Videos
BMC Software on Orchestration, Autonomous Operations, and Responsible AI
Insights
- Telecom operators are under pressure to simultaneously reduce costs, improve customer experience, and modernize operations.
- End-to-end orchestration provides the visibility, control, and scalability needed to operationalize AI and deliver measurable business value.
- Autonomous operations require strong governance, compliance, and responsible AI frameworks alongside automation.
At MWC 2026, Jacques van der Merwe, Jonathan Moore, and Rob Morgan from BMC Software discuss how telecom operators are navigating growing competitive pressures while balancing operational efficiency, customer expectations, and digital transformation. They explain that many organizations remain constrained by fragmented processes, siloed technologies, and limited visibility across critical business operations. The conversation explores how orchestration platforms can connect systems, processes, and data across the enterprise, enabling organizations to improve control, accelerate decision-making, and apply AI more effectively. The speakers also highlight the importance of modernizing legacy environments without disrupting the business, using orchestration to bridge existing systems with new technologies. Looking ahead, they argue that the most successful Frontier Telcos will combine autonomous operations with strong governance, compliance, and responsible AI practices to deliver sustainable business outcomes at scale.
Rob Morgan:
So I think the biggest challenge that telcos face in the market at the moment is around three core constituent parts. So the first one is that they are under huge competitive pressure and their return on capital employed metrics are down and their CFOs and the boards are asking them to significantly reduce their total cost of operation.
So against that, on the other side, you have the fact they need to deliver better services for their customers. Customers in the B2C world will move quickly. In the B2B world, they'll move more slowly, but they make a decision and then they execute on it.
So if you put those two things together, massively reduce total cost of operation to improve customer experience. They're not natural bedfellows. So the third challenge relates to those things, which is how can they orchestrate and make their businesses operate more effectively at a lower cost, but delivering better service.
Jacques van der Merwe:
I think what they struggled with is instead of focusing on the process of delivering the services, throwing more bodies at the problem, right? And so as new technology come into play, right in the tech stack and into operations, it remains very, very siloed. And so they're investing in different types of technology, but really not focusing on the actual process of what you need to orchestrate to deliver the service.
And so some of the challenges that we see is that they don't have a full visibility end-to-end. They don't have control and they struggle to scale and if you struggle with those specific areas, it's really difficult for the company to change how they do things and not necessarily what they do.
Jacques van der Merwe:
So from a BMC controlling perspective, what we do is we provide a platform for telcos to orchestrate the technology stack, to deliver a service that is measurable that you can monitor and where you get real time insights and analytics from. Because what we see and what we mentioned a little bit earlier is to have control over the entire process. If you don't have control over the process, you can't improve the process, you can't improve the way you do things today. And we see that specifically with the likes of AI.
So we've been in conversations with executives where the board asks the business, when are we going to see the value of AI? And that's where we talk about control, visibility and scalability. How do you operationalize that? And so the controlling platform is an orchestrator of orchestrator's platform, where we truly neutralize the technology stack and we focus on orchestrating the technology to deliver a service that you can improve over time that is auditable, the entire process, every step that was taken is traceable.
And once you've done that, we've seen companies reduce their data pipeline runtimes by over 50%, right? Changing the way that they do things because the data pipeline needs to feed the machine learning models or the AI models that they can bring into operations. And so Rob was talking about reducing the cost of operation and process. And that's what we help customers do at a global level.
So, you know, more than 82% of the Fortune 500 use Control-M to orchestrate their business services and to remain agile and to be competitive.
Jacques van der Merwe:
And so I was talking to one of the CIOs the other day for the largest telco in Sweden and they were talking about legacy applications. It is very complex to replace those applications. It takes a very long time. But can we hide that application? And the answer was yes, because the value is in the process of how you execute things. And so you can break that old legacy application up into smaller bits and pieces and you can replace that with new technology to be very agile and to change the way that you deliver services, to be very competitive in that sense, but also to operationalize new change very rapidly.
Rob Morgan:
So from an orchestration perspective, the piece that makes BMC different and even more relevant in an AI-enabled world is if you look at the end-to-end processes, particularly what we see is people orchestrating small components of a process. And so what that means is you can AI enable a component part, but not the end-to-end process. Because BMC is able to orchestrate across the whole of the processes, adapting and working with any systems, we take away the challenges of legacy technology and that stack and allow orchestration across the whole layer.
And so what that means is when you then apply AI technologies to it, it's the end-to-end process that works. The reason that's so relevant for a telco is if you imagine a classic process, Quote-to-Cash, probably the most important process in a telco, there are lots of different systems, lots of different components, no owners. So if you end up trying to orchestrate individual parts of that process, you don't know whether that process, that part of the process has worked properly. Our ability to orchestrate end-to-end means that all of the data flows properly and you can apply AI across the whole of that data stack. It's a real differential.
Rob Morgan:
I see 3 strands that are really important. So the first one and we've spoken about it is how we allow the business to become more autonomous, automating processes to drive real value. And over a period of time, as AI matures and the data flows that we support become even more effective, I see that moving to a more AI-driven environment than a people based environment.
But on it's own without strategy and the strategy linking to compliance, governance and the approach that the organization wants to take to be a responsible organization and to drive an ethics based strategy, those two things don't work. So the way that we look at it from a BMC perspective is to make sure that we are helping our customers have responsible AI so that from a risk compliance and governance perspective, they are able to make those right decisions for their organization whilst they automate and move to an autonomous operating model.
Jonathan Moore:
Well, it's a historic relationship. Firstly, we've been, you know, we're partners for more than 12 years. There's a really strong culture between both the organizations. On both sides we're very committed to obviously driving customer value through our solutions. We're culturally aligned, operate in the same way.
And the key thing that occurs from that is that we share the same focus on delivering real customer value, which is really important. But together we can create capability for our customers to accelerate their journeys. That's really important.
