“We are the ‘undisputed leader’ in the Enterprise Service Management Space.” – Ali Siddiqui, BMC Helix

CNME Editor Mark Forker sat down with Ali Siddiqui, Global CEO of BMC Helix, to find out how the value dashboards on their Agentic AI platform are enabling their customers across the enterprise space to transform their day-to-day business operations. 

The term visionary is often bandied about quite loosely when describing IT executives from the global technology industry.

However, when it comes to Ali Siddiqui, the word visionary is an appropriate adjective to describe his stellar career to date.

Siddiqui was appointed as the Global CEO of BMC Helix in April 2025.

During his career he has held senior leadership positions at various technology giants such as VMware, Oracle, and Cisco to name a few.

Those who have worked closely with Siddiqui over the years have all highlighted his uncanny ability to articulate and envisage what the ‘big picture’ looked like, and crucially, he possesses the tools to execute his vision.

When it comes to AI deployment across the enterprises space, it’s fair to say that there’s been more than just a few teething issues.

Failure rates are high, which has caused unrest in boardrooms among executives who are desperate to not only deploy AI, but see an ROI on their AI investments.

We began the conversation by examining what role BMC Helix was playing in terms of helping their customers yield the benefits of AI technologies across the enterprise sector.

Siddiqui was unequivocal in his view that the biggest problem facing enterprises when it comes to AI deployments was their inability to define the business outcomes they wanted to achieve by using AI technologies.

“Look we always work very closely with our customers, we are customer-centric and hands-on. I think it’s important to make a distinction between AI and Agentic, and what we do is Agentic. There has been failure in terms of successful AI use-cases for many enterprises, there’s no doubt about that. What we have found is that many customers are struggling to find a clearly defined business value when it comes to AI, and ROI on AI use-cases, and that’s an area where we are stepping in to help them overcome,” said Siddiqui.

Siddiqui believes that the true value of Agentic AI lies in its ability to orchestrate complex tasks.

“IT transformation requires both complex and simple tasks, but the ability to orchestrate these tasks is a key capability within the realm of Agentic AI. It allows users to run automations to focus on the actual work and enables them to be action orientated,” said Siddiqui.

Siddiqui highlighted how their BMC Helix platform provided ‘out-of-the-box’ value dashboards, and stated that was a key differentiator for the company in what is a crowded marketplace.

“I believe what makes us stand out from the crowd is our agentic capabilities. If you look at our platform today, then you’ll see out-of-the-box value dashboards. We deliver on value dashboards for customers, and they can see tangible results and outcomes as a result. We’ve been on this AI journey for about 6 years. We started on Gen AI about 3 and a half years ago, and then we pivoted towards Agentic AI. However, we always believed in action orientated AI from the onset, which is now Agentic AI, and we’re delivering that to our customers. Almost all our customers use Agentic AI and are getting real value, and what we’ve been able to do is deliver business outcomes and demonstrate that to the management of our customer base,” said Siddiqui.

One of the biggest talking points in the world of Agentic AI has been related to how AI Agents complement the human workforce.

In the field of cybersecurity, AI Agents are seen as a great way to help cybersecurity practitioners to combat alert fatigue, but on the other side of the coin, concerns have been raised as to how much ‘access’ you give an AI Agent.

Siddiqui was quick to stress that from his perspective Agentic AI was not about job reductions.

“I think there are doomsayers that say Agentic AI is going to result in multiple job losses, but Agentic AI is not about reducing overhead from a human capital perspective. It is designed to allow you to do more innovation. I don’t know a single CIO in the world who thinks that the budget they have is enough to cover all their innovation, not one. Trying to enhance your customer experience and engaging in predictive insights are not easy and straightforward to do, they require a lot of time and investment, so no CIO will have a big enough budget to do everything they want. So, essentially, we really want our customers to understand that Agentic AI is not about reducing jobs, it’s about letting people do more with the same budget. Our agentic capabilities are laser-focused on predictive insight, enhancing that customer experience and ensuring that the employee experience is outstanding. I believe that is what every CIO ultimately wants to achieve, so again, it’s not about replacing jobs, it’s all about doing more innovation,” said Siddiqui.

Quite naturally, with failure rates in relation to AI deployments relatively high, there can be not quite a resistance to change, but perhaps a slower pace of adoption.

However, as Siddiqui pointed out it all comes down to ‘change management’.

“We’ve got hundreds of customers and large customers like Ericsson and DNV using our Agentic AI capabilities in production, and that is all down to change management, and ultimately that is what change management is all about. We have invested heavily in a modern go-to market strategy. We empower our customer success teams to drive that change management, because we want to deliver on their expectations and our customers’ success teams work together with our customers to ensure they get all the benefits of our Agentic AI platform. The value dashboards also tell us how compliant the customers are, and ensure they are following compliance rules, not experiencing hallucinations, and ultimately how we are adding value to what they do on a day-to-day basis,” said Siddiqui.

In the IT world, recognition from independent industry analysts such as Gartner, IDC and Forrester gives enterprises a significant amount of clout.

It validates their business model – and firmly positions them as a key market player globally, and in a marketplace that is both saturated and ultra-competitive gaining that recognition can tip the scales in their favour.

Forrester recently recognized BMC Helix as a market leader in ESM, and Siddiqui explained the impact of that.

“It’s a testament to the hard work of the team that Forrester has placed us as not only the No.1 leader, but they went one step further and described us as the ‘undisputed’ leader in the Enterprise Service Management space. I think both Gartner and Forrester believe that to effectively deliver IT transformation in ESM, you need service ops. They have stated that it is no longer a nice to-have, but a necessity. It is a major validation of our strategy, as we were the ones that coined the term ‘service ops’ around 6 years ago. We bet big on it, and that gamble has paid off,” said Siddiqui.

Siddiqui added that the fact BMC Helix invested early in service ops early has given them a big advantage in the market.

“The fact that we focused on service ops has undoubtedly given us a headstart on our competition. We are AI-native, and the AI-native platform we have built is a big differentiator for us. I think the key differentiator for us is that we can do  AIOps, ESM and service ops all together, which is critical for us and our customers. We don’t just have customers doing demo service ops and agentic, we have customers using our platform in production and they are getting incredible business value out of that. Our customers are then telling other companies that they are using BMC Helix in production and generating huge ROI on that,” said Siddiqui.

The conversation then pivoted to another key strength in their armour, and that was in relation to their ‘open platform’.

“There is no datacentre on earth that works with only one vendor. Regardless of what datacentre you visit, every CIO that you talk to will give you a list of the tools they use, and you could have 50 different vendors. So, given the state of play we decided to also bet on the concept of the open platform. We are almost anti-platform; we didn’t want to lock customers in and say you have to use everything from us if you want to get value. Customers want autonomy, flexibility and choice, and that’s why the open platform is resonating with the market. The open platform provides the capabilities to work seamlessly with other vendors and deliver value to CIOs, and this approach is another market differentiator for us,” said Siddiqui.

Siddiqui concluded a brilliant conversation by reiterating that the fundamental mission and overall goal of BMC Helix as a company is to deliver outstanding value to their customers.

“I believe that the next phase in our journey with customers is providing them with the ability to be predictive. They get huge business value from being predictive, and that also ties into their overall approach to innovation. We are already helping hundreds of customers to harness predictivity that they need to deliver the innovation. Agentic AI will become the baseline. What we are really trying to do now is provide customers with that ability to be predictive, and if we can continue to do that, and demonstrate real tangible value to them, then we will remain as the incumbent market leader,” said Siddiqui.