ignio blends ability to act with ability to reason

Digitate’s ignio was a poster child during the early days of Intelligent Automation. Together with IPsoft, Wipro HOLMES and arago it stood for an IT-led approach rather than the more noisy RPA discussions. Perhaps because of the RPA hype, it has become a tad quiet around those approaches. Yet, its capabilities are highly differentiated and therefore cannot easily be pigeonholed. Beyond the headlines Digitate, the business unit created by TCS to accelerate the development of ignio, has made steady progress.

The intent is to offer a closed-loop system for autonomous enterprises – which implies one common system for intelligence, automation and collaboration covering both IT and business. With that ignio cuts across the big buckets of Automation and AIOps. But where the real differentiation comes in is the ambition to move automation from reactive to proactive and ultimately to predictive. From a technology capability point of view where ignio stands out from the crowd is in blending the ability to act with the ability to reason. This is a marked difference to a run-book or a process automation- led approach in its ability to scale to business and IT complexity, risk and diversity.

Reasoning provides the differentiation for Digitate’s portfolio

The journey of ignio started with cognitive automation on traditional IT use cases around IT Service Management as well as event and monitoring management. Here it is competing with the plethora of AIOps tools. But unlike those AIOps tools, it does not just assess the myriads of data points – such as log files and alerts – but it also performs actions on the insights generated. In this, it is aligned with the helping organizations progress toward full stack observability, cross domain analysis and autonomous resolution. IBM’s acquisitions of Instana and Turbonomic are both examples of that.

ignio’s ability to learn context aligns Digitate with arago’s approach. Thus, it provides a data and analytics foundation that is critical in providing visibility and understanding of normal behaviour and dependencies. This is an important step in an enterprise journey towards autonomous operations. This means the system can adapt to changes in the environment without the need for tweaking scripts or runbooks. Exhibit 1 provides details of the activities that the ignio platform can perform:

Exhibit 1: The activities that the ignio platform can perform

Source: Digitate, 2021

Digitate must progress to automating cross-domain and functional workflows

While Digitate provides differentiated yet disparate solutions, the ultimate goal must be to automate cross-functional workflows. Its portfolio ranges from traditional AIOps to ERP and workload automation. With Cognitive Procurement, Digitate has crossed from IT automation over to business process-centric requirements. As the dynamism in the ServiceNow ecosystem demonstrates, the automation of increasingly cross-domain workflows is where the next frontier in operations is emerging. It is here where Digitate’s ambition of progressing toward the autonomous enterprise has a clear pathway.

Currently, enterprises pursue a land and expand strategy with AIOPs and automation solutions by targeting limited high value use cases first before expanding to high volumes of use cases. Given the innovative and highly differentiated nature of Digitate’s its capabilities, the sales cycle remains long and complex.

A critical enabler on its journey toward cross-functional and end-to-end automation is its Studio platform – an integrated modelling environment. It allows clients to extend current scenarios to changing environments, enabling broader ingestion of data, handling newer faults, leveraging newer algorithms while integrating with more operational tools.

The Bottom Line: Digitate can achieve more by aligning its intelligence and automation capabilities with the OneOffice mindset.

As we have stated numerous times it is difficult to cut through the marketing noise of Automation and AIOps. But Digitate should double click on emphasizing the differentiation from these two broad buckets. By aligning itself with the OneOffice mindset and emphasizing its capabilities of blending actions with reasoning, it could rekindle its role as the poster child for end-to-end automation. While the Automation community has settled for task automation and employee productivity, the industry urgently needs a trailblazer and educator for a broader and bolder vision.