re actually seeing, in some cases, that companies are starting to report on the progress of their AI initiatives in their letter to the shareholders.
“This is going to move fast, which means that, from the vendor side we have to be ready, not in three years, [but] six months,” says Faruqui. “And we in BMC, we are working through a very bold vision where we see this agent economy really taking off; and really, orchestration is the vehicle for business outcomes.”
Basil Faruqui is scheduled to appear at the AI & Big Data Expo Europe in Amsterdam on September 24-25 as part of the panel session 'Building Robust Pipelines-Best Practices for Scalability and Efficiency'.