BMC Software’s Basil Faruqui

How to Master Your Data and AI Approach

Basil Faruqui, Director of Solutions Marketing at BMC Software, discusses the importance of data orchestration, DataOps, and artificial intelligence (AI) in automating complex workflows for business success.

What recent changes have occurred at BMC?

BMC is in an exciting phase, especially regarding the Control-M product line. We are helping major global companies automate and coordinate business outcomes that rely on complex workflows.

We’ve placed strong emphasis on DataOps, focusing particularly on orchestration. In the past year alone, we’ve introduced over seventy integrations to serverless and PaaS services across AWS, Azure, and GCP. This enables our customers to easily incorporate modern cloud services into Control-M workflows. Additionally, we are accelerating workflow development and optimising run-time performance by building GenAI-based use cases.

What DataOps trends have emerged recently?

We’re witnessing continued investment in data and analytics tools. Analysts estimate that spending on such software topped $100 billion last year. According to Matt Turck’s 2023 Data Landscape report, over 2,000 companies now exist in this space, and more than 500 were added in just a year.

Due to this explosion of tools, DataOps has become vital. Companies are realising that simply adding engineers isn’t enough. Operational practices now guide the scaling of data initiatives. With GenAI rapidly expanding, this approach is more essential than ever.

What should businesses consider when developing a data strategy?

Senior executives like CEOs, CMOs, and CFOs continue to invest heavily in data initiatives. These investments deliver transformative results, not just incremental gains.

Three factors stand out:

1. Alignment with Business Goals – Ensure IT teams focus on what truly matters.
2. Data Quality and Accessibility – Low-quality data yields poor insights. Making data accessible empowers teams to make informed decisions while maintaining proper controls.
3. Production-Readiness – Strategies must include operations readiness from the start, not as an afterthought.

How does data orchestration fit into a company’s strategy?

Data orchestration serves as a foundation for DataOps. Most businesses store data across platforms like legacy databases, cloud, and third-party applications. Integrating these sources into a unified system ensures smooth data flow, reduces duplication, cuts latency, and eliminates bottlenecks. Ultimately, this accelerates decision-making.

What challenges do clients face with data orchestration?

Many clients struggle to scale data products quickly. For example, GenAI has created urgency, with executives demanding fast results to avoid disruption.

Prompt engineering and chaining are gaining popularity. But integrating LLMs, vector databases, and bots into mixed data pipelines remains complex. These pipelines often span mainframes, cloud environments, and hybrid architectures.

One client likened Control-M to a “power strip” for orchestration, allowing new technologies to plug in without rewiring the entire system.

What tips do you have for optimal data orchestration?

Focus on interoperability between applications and data operations. This is key to achieving production speed and scalability.

For instance, an ML pipeline predicting customer churn depends on data from ERP/CRM apps. These application workflows must finish before the data pipeline begins. Once the model identifies at-risk customers, apps must respond, perhaps with a promotional offer.

Control-M excels here by managing dependencies between the app and data layers.

What are the benefits and challenges of implementing AI?

GenAI is rapidly transforming the data ecosystem. New models, databases, and automation tools are appearing daily. While fast-paced, this evolution opens doors.

From an orchestration view, BMC empowers customers to integrate these tools into existing systems instead of rebuilding from scratch.

Can you share an AI success story?

Domino’s Pizza uses Control-M to manage over 3,000 data pipelines. These pipelines draw from internal systems, third-party apps, and supply chains across more than 20,000 global locations.

Control-M ensures seamless workflow orchestration across technologies like MicroStrategy, Kafka, Talend, SQL Server, and Power BI. It offers end-to-end pipeline visibility and helps Domino’s meet service-level agreements while scaling efficiently.

Thanks to this, Domino’s delivers faster insights to franchisees, improves food quality control, and supports new service rollouts.

What’s next for BMC?

Our Control-M roadmap focuses on:

• Enabling a unified orchestration control point as customers adopt modern technologies, especially the public cloud. We’ll continue building integrations for IaaS, containers, and serverless PaaS services.
• Delivering a persona-based user experience to encourage collaboration across engineers, operators, and business users.
• Elevating data quality within orchestration by making it a core component of application and data workflows.

Stay tuned for more developments!