Last year, I kicked off my tenure as a Forrester principal analyst with a series of reports based on my first AIOps NowTech (now called a Landscape). That AIOps Landscape spanned all AIOps perspectives, as I defined in The Three Stages of Preparation For AIOps report and explained in the corresponding announcement blog. While last year’s AIOps Landscape was not limited to an AIOps perspective, the Forrester Wave™ evaluation covering AIOps that published in December was limited and focused only on the AIOps technology-centric perspective.

I’ve now started the process of defining the AIOps process-centric perspective. This required that I publish a targeted Process-Centric AIOps Landscape. This new landscape includes a subset of 12 AIOps vendors that I classified as currently offering a primarily process-centric AIOps solution. Important to understand is that regardless of the AIOps perspective, the goal does not change, as I defined in The Forrester AIOps Reference Architecture: The Need For Clarity.

“Combining human and technological applications of AI/ML, advanced analytics, and operational practices with business and operations data. AIOps enhances human judgment, proactively alerts on known scenarios, predicts likely events, recommends corrective actions, and enables automation. It’s fueled by coalescing and transforming sensory data into AI-enriched actionable information. A retrospective causal analysis and governance structure fuels foundational improvements and trust.”

Again, I urge you to read the rationale for segmenting the current 2022/23 AIOps market, as it’s changing rapidly and will continue to change until there’s an eventual convergence.

Business Value As A Driver

Operational awareness is still the driving factor for IT leaders and is demanded by their business partners. Understanding how technology devices and services work together to deliver services and products is vital to the long-term success of an organization. The pace and scaling challenges of today’s organization demand that IT leaders deploy AIOps capabilities that deliver AI-enriched actional information. Additionally, this information is foundational for efforts that are trying to enhance human judgment and decisions.

Market Maturity

As noted above, the understanding of what AIOps entails and what its goals are is finally solidifying with the release of my AIOps reference architecture. The perspectives and implementation paths, however, are still in flux. Selecting an AIOps vendor that has core strengths to support your perspective is crucial to your success. All AIOps vendors are expanding capabilities and strengthening core functionalities. The chasm between technology-centric, process-centric, operationally aligned, and “AIOps-lite” vendors will eventually narrow and become far less of a concern for IT leaders when choosing an AIOps vendor solution. For now, however, the segmentation and perspective as laid out in this AIOps process-centric Landscape is very relevant and important to understand.

AIOps Use Cases Drive Objectives

The new Forrester Landscape format is driven by core and extended use cases. Participating vendors were asked to identify which of the 10 use cases their AIOps offering is best suited to handle as per their clients’ demands. The 10 use cases were ultimately divided into seven core use cases and three extended use cases based on the vendor responses:

Core Use Cases

  1. Operational awareness and event noise reduction
  2. Data-driven automation and remediation
  3. Operational anomaly and root-cause detection
  4. Real-time monitoring and observability
  5. Incident/service disruption detection/mitigation
  6. Intelligent and suggestive alerting
  7. Infrastructure and operations management

Extended Use Cases

  1. Operational and process analytics
  2. Business service insights
  3. Transaction analysis

The 10 use cases were then mapped against 15 functionalities. Each functionality was identified as having a primary, secondary, or insignificant impact on the delivery of each use case. The comprehensive matrix helps IT leaders best determine, based on their highest-priority use cases, which vendors are best suited for their needs.

Are You Prepared For the Changing Landscape?

The current AIOps vendor landscape is segmented into perspectives but changing quickly. Vendors are entering the various perspectives by expanding capabilities and deepening core functionality organically and through acquisition. Vendors across all four perspectives are actively working to compete for clients regardless of their approach to implementing an AIOps solution. As a vendor, are you doing what you must to appeal to all client approaches? As a client, do you understand the perspectives and which vendor approach is best suited to your current needs? I can help with both those decisions — just reach out and ask.

Join The Conversation

I invite you to reach out to me through social media if you want to provide general feedback. If you prefer more formal or private discussions, email inquiry@forrester.com to set up a meeting! Click Carlos at Forrester.com to follow my research and continue the discussion.