Real-World AIOps: Between Data and Datasheets

Valerie O'Connell
EMA

Vendors and their visions often run ahead of the real-world pack — at least, the good ones do, because progress begins with vision. The downside of this rush to tomorrow is that IT practitioners can be left to ponder the practicality of technologies and wonder if their organization is ahead of the market curve or sliding behind in an invisible race that is always competitive.

Although AIOps is a relatively new category named within the past five years, it is based on the well-established awareness that advanced IT analytics has a lot to offer in the pursuit of operational excellence. Advances in big data, AI, ML, and IT operational complexity combined to match product capabilities with market needs. The otherwise hopeless complexity of clouds, microservices, and containers in an environment of high velocity change form the backdrop of IT's largescale adoption of AIOps.

The needs are real, as are the vendor product and platform capabilities.

EMA completed an in-depth technical evaluation of 17 AIOps vendor offerings complete with user interviews as 2020 wrapped up publishing the results in EMA Radar Report: AIOps – A Guide for Investing in Innovation. The next logical step was to probe how widely those capabilities are being adopted beyond the datasheets, and with what results.

That's exactly what EMA did in its recent research, AI(work)Ops 2021. The outreach screened 2,500 global participants to vet the final field of IT practitioners for insight into how AIOps is being used now and in the near future. Use cases, drivers, challenges, and benefits were all addressed, as well as top capabilities and buying considerations. Much of the findings neatly align with common sense.

Perhaps the most surprising finding was not the fact that AIOps is successful, but the extent of that success. For the vast majority of respondents, AIOps implementations were self-rated as successful (19%), very successful (46%), and extremely successful (31%), all returning high value relative to cost.

Not since chocolate and peanut butter has there been a more natural pairing than AIOps and automation

Done right, the impact of AIOps on the relationship between IT and other parts of the business can be transformative. Use of AIOps makes improvement in IT/business alignment almost unavoidable. A large part of doing AIOps right is automation. Not since chocolate and peanut butter has there been a more natural pairing than AIOps and automation. In this case, the pairing is almost a survival mechanism in a world where success requires simultaneous execution of business agility and rock-solid IT service.

The case for AIOps and its attendant automation is so clear and such an exercise in common sense that EMA expects the name will quietly go away over time. The capabilities — new today — will just become an everyday part of everyday IT operations. However, that time is still quite a bit further out in time.

The good news is that vendor capabilities today far exceed common enterprise demands. Actual deployments and overall use currently lag well behind the potential of existing platforms. That gap will quickly close as enterprises continue to gain experience and return high levels of value. After all, success breeds success in AIOps as well as in life.

Join the Webinar: AI(work)Ops: A Research View of AIOps Implementations

Join Valerie O'Connell, EMA Research Director of Digital Service Execution, as she discusses her recent field research.

AI(work)Ops: A Research View of AIOps Implementations

Tuesday, May 18 9 a.m. Pacific | 12 p.m. Eastern

This research-based webinar from leading IT research firm Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) examines the characteristics that are common to the 21% of IT practitioners who rate the impact of AIOps on the IT/business relationship as "transformational." Topics will include:

- AIOps, automation, and digital transformation

- Key capabilities

- Indicators and metrics of success

- Organizational drivers and priorities

- Challenges and demonstrated benefits

- Budgets, buyers, and preferences

- Platform considerations

- Success factors

Valerie O'Connell is EMA Research Director of Digital Service Execution

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Real-World AIOps: Between Data and Datasheets

Valerie O'Connell
EMA

Vendors and their visions often run ahead of the real-world pack — at least, the good ones do, because progress begins with vision. The downside of this rush to tomorrow is that IT practitioners can be left to ponder the practicality of technologies and wonder if their organization is ahead of the market curve or sliding behind in an invisible race that is always competitive.

Although AIOps is a relatively new category named within the past five years, it is based on the well-established awareness that advanced IT analytics has a lot to offer in the pursuit of operational excellence. Advances in big data, AI, ML, and IT operational complexity combined to match product capabilities with market needs. The otherwise hopeless complexity of clouds, microservices, and containers in an environment of high velocity change form the backdrop of IT's largescale adoption of AIOps.

The needs are real, as are the vendor product and platform capabilities.

EMA completed an in-depth technical evaluation of 17 AIOps vendor offerings complete with user interviews as 2020 wrapped up publishing the results in EMA Radar Report: AIOps – A Guide for Investing in Innovation. The next logical step was to probe how widely those capabilities are being adopted beyond the datasheets, and with what results.

