Name: Monetizing SolarWinds AI – From Roadmap to Customer Value
Uploaded: 2026-05-21T15:30:13.594Z
Duration: 1 h 30 min 4 s
Description: Monetizing SolarWinds AI – From Roadmap to Customer Value

Transcript for "Monetizing SolarWinds AI – From Roadmap to Customer Value": Hi. This is Barb Fields Camp, vice president of Global Channels and Alliances here at SolarWinds. Thank you so much for joining us today, and welcome to this partner training webinar on monetizing SolarWinds AI. You know, as AI continues to reshape IT operations, it's creating real opportunities for our partners to drive new customer conversations, expand your services, and deliver even greater business value. Today's session is focused on how you can turn SolarWinds AI innovation into practical revenue opportunities within your business. We will walk through where AI fits into the SolarWinds portfolio, how to position this with customers, and connecting the value of AI to outcomes that your customers care most about. This is a two part series, so please keep a lookout for part two. AI is such an important subject. We felt like we needed two sessions to really make sure we dove into the comprehensive, detail. So we appreciate your partnership and your investment in building this together, so let's get started. Let me quickly set the stage for today. We'll start with what you're hearing every day from customers, what they're feeling, where they're feeling pressure, and where they need help. And then we'll introduce the SolarWinds AI or SolarWinds one, SW one, is the digital teammate built right into our platform. We're gonna tackle the very important question of AI security, and then we'll finish up with how you can confidently lead AI conversations selling that innovation while delivering clear customer value. Let's get going. Thanks, Barb, for that intro. And as you outlined, AI will be a great value add for our partners to position with customers and prospects. I'm John Callaghan, director for partner enablement here at SolarWinds. And may I add my welcome and thanks to you all for joining today. So let's begin by looking at extracts from the 2026 SolarWinds IT trends report and firstly focus on customer thoughts on AI. I've been lucky to work in the IT industry since 1988 and have experienced firsthand the key momentum shifts that have occurred. In 1988, we saw the shift from centralized mainframe computing, from IBM, for example, to distributed client server technology, which allowed more companies and individuals to take advantage of IT. Microsoft, Dell, Apple, and many more emerged as the next generation of great tech companies. And we saw numerous companies disappear, such as Digital or DEC as they were known, Amdahl, Gateway, if you remember those guys, Compaq, and more. The next big shift was the Internet in the late nineteen nineties when we saw search engine technology as the next big thing. Google emerged and became a verb. In 2004, roughly, we saw virtualization technology hit the market, simplifying the world of compute and resource sharing, and VMware emerged as the big winner. The mobile technology in 2008 put IT inconvenience literally in the hands of everybody. And next up was big data, public cloud, where Microsoft and Amazon began to dominate. And now we have AI and the beginning of the next big thing in IT. It's early days in this evolution, or maybe you could call it a revolution. But when customers talk about AI today, the conversation is all over the map. Some see it as a force multiplier, that idea of feeling almost superhuman. Others are worried about job disruption, runaway spending, or even big existential risks. The reality is all of these headlines are shaping buying decisions right now. Our opportunity, working hand in hand, is to cut through the noise and help customers focus on practical, responsible AI that drives real outcomes, starting with IT operations. Now before I show you the results of the trends, technology trends, when you think about AI over the next two to three years, how are you feeling about it? Are you cautious? Are you neutral? Or leaning optimistic? The reality is your customers are spread all across this spectrum as well. Understanding where they sit is critical because successful AI conversations don't start with the technology. They're gonna start with the mindset, trust, and confidence in what comes next. So here is what the trends survey showed. What we're seeing here is the tension point in AI adoption. On one hand, a clear majority are optimistic, About 44% are leaning cautiously or highly optimistic. On the other side, a significant group is still cautious or concerned. That gap is important. It tells us AI isn't a yes or no conversation. It's a trust conversation, and that's where you as partners play a critical role, helping customers move from uncertainty to confident practical adoption grounded in real operational value. One thing is for sure, and this is where there is strong alignment across IT leaders. 80% agree that the role is shifting from being a hands on operators to orchestrators of complex environments. So AI is accelerating that transition. Customers don't want replacement. They want leverage. They want tools that help them coordinate people, platforms, and priorities more effectively. For you as partners, this is a power of locally, positioning Solvents not as automating jobs away, but as enabling smarter orchestration at scale. So as IT teams move into an orchestration role, we're seeing two very clear paths emerge. One is the optimization path on the left. About 42% are using AI just simply to do more with less and keep performance steady. The bigger opportunity, though, is on the right where 57% are applying AI to free teams up for higher value strategic work. That's the moment that you can lean in, helping customers move beyond efficiency gains and towards outcomes that actually change how IT can deliver value. Section is not really new information because as the old saying goes, good data in, good data out, or bad data in, bad data out. And, of course, as you know, there's many ways of saying that. And this is becoming the grounding reality behind every AI conversation. So customers strongly agree that AI's effectiveness depends on data quality and breadth, but the footing really isn't there yet. Only 38% truly trust their data. Fewer than half are confident that their databases can handle AI demands, and fragmentation is everywhere. Now that gap creates risk, but it also creates lots of opportunity. And this is exactly where SolarWinds and you can win, helping customers strengthen their data foundation so AI delivers reliable, defensible, real world outcomes. Now the good news is this isn't all abstract. There are very practical things that we can do with customers right now, And it starts with training, helping teams understand AI insights and design workflows that actually fit how they work. And of course, governance will matter too, clear policies with humans firmly in the loop. And finally, it comes back to the data, improving visibility, quality, and reducing fragmentation. These are tangible steps where partners can add immediate value and help customers move forward with more confidence. And if there's one idea to take away, it's this. The future of IT is orchestration. But orchestration only works when it's built on trust. Trust in the data, trust in the insights, and trust in how AI is applied. This is where Solomons is leaning in and where you as a partner can make a real difference. Helping customers adopt AI responsibly, competently, and in ways that truly elevate how IT delivers value. So we're gonna cover quite a lot today. And if you want to go deeper, I'd really encourage you to check out the full SolarWinds IT trends report. It's packed with data that you can use to shape customer conversations, where you can validate what they're experiencing and position AI in a practical human centered way. So if you want, just scan the code, download the report, and use it as a resource to drive smarter, more trusted AI discussions. And with that, let me hand over to the amazing superhuman, Crystal Taylor, who many of you will know from the many content rich videos she has delivered on many platforms. And Crystal knows a hell of a lot more about AI than I do. Let's face it. I can just about spell a I. So over to you, Crystal. I'm SolarWinds evangelist Crystal Taylor, and I'm here to help introduce SolarWinds AI. We're gonna talk about how we're leveraging AI to help bring even more value to your customer base and gain new customers. Thanks to John for sharing the results of the IT trends report. We've definitely heard a lot from customers and end users about the state of AI. However, challenges persist that always have been there. What's important to remember is that while AI is accelerating change, the core challenges haven't gone away. Hybrid environments are still complex, teams are still dealing with constant information overload, and the pressure to do more with less is very real. This is the day to day reality your customers are living in. AI doesn't replace these challenges, but when applied thoughtfully, it can help bring clarity, focus, and control to environments that feel increasingly unmanageable. We have a vision for autonomous operational resilience where technology does more of the heavy lifting. We've started impacting that vision with some of our AI advancements and other product advancements we've made over the last year or two, including things like AI powered features, which we're gonna learn about here in a minute. To accelerate these visions, customers are asking three core questions. Can we actually see everything across our hybrid environments? Can we get ahead of issues instead of just reacting? And third, of course, when do we finally automate the hard stuff, not just the easy tasks? And the question there is really around how do we automate the automation where we're not having to manually build these things. These three pillars, unified, proactive, and automated, define the journey that our customers are on. For partners, they're a powerful way to guide conversation from today's pain points to a clear, achievable path forward with SolarWinds. This is where everything comes together. SolarWinds AI is woven across the entire portfolio from monitoring and observability to incident response to IT service management. Underneath the AI platform connects networks, infrastructure, applications, services, and assets into a unified intelligence layer. The outcome is what customers actually care about, consolidated tools, stronger operational resilience, better service outcomes, lower costs, and real automation. For partners, this gives you a complete end to end story showing how AI delivers value across the full IT life cycle, not just in isolated use cases. And as you can see from our slide here, we have quite a bit in place already. We have AI powered features already in observability incident response and IT service management. Things you may or may not already be familiar with, like automated runbooks, like automated case summaries, anomaly based alerting, just to name a few. This slide illustrates how everything fits together. At the top, we have SolarWinds observability, SaaS, which covers networks, infrastructure, cloud, applications, digital experience, and databases, alongside incident response and service management. Underneath it all sits the SolarWinds platform, cloud native and powered by AIOps, machine learning, and generative AI. What's important is flexibility. Customers can run SaaS, self hosted, or hybrid through Platform Connect and the hybrid collector system. For partners, this is a strong story. One platform, multiple deployment models, all aligned to modern operational needs. All of our AI features are powered up through that connection to the cloud, so it is incredibly important to use that to power your way forward. To help us help our customers achieve this vision of autonomous operational resilience, we're aligning our investments around what our customers keep telling us they need. First, help them see what actually matters, driving broader, deeper coverage across environments and device types. Second, help them get better outcomes using smarter solutions that apply AI where it counts, purpose built. And third, make it easier to get results with a more intuitive experience that reduces friction. All of this is enhanced with agentic AI underneath so customers move faster with more confidence and partners have a clear outcome full focused story to lead with. This slide shows how SW one Agentic AI is built to scale safely and responsibly. At the center is the SolarWinds SaaS platform connected across observability, incident response, and ITSM, whether customers are SaaS, self hosted, or hybrid. Agentic AI sits on top, orchestrating context, memory, tools, and guardrails through a secure interface. With flexible LLM choice, auditing, and third party agent support, this isn't a closed system. It's extensible by design. This means that we're implementing MCP from the start to add functionality later on to integrate with other things so that they can get full pictures as they go along. This represents our investment in the future. And for partners, this means confidence, enterprise ready AI that integrates cleanly into customer environments and opens the door to real, actionable automation. S w one is accelerating the shared vision that we talked about earlier. First, it's unified. In this s w one era seeing everything isn't just more data, it's meaningful visibility with context across the environment. Second, proactive. SW one helps customers get ahead of issues by default using intelligence to surface risk before it turns into impact. And third, automated. As SW one takes on the hard, repetitive task, the nature of IT work changes. Teams can shift from constant reaction to higher value decision making. For partners, these three pillars give you a clear way to frame how AI drives real positive change for your customers. SolarWinds SW one is your customer's context aware digital teammate. You can position this with them by helping them understand that it's going to save loads of time from the tedious task that they hate doing on the day to day, answering lots and lots of questions, getting context, getting faster root cause analysis because they can see the data altogether in an easy digestible format in human readable language. Next, you're gonna see a demo of the current capabilities of the SolarWinds SW one agent. It is currently in tech preview in SolarWinds observability SaaS and SolarWinds observability self hosted. Current capabilities include things like answering questions that are environmentally aware and asking answering questions that pull from documentation, so you can be assured that when you're asking questions about how to set something up or if you're trying to do new user onboarding, you can get that context directly from documentation and that it's accurate and correct. So what are we planning for 2026 and beyond? Here you can see that we have our goals of greater coverage, smarter solutions, and improved experience, and a little bit more detail about what we're currently working on. We really want to expand our coverage. We're looking at adding more cloud services, more private cloud platforms, databases like SAP HANA, devices, and SaaS applications. At the same time, we're delivering smarter solutions with SW one goal oriented agents, stronger alert to incident correlation, AI query assistance, and anomaly detection. And we're improving the day to day experience with tighter incident response integration, compliance reporting, and smarter views. What's key here is that we're accelerating all of this with Agentic AI and doing it in close partnership with you so we can bring these capabilities to market faster and deliver real customer impact together. Next, I'd like to show you the future possibilities of what the SW one agent could look like. These are items that are currently works in progress right now and may or may not make it into the final product. But we are looking to enhance our agentic AI experience to really improve upon the vision that we're seeing as well as accelerating our plans to give customers everything that they need to get context and to improve the mean time to resolution in their environments. Hi. This is a demo of SolarWinds SW one, a truly agentic experience that we're building to solve customer's problem. So I'm gonna first log in, and we'll go through a quick onboarding experience. So this is right now configured to connect to sole self hosted instances. As you can see, it's connected. But this is Agenctic experience is being designed so that it can span across and work across various different SolarWinds products that you may be using. That includes sole SaaS or DPA, service desk, or incident response, or even more products in the future. So we'll continue on. And right now is reading your OSH environment and discovering key information about, your environment. So total number of nodes, the states that they're in, and number of alerts that's been triggering. And then if we continue on, you can personalize your experience so you can identify yourself here and tell the agent a little bit about yourself. So for now, select network engineer, and I also care about security and compliance, so I'll select that as well. And you'll see that then that is, auto adjusting your preference, and you can also add additional details for the agents to look at. We're also introducing a lever to control the autonomy of the agent. You can go full autonomous or balanced or safe. What we want to provide is a lever to make sure that you are able to progressively build trust and enable, autonomous, autonomy for the agent. So we'll we'll stick with the balance for now. And after that, you can suggest goals. These goals are the maps to a business problem or a specific problem that you may be having in SolarWinds products that you we are enabling agents to go automate and remediate. So for the sake of this demo, we'll pick reduce alert noise so that we can keep the environment as quiet as possible, but the agent will be running behind the scenes driving towards the school. We'll also enable reduce compliance compliance violations so that it can look at your network devices and see and discover any compliance violations, at which point the agent can autonomously also ask for, additional approvals to execute remediations. So we'll get started. And when you first start, you're greeted with a daily digest here highlighting some of the key activities that had happened in your infrastructure and your environment while you were away, and it also captures key events that requires your attention. So you can expand and get more information about this. And if you wanna talk to the agent and conversate, to get more detail, you can start up a session and the it'll kick off an agent session here where you can then look at more details about this particular issue. So as this is going and looking into this problem, we're providing full transparency into what tools the agent is using, and then the agent will be able to sort of go and retrieve the data, go through this analysis, and put together some key information and visual visualizations for you to consume. So you'll see that, it has to retrieve the data and, it's getting more data as this needs to do a comparison. And, you'll see that it'll come up with a a dashboard here that can sort of visualize the dataset, which makes it super easy for you to consume and understand and comprehend the issue. So you'll see that the dashboard has showed up. You can expand and you can grab more details, and, it gives you an alert and event timeline, gives you a response time charts, and all of these things are being composed by the agent automatically. This isn't something that you have to go and create manually. So other than that, we can also go into goals. Remember that we and we invoke two goals here, reduce compliance violation and reduce alert noise. And you can click on one of them and see how the agent is behaving. You'll note that it's going through the first iteration. It's measuring the baseline. It's also analyzing more data. And as it goes through this, it'll it'll it'll come up with key findings for you to review and also action items for you to approve. We have a little nice, explanations here on how the agent actually autonomously remediates this action, what the iteration loop involves, what are different types of goals that we enable, and, key findings and what that means. And, for example, I can show you from the previous runs, these are the key action items that was identified by the agent. But before it goes and acts on these, it's asking for your approval. Right? So you can read the description. We also expose risk factors here so that you can look at how, what the impact is and fully understand the both pros and cons of taking this action. And if you feel comfortable, you can give an approval to the agent, in which case it'll go and act on it. Or you can say, hey. This risk is too great. I don't want to take this action, and you can decline that action as well. One additional thing is there may be some key actions that agent is not able to take because it doesn't have access to the tools or it's only meant for the humans to go and invoke those actions, and those are captured here as well. So the users can come in, look at this list, and go one by one and execute the steps in manual, manually, but, but according to the recommendations that was given, and that's something that we track as well. So these goals are the key value proposition of this experience that we're going to be adding more goals in the future. But right now, you can see that, for example, this reduced compliance violation has now identified these key findings and has also recommended these key actions for you to take. A lot of these agent activities are audited. We're we're capturing and allowing you to audit as well, so that's transparently captured here. We're also exposing some key, information about your environment. So you'll see that the nodes that you're monitoring and the alerts and some key, system level KPIs are being captured. You can go and look at the summary of these nodes. We'll be able to sort of provide key metrics. And, also, based on, agent evaluation, provide observability insights. So, it's putting that together here. And if you want to also look into more details about this, then you can start up a conversation and a session with the agent. So this makes it super easy for you to actually analyze, investigate, and learn more about your infrastructure and also invoke the agent to go achieve and maintain specific goals, which and which then will come back and and get your approval to take remediation actions. And once you have progressively, set up the trust with the agent, then you can go ahead and and put these some of these things into a more of an autonomous mode where the agent would then able to go and and take automated action on your behalf. So we're gonna be iterating on this and building out more depth and breadth to the experience, so we hope to be back with more details. Thank you. Now, of course, we come to the big question of AI security. Well, we have a lot of questions from our customers constantly being asked. And while we are still in tech preview, we don't have anything public published as of yet. But you can be assured that we are working on something at the moment. We will have something ready when we go prime time. And in the meantime, we can give you some context on what you can share regarding our security protocols for AI. Our AI features are purpose built on principles you and your customers can trust. We've been building features and functionality in our product for years with our secure by design principles, which then expanded into our AI by design principles. We've updated our AI by design principles to include agentic AI and added the new principle for autonomy boundaries and safety. We believe that trust and transparency are key to helping our customers alleviate the toil of the tedious everyday tasks and work towards the goal of autonomous operational resilience through the use of AI powered feature functionality. We understand that there are more specific questions about SolarWinds AI, and I'll do my best to address some of those now. Today, SolarWinds AI powered features require a connection to the cloud through Platform Connect, as earlier illustrated. Use of these features is completely optional and off by default. Data is encrypted in transit, used transiently by the AI providers, and not used to train the base models. Stay tuned for part two for further updates. Thanks so much, Crystal, for that insight into SolarWinds AI and, of course, the importance of security in the world of AI. So let's wrap up with some next steps that you can take as we take the AI journey together in the coming months, quarters, and years. First up, you can evangelize SolarWinds AI and help customers understand why it matters and how it fits their reality. Second up, we talk about value in subscription. Right? So lead with value. Anchor every AI conversation in outcomes, Resilience, efficiency, confidence, and not hype. And finally, promote upcoming events. Use workshops, briefings