HCL's DryIce embodies 15 years of intellectual property, said executive vice-president and chief technology officer IT services Kalyan Kumar (pictured).

This experience has now been productised, and DryIce is available to customers whether or not they use HCL's managed services.

There are four platforms under the DryIce umbrella, he said:

• AIOps – aimed at automating technology, and including capabilities such as a cognitive service desk;
• Idev – applying AI technology to DevOps;
• Copa – for automating and unifying front and back office processes; and
• Service Exchange – the delivery of DryIce technologies as services.

HCL claims DryIce is unique in that it is a mainstream IT automation platform combining AI-backed automation with powerful orchestration.

While DryIce is being broadly adopted, the media and publishing industry tends to adopt automation more quickly that other sectors, he observed.

But a large truck manufacturer is using DryIce to automate the dealer lifecycle, and a combination of a chatbot and robotic process automation are taking care of 98% of the work.

The handoff between chatbots and humans is important, Kumar said. The approach he recommends is to develop purpose-built chatbots for specific activities, notably those which are high volume but low complexity. Machine learning will improve their performance over time, but where they can't resolve an issue it should be transferred to a human.

On the orchestration side, the difficulty depends on the applications that are to be connected. Most implementations can be done in 4 to 12 weeks, but Kumar's advice is to look for the quick wins first and then iterate from there.

The truck dealership example involved four different systems, but Copa provided the chatbot with cognitive intelligence plus the orchestration capability needed to drive them.

This was a good example of an organisation applying the power of automation and AI without making major changes to the underlying systems, he said.

Other examples of greatly increased productivity include the use of HCL's ElasticOps service that allows each person to manage 20 times as many servers, and cloud automation that has reduced provisioning times from 25 days to four hours, he said.

HCL's plans for DryIce over the next year include the adoption of a new, next-generation service management system to cope with the XaaS (anything as a service) approach.