Interview: Sanjay Chandra, VP of IT, Lucid Motors

“Don’t wait to start your AIOps journey once you are overwhelmed with alerts. Start early to get a single pane of glass to understand which monitoring tools you really need.” – Sanjay Chandra, Vice President of Information Technology, Lucid Motors

Assaf Resnick, CEO and co-founder of BigPanda, sat down with Sanjay Chandra, vice president of information technology at luxury electric automaker Lucid Motors, at Gartner IT IOCS 2022. They discussed Lucid’s unique ITOps journey and how BigPanda helps minimize downtime of critical applications and services.

Sanjay is a visionary ITOps leader responsible for IT, enterprise systems, global infrastructure, operations, and security at Lucid Motors. He brought BigPanda into his IT organization at Tivo and now again at Lucid Motors, making him a strong proponent of early adoption of AIOps. Sanjay has twice seen the potential impact BigPanda can have on a growing organization.

Scale the NOC globally using technology, not people

Lucid Motors is the first company to win MotorTrend’s flagship Car of the Year award for their initial product. The company essentially works as a rapidly growing startup, building infrastructure and processes to support rapid customer and geographic expansion.

As part of their ITOps strategy, Sanjay knew that he didn’t want to invest in a global network operations center (NOC) with a proliferation of technology tools and workflows that can make global expansion costly and complicated. At the same time, he knew he needed flexibility because it isn’t always clear which strategy will deliver the best results. He needed a solution that provided the most value and the ability to scale while simultaneously protecting the availability and performance of key services and applications.

His primary objectives included:

• ITOps visibility with DevOps/SRE independence: Lucid Motors, like many other modern companies, uses DevOps and SRE practices to create and manage their technology services and infrastructure. Traditional ITOps practices can seem at odds with the rapid velocity desired by DevOps teams, but Sanjay realized that standardizing infrastructure management through ITOps teams will enable Lucid to scale rapidly and safely.
• Preventing ITOM and ITSM tool proliferation: There is a never-ending proliferation of change management, service management, and monitoring tools. Each time a new tool is introduced, it serves a specific niche use case for a specific area. The accumulation of tools creates a constant battle to simplify the monitoring stack so the organization can efficiently leverage its existing resources instead of adding to it. But without visibility into which tools are delivering real value, it can be difficult to know where to invest and where to cut bait.

These two challenges point to a future where NOC teams become overwhelmed with alerts. Once an organization realizes the problem exists, Sanjay explained, it’s too late because it’s already preventing teams from working efficiently and creating obstacles to scaling.

Sanjay knew he needed the glue between infrastructure and ITSM, release, problem, and change management so he could intelligently know how to scale without growing his NOC uncontrollably.

Why AIOps?

As a two-time adopter of AIOps, Sanjay decided not to wait to figure out which monitoring tools they needed, what their observability strategy would be, and how to meet the needs for custom design and IT work.

Instead, he wanted to bring in BigPanda’s Incident Intelligence and Automation, powered by AIOps, to have a single pane of glass so they could kill alert noise from the start and prevent his team from being overwhelmed—so they could focus on what’s important. AIOps became the solution they needed to reduce event and alert noise, and intelligent incidents allowed them to take action quickly.

BigPanda allowed them to scale without adding cost, giving them the space to reinvest that capital into innovation and grow as an organization.

ITOps future for Lucid Motors

Observability is a journey, and Sanjay believes that Lucid Motors will be a “follow the sun” type of NOC, with plans to start car production in Asia for sales in Asia and Europe. With their plans to scale and expand infrastructure, BigPanda allows Lucid to more thoughtfully grow their NOC. With AIOps, their NOC can scale as Lucid’s infrastructure expands.

AIOps can be an integral part of your organization’s growth and success in the long run. Take a look at everything our AIOps solution has to offer your organization.