Skip to main content

APMdigest and The Field CTO Launch The AI+ITOPS Podcast - Episode 1 Guest: EMA's Dennis Drogseth

APMdigest and The Field CTO (TheFieldCTO.com) joined forces to launch the AI+ITOPS Podcast.


"Digital transformation ... and the need for IT to enable digital business outcomes, is greater than ever, and all the tools including AIOps and automation ... are critical in making the difference." Listen to the podcast

The first series of podcasts — one podcast per week for the next 11 weeks — are sponsored by New Relic One, Observability Made Simple.

The mission of the AI+ITOPS Podcast is to discuss the struggles faced by ITOps — such as digital transformation and the need to keep IT services "always on" — and explore how AI/ML, AIOps, Application Performance Management (APM), and other ITOps and DevOps technologies can help.

The AI+ITOPS Podcast is hosted by Andy Thurai of The Field CTO (TheFieldCTO.com). Thurai is an accomplished IT executive, strategist, advisor and evangelist with 25+ years of experience in executive, technical and architectural leadership positions at companies such as IBM, Intel, BMC, Nortel and Oracle; he advises many start-ups; and he is a Steering Committee Member for AIOps Exchange. He has been a keynote speaker in many major conferences, as well as host of many webcasts, podcasts and video chats. He is a regular Forbes contributor, and has written 100+ articles on emerging technology topics for publications such as Forbes, AI World, VentureBeat and Wired. Andy Thurai can be reached on Twitter at @AndyThurai, LinkedIn, or his website at www.TheFieldCTO.com.

Taking an Insider's Look at EMA's Upcoming AIOps Research

In Episode 1, Andy Thurai interviews Dennis Drogseth, VP and Analyst at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), for an insider's look at the firm's upcoming research into the AIOps market. In the full interview, they discuss the very meaning of AIOps, types of products and features, challenges, winning strategies, the relationship between automation and AIOps, and AIOps in a pandemic world.

For your convenience, Episode 1 is available in a shorter "express version" and a longer full interview.

You can go to the AI+ITOPS Podcast page or simply listen to or download your choice of podcast below.

If you prefer to listen via a podcast service, the AI+ITOPS Podcast is currently available on RSS Feed, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify and more. Go to the AI+ITOPS Podcast page for a full list of podcast services.

Episode 1 - Express Version (21:42)

Click here for a direct MP3 download of Episode 1 - Express Version

Episode 1 - Full Interview (38:09)

Click here for a direct MP3 download of Episode 1 - Full Interview

Hot Topics

The Latest

Rapid AI adoption and the unique ways AI workloads operate is redefining the scope and structure of what these teams must deliver. This shift is forcing organizations to rethink how they manage scale, automation, and control, according to The State of SRE and Platform Engineering 2026, a new report from Dynatrace ...

AI is usually talked about as a software tool, but it also depends heavily on the network behind it. Whether a company is using AI for chatbots, automation, monitoring, analytics, or employee support, all of that information has to move across the network in a reliable and secure way. That means AI is not just an application decision. It is also an infrastructure decision. Before organizations rush into AI, they should ask a simple question: Is our network ready to support it? ...

Enterprise AI often lacks governed access to where business processes actually execute. Without that access, AI agents may be able to reason, but they cannot operate reliably across enterprise workflows. For AI agents to effectively carry out workflows, they will require integration-layer context and controls. Organizations can implement these prerequisites by providing AI with managed access to the middleware layer ...

Enterprise networks rarely behave the same way for very long. A routing adjustment in one region may unexpectedly alter application performance in another. A cloud migration may introduce hidden dependencies that go unnoticed until an outage occurs. All the while, the network is managed by several different teams, each of whom use different tool sets — and as a result, have different views of the network ... There’s usually an engineer who remembers why traffic fails over a certain way between sites, or which transparent firewall was added where. The problem is that human memory cannot scale alongside enterprise-scale networks ...

Ask an infrastructure team how confident they are in their ability to govern AI, and most will tell you they've got it handled. A recent survey of 406 IT decision-makers and platform engineering leaders found 86% expressing exactly that confidence. Ask the same group whether they have a formal written AI governance policy, and the number drops to 30%, according to Spacelift's Infrastructure Automation Report ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 27, Shamus McGillicuddy, EMA VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, and Parker Hathcock, EMA Research Director covering IT Service/Operations (ServiceOps), discuss observability unification in modern IT operations ... 

Virtual Private Networks became a cornerstone of enterprise security at a time when corporate infrastructure looked very different from today ... For years, this model worked well. But the architecture behind VPNs assumed a centralized corporate environment—one where the network itself was the hub of activity. In a cloud — first world, that assumption no longer holds ...

Website outages get resolved just as fast in August as they do in November. I went looking for the opposite: the summer slowdown everyone assumes is there once the people who fix things are away. It isn't in the data we collected, covering 1.8 million confirmed outages across tens of thousands of websites ...

This year, many of the cloud infrastructure contracts signed in the early days of the AI boom will come up for renewal. As the year goes on, I anticipate we'll see a significant amount of cloud vendor swapouts and multi-cloud adoption, and the reason isn't just GPU depreciation. It's because they're tired of their current cloud providers ...

There's a moment the many observability teams have experienced days into bringing a new service into production: you realize that the vendor's claims of "intelligent" behavior included a large serving of hype. Their dashboards look nice until they don't, the failure modes are a black box, and no one on the team can confidently explain why the system did what it did at 2 am. Agentic AI is about to force every Ops team to relive that moment at web-scale until they start treating these systems as the dependencies they actually are ...