That's exactly what EMA did in its recent research, AI(work)Ops 2021. The outreach screened 2,500 global participants to vet the final field of IT practitioners for insight into how AIOps is being used now and in the near future. Use cases, drivers, challenges, and benefits were all addressed, as well as top capabilities and buying considerations. Much of the findings neatly align with common sense.

Perhaps the most surprising finding was not the fact that AIOps is successful, but the extent of that success. For the vast majority of respondents, AIOps implementations were self-rated as successful (19%), very successful (46%), and extremely successful (31%), all returning high value relative to cost.

Not since chocolate and peanut butter has there been a more natural pairing than AIOps and automation

Done right, the impact of AIOps on the relationship between IT and other parts of the business can be transformative. Use of AIOps makes improvement in IT/business alignment almost unavoidable. A large part of doing AIOps right is automation. Not since chocolate and peanut butter has there been a more natural pairing than AIOps and automation. In this case, the pairing is almost a survival mechanism in a world where success requires simultaneous execution of business agility and rock-solid IT service.

The case for AIOps and its attendant automation is so clear and such an exercise in common sense that EMA expects the name will quietly go away over time. The capabilities — new today — will just become an everyday part of everyday IT operations. However, that time is still quite a bit further out in time.

The good news is that vendor capabilities today far exceed common enterprise demands. Actual deployments and overall use currently lag well behind the potential of existing platforms. That gap will quickly close as enterprises continue to gain experience and return high levels of value. After all, success breeds success in AIOps as well as in life.

Join the Webinar: AI(work)Ops: A Research View of AIOps Implementations

Join Valerie O'Connell, EMA Research Director of Digital Service Execution, as she discusses her recent field research.

AI(work)Ops: A Research View of AIOps Implementations

Tuesday, May 18 9 a.m. Pacific | 12 p.m. Eastern

This research-based webinar from leading IT research firm Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) examines the characteristics that are common to the 21% of IT practitioners who rate the impact of AIOps on the IT/business relationship as "transformational." Topics will include:

- AIOps, automation, and digital transformation

- Key capabilities

- Indicators and metrics of success

- Organizational drivers and priorities

- Challenges and demonstrated benefits

- Budgets, buyers, and preferences

- Platform considerations

- Success factors

Valerie O'Connell is EMA Research Director of Digital Service Execution

Related Links

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The Latest

Observability Is the New Control Plane for Enterprise Transformation

The enterprises that will define the next decade are not the ones that deployed the most technology. They are the ones who understood what their technology was actually doing. That distinction is not a philosophical point. It is the central operational challenge facing every organization that has spent the last five years modernizing at speed ...

When AI Becomes the Corporate OS

AI is becoming the operating system of the enterprise. It acts as an invisible coordination layer that understands intent, connects systems, and executes work across complex SaaS environments. Previously, employees had to click through multiple systems — CRM, ERP, support tools, collaboration platforms — to complete a single task. Now, instead of navigating each application manually, they can simply state what they need to accomplish ...

The $600 Billion Wake Up Call

In 2026, the cost of downtime or an outage is no longer just a technical inconvenience; it's a $600 billion wake up call for global businesses. As our digital ecosystems become  more interconnected, each touchpoint introduces new risks and multiplies the consequences when things go wrong. And the data is clear: aggregate downtime costs  for Global 2,000 companies have surged 50% since 2024, reaching a staggering $600 billion ...

Breaking Down Agentic AI Fragmentation and Complexity with Governance

Deloitte found that 74% of enterprises expect to deploy agentic AI solutions in the next 24 months. However, the rush to deployment is outpacing foundational work, though. Only 21% of enterprises have fully formed agent governance models in place. The result? AI agents deployed without guidance or governance begin to function as fragmented islands of complexity ...

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Cloud spending is no longer viewed as a passthrough IT expense, but as a strategic financial lever that directly impacts innovation capacity, profitability and enterprise resilience, according to the CFO Cloud Cost Optimization Report from Azul ...

Building AI Agents That Build Trust

As AI moves from generating responses to performing actions, the need for trust increases exponentially. And as organizations enlist AI agents for increasingly sophisticated business processes, trust is going to be the single most important theme for spurring adoption. What can organizations do to build trustworthy AI agents? ...

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I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

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Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

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For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

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