Exclusive Interview with George Thangadurai, CEO of Heal

Exclusive Interview with George Thangadurai, CEO of Heal

Heal leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms to promote a safe ecosystem for Indian Enterprises. The platform disburses AIOps solutions that are able to predict or foresee incidents and creates solutions to counter them in real-time.

In an exclusive interview with George Thangadurai, the CEO of Heal, we will take a close look at the functionalities and the potentials of Heal to transform business organizations infrastructure.

Kindly brief us about the company, its specialization, and the services that your company offers.

HEAL is the industry's first preventive healing AIOps solution that helps ITOps teams predict and prevent incidents even before they happen using patented AI and ML algorithms. Proudly Made In India, we look to empower Indian enterprises with the tools necessary to become a zero downtime enterprise. Our deep knowledge of the Indian ecosystem allows us to serve 30+ customers in India including 7 out of 10 major banks.

What are some of the challenges faced by enterprises in their IT Operations? How does your solution help overcome it?

Traditionally ITOps teams have been struggling to cope with accelerated digital transformation and despite significant investments in multiple monitoring tools; they are not able to prevent downtime before it affects the end-user. Most of the data collected are siloed, thus really hard to analyse and act upon without significant investments in developer time and SMEs. If we can identify possible chokepoints, anomalies beforehand, teams can finally stop firefighting and focus their efforts on scaling the infrastructure thus reducing operational costs. HEAL is bringing a paradigm shift and is the first proactive solution in a world where almost all APM players are reactive. With HEAL you can

  • Prevent incidents even before they occur.
  • Increase the time between outages manifold.
  • Resolve issues faster – achieve negative MTTR.
  • Free up dev time significantly to work on scaling infrastructure rather than firefighting.

Can you explain how your company's strategy facilitates the transformation of an enterprise given the current pandemic crises?

COVID has ushered the next level of innovation in IT and ITOps is not an exception. With dwindling budgets and increasing online transactions, companies are forced to reduce IT operational costs, maintain 100% availability at the same time.  Most companies have realized having multiple monitoring tools is not solving the problem and is just adding in more complexity plus money down the drain. HEAL's product philosophy is resonating more than ever. More and more companies are looking at the prospect of incorporating AI and ML-driven solutions to help them identify problems beforehand and move away from legacy APM solutions that are not more than mere dashboarding tools.

How is your software solution different from the existing AIOps tools?

HEAL's differentiators –

1) Unlike other monitoring solutions we are truly preventive. HEAL can give you early warning alerts even before a problem occurs.

2) HEAL integrates seamlessly with your existing monitoring setup/ITSM tools. Because we don't have any limitations on the data we can ingest, our algorithms are better equipped to predict the root cause more accurately.

3) We have a patented algorithm "application behaviour learning", which also factors in the effect of workload on system behaviour. The availability of contextual data helps the SRE get rid of false positives and alert storms and gives them an accurate picture.

What is Preventive Healing? How is it improving ITOps productivity and helping reduce operational costs?

Preventive healing is definitely the next level of AIOps capabilities. At its core the philosophy is

"Why spend time fixing issues *after* an incident has occurred when you can save that time and effort by using a tool that can prevent the incident from happening in the first place"

When you take the instance of a bank or an eCommerce site, every minute of downtime hurts the brand and the bottom line severely. In desperation, enterprises are hiring more and more SRE's, consultants plus significant investments in monitoring solutions to make sure issues that have already occurred are fixed. There are three ways HEAL can improve productivity and reduce operational costs

1) ITOps teams need not spend time firefighting when they can predict and prevent incidents way before they occur. This way they can focus on stuff that matters.

2) If an incident does occur, HEAL collects all the contextual data that can pinpoint exactly with a high degree of accuracy resulting in a massive drop in issue identification times, false positives and, alert storms.

3) Lead signals on anomalies increase the MTBI manifold.

4) HEAL can identify probable chokepoints, hotspots and take action autonomously without manual intervention.

How has the adoption of AIOps in India evolved over the last few years?  

Indian enterprises have seen a significant upswing in the usage of online applications. Covid-19 has exacerbated this further, for sure. This has forced enterprises to monitor applications and infrastructure. APM tools are now part of the standard toolkit for any enterprise. They are also finding that simply monitoring applications will not solve their pain points fully. Hence, the need for predictive and preventive approaches has started playing increasing roles in IT Operations' playbook. Thanks to advances in machine learning models and patented ways to map workloads and behaviours, AIOps software can now predict and pinpoint anomalies with better accuracy. Enterprises are finding these not only useful but also becoming increasingly reliant on them.

What is your go-to-market strategy and where do you see the company and the industry in the future ahead?

Our GTM strategy is aligned with our customers' increasing need for zero downtime and unparalleled experience for the users of applications at all times. We see these needs across a broad spectrum of enterprises including BFSI, telecom, e-commerce, travel & hospitality, technology companies and healthcare. We go direct and work with partners to ensure our software is not only deployed effectively, but our customers can extract maximum value for their users. As companies move more and more workloads to the cloud, we see a growing need for an end-to-end AIOps paradigm and this market has significantly more potential in the years ahead. In addition, we also see additional value in extending the applicability to network monitoring and application security areas.

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