APMdigest and The Field CTO Launch The AI+ITOPS Podcast - Episode 1 Guest: EMA's Dennis Drogseth

APMdigest and The Field CTO (TheFieldCTO.com) joined forces to launch the AI+ITOPS Podcast.


"Digital transformation ... and the need for IT to enable digital business outcomes, is greater than ever, and all the tools including AIOps and automation ... are critical in making the difference." Listen to the podcast

The first series of podcasts — one podcast per week for the next 11 weeks — are sponsored by New Relic One, Observability Made Simple.

The mission of the AI+ITOPS Podcast is to discuss the struggles faced by ITOps — such as digital transformation and the need to keep IT services "always on" — and explore how AI/ML, AIOps, Application Performance Management (APM), and other ITOps and DevOps technologies can help.

The AI+ITOPS Podcast is hosted by Andy Thurai of The Field CTO (TheFieldCTO.com). Thurai is an accomplished IT executive, strategist, advisor and evangelist with 25+ years of experience in executive, technical and architectural leadership positions at companies such as IBM, Intel, BMC, Nortel and Oracle; he advises many start-ups; and he is a Steering Committee Member for AIOps Exchange. He has been a keynote speaker in many major conferences, as well as host of many webcasts, podcasts and video chats. He is a regular Forbes contributor, and has written 100+ articles on emerging technology topics for publications such as Forbes, AI World, VentureBeat and Wired. Andy Thurai can be reached on Twitter at @AndyThurai, LinkedIn, or his website at www.TheFieldCTO.com.

Taking an Insider's Look at EMA's Upcoming AIOps Research

In Episode 1, Andy Thurai interviews Dennis Drogseth, VP and Analyst at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), for an insider's look at the firm's upcoming research into the AIOps market. In the full interview, they discuss the very meaning of AIOps, types of products and features, challenges, winning strategies, the relationship between automation and AIOps, and AIOps in a pandemic world.

For your convenience, Episode 1 is available in a shorter "express version" and a longer full interview.

You can go to the AI+ITOPS Podcast page or simply listen to or download your choice of podcast below.

If you prefer to listen via a podcast service, the AI+ITOPS Podcast is currently available on RSS Feed, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify and more. Go to the AI+ITOPS Podcast page for a full list of podcast services.

Episode 1 - Express Version (21:42)

Click here for a direct MP3 download of Episode 1 - Express Version

Episode 1 - Full Interview (38:09)

Click here for a direct MP3 download of Episode 1 - Full Interview

Hot Topics

The Latest

Rapid AI adoption and the unique ways AI workloads operate is redefining the scope and structure of what these teams must deliver. This shift is forcing organizations to rethink how they manage scale, automation, and control, according to The State of SRE and Platform Engineering 2026, a new report from Dynatrace ...

AI is usually talked about as a software tool, but it also depends heavily on the network behind it. Whether a company is using AI for chatbots, automation, monitoring, analytics, or employee support, all of that information has to move across the network in a reliable and secure way. That means AI is not just an application decision. It is also an infrastructure decision. Before organizations rush into AI, they should ask a simple question: Is our network ready to support it? ...

Enterprise AI often lacks governed access to where business processes actually execute. Without that access, AI agents may be able to reason, but they cannot operate reliably across enterprise workflows. For AI agents to effectively carry out workflows, they will require integration-layer context and controls. Organizations can implement these prerequisites by providing AI with managed access to the middleware layer ...

Enterprise networks rarely behave the same way for very long. A routing adjustment in one region may unexpectedly alter application performance in another. A cloud migration may introduce hidden dependencies that go unnoticed until an outage occurs. All the while, the network is managed by several different teams, each of whom use different tool sets — and as a result, have different views of the network ... There’s usually an engineer who remembers why traffic fails over a certain way between sites, or which transparent firewall was added where. The problem is that human memory cannot scale alongside enterprise-scale networks ...

Ask an infrastructure team how confident they are in their ability to govern AI, and most will tell you they've got it handled. A recent survey of 406 IT decision-makers and platform engineering leaders found 86% expressing exactly that confidence. Ask the same group whether they have a formal written AI governance policy, and the number drops to 30%, according to Spacelift's Infrastructure Automation Report ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 27, Shamus McGillicuddy, EMA VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, and Parker Hathcock, EMA Research Director covering IT Service/Operations (ServiceOps), discuss observability unification in modern IT operations ... 

Virtual Private Networks became a cornerstone of enterprise security at a time when corporate infrastructure looked very different from today ... For years, this model worked well. But the architecture behind VPNs assumed a centralized corporate environment—one where the network itself was the hub of activity. In a cloud — first world, that assumption no longer holds ...

Website outages get resolved just as fast in August as they do in November. I went looking for the opposite: the summer slowdown everyone assumes is there once the people who fix things are away. It isn't in the data we collected, covering 1.8 million confirmed outages across tens of thousands of websites ...

This year, many of the cloud infrastructure contracts signed in the early days of the AI boom will come up for renewal. As the year goes on, I anticipate we'll see a significant amount of cloud vendor swapouts and multi-cloud adoption, and the reason isn't just GPU depreciation. It's because they're tired of their current cloud providers ...

There's a moment the many observability teams have experienced days into bringing a new service into production: you realize that the vendor's claims of "intelligent" behavior included a large serving of hype. Their dashboards look nice until they don't, the failure modes are a black box, and no one on the team can confidently explain why the system did what it did at 2 am. Agentic AI is about to force every Ops team to relive that moment at web-scale until they start treating these systems as the dependencies they actually are ...