As core IT has become the center of innovation for business, so too has DevOps evolved into a key facilitator of delivering solutions to the market across the public as well as private cloud. Companies that have embraced digital transformation have become readily accessible to consumers, receiving constant and relentless feedback on how to improve their products. As requirements go downstream at a rapid pace, DevOps has needed to fight more fires and react to increased complexity. They are strapped for time and must juggle multiple responsibilities to stay afloat.
The discipline is at peak demand, and DevOps continues to be the lifeblood of an IT operations center, streamlining deployment and management of applications and services at the face of consistently expanding requirements of users. As customers become more connected and engaged with businesses, enterprises will need the DevOps discipline to help them migrate the solutions to digital platforms. Customers expect solutions to “just work,” and DevOps provides the necessary capabilities to respond to a myriad of issues that can spring up in everyday use.
Believing the same and utilizing machine intelligence and automation to its fullest, Grok is enabling self-healing cloud apps and systems to predict and respond to potential IT incidents. Using algorithms built on 10+ years of machine intelligence R&D, Grok’s platform deeply understands a company’s cloud system using readily available IT operations data. Once Grok detects unusual activity within cloud services, apps or other metrics, the platform provides integrations and tools to proactively respond to system changes with no need for human intervention. Grok gives time back to operations teams, so they can focus on building innovative solutions, freeing up much needed operating expense in today’s cloud-first world.
Transforming IT into a Core Competitive Advantage
Today’s DevOps engineers are strapped for time and resources, shouldering the burden of the entire IT stack and ensuring systems meet the demands of cloud scale. Missteps conducted by IT result in devastating effects on business, including customer churn and high operating expenses. Unfortunately, some companies still see IT as a cost-center, providing a means to an end for building their core business.
Contrary to this, Grok believes that machine intelligence and automation can transform IT into a core competitive advantage for businesses, and helps companies harness the data that provides the insights required to make optimization decisions on how to build and manage cloud environments. They wish to help businesses by reducing this maintenance burden on DevOps teams by shifting the responsibility of everyday maintenance to the machines themselves. This gives teams time to build proactive processes to help deliver innovative experiences to the market.
Grok’s open platform ensures cloud-based businesses within any industry harness the power of machine intelligence and automation. The company’s patented core anomaly detection engine provides a key competitive advantage for companies looking to get started with machine intelligence, providing a much-needed solution to a growing problem in the market. The company’s algorithms work with streaming telemetry data sources, offering insights with each new data point received from an app or service. Once an anomaly is detected, the Grok platform includes built-in automation capabilities to respond to system changes with speed.
At Grok, the team believes humans should be focused on higher order, challenging problems that businesses face, and wants to give companies more time to meet the needs of their clients. Grok provides the missing links people, processes and systems in order to create an operations ecosystem that automatically responds to business demand.
An Award-winning Product and Design Professional
Tarun Gangwani is Head of Product at Grok. He is an award-winning product and design professional whose work has been used by millions of people around the world. With his background in cognitive science and design, Tarun has delivered user-centered solutions to start-ups and enterprise companies within a wide variety of industries that leverage cloud technologies to deliver innovation to their clients. Tarun’s perspectives and work have been featured in major news publications, including the New York Times, CIO.com, Tech.Co and Forbes.
Tarun joined Grok as a co-founder in 2016 to manage design and development teams to deliver compelling user experiences for businesses managing their cloud workloads. Currently, he runs product, design and development for Grok.
Previously, Tarun led multi-disciplinary product development teams within IBM’s $9 billion cloud business. Tarun was a pioneer in designing IBM’s cloud developer platform, Bluemix. It has since become the largest open-source cloud platform in the world. He joined IBM in 2013 as part of the company’s first wave of designers, which is now 1,000-strong. His work has been recognized by numerous outlets, including the New York Times. In 2016, he was selected to the Forbes 30 Under 30 List, which features entrepreneurs and leaders in business and technology from around the world.
Before IBM, Tarun has worked in various positions in design, technical consulting, and web development. He is a proud Indiana University alumnus, with degrees in cognitive science and human-computer interaction design.
Providing Data-driven Insights across Multiple Contexts
Within hours of setup, Grok provides data-driven insights across multiple contexts, from application performance metrics to infrastructure health. These insights provide a crucial trigger for creating self-healing cloud services, reducing mean time to respond and increasing service availability. Grok believes in the long term, DevOps and IT will gain more bandwidth to focus on building innovative solutions, proactively responding to IT incidents, instead of reactively fighting fires.
“DevOps has shepherded new ways to deploy, manage and scale apps and services across hybrid cloud environments, optimizing the way businesses run from core infrastructure to API calls on the edge. Without DevOps, we would not have the billion user platforms with exponential concurrent active devices on a single network. The discipline has helped businesses transform the way we do work and commune as a global society,” – Tarun asserts.
Conversely, Tarun believes that this rapid growth and expansion of the discipline has increased their reliance upon it. “DevOps engineer demand is at an all-time high, and companies have needed to reallocate investments in other areas to support their need for the discipline within their environments. At the end of the day, companies still need things faster and cheaper while also being of high quality. As a result, companies will need to figure out ways ensure investment in DevOps does not overwhelm the entire organization, stifling innovation and progress forward. Furthermore, DevOps itself will need to further optimize its tools and processes for businesses to manage its exponential growth within organizations. We believe the optimizations Grok provides with machine intelligence will help support DevOps and meet the challenges faced today for businesses as a whole,” – Tarun answers to the opportunities that come with DevOps.
Razor Focused on Customer Success
Everyone on the Grok team is razor focused on customer success, which by extension benefits the company itself. Each of them works to bring their solution to new customers every day, while uniquely tailoring capability to a wide variety of IT environments. The team constantly listens to the market for the latest in the industry, questioning where future innovations can be made in both IT operations management and the lifecycle of cloud services.
Tarun believes that all startups should look to solve human problems within organizations, building technology and defensible IP that meets the needs of their clients. “Companies that build technologies and search for a problem to solve will struggle to bring their product to market. Instead, companies should assemble teams of people who empathize with the problems in enterprise IT today,” Tarun advises to growing startup companies.
Eyeing for the Better Future
Grok will continue to evolve as the world’s industry-leading self-healing cloud operations platform. The company’s platform will include new capabilities to uncover latent relationships among apps, services, and systems of record to generate more intelligent triggers to respond to cloud system changes. Grok also aims to continue to invest in their learning technologies as the company looks for more ways to use the data businesses already collect to enhance the platform’s understanding of client environments.
“We have developed Grok to respond to the pressure DevOps has within businesses. We hope our solution can move the industry forward by reducing the cost of IT and giving more time back to DevOps to be proactive, instead of reactive. We hope to continue to empower organizations to focus on creating new value for their markets by relying on Grok to handle day-to-day operations,” Tarun shares on the future prospect of Grok.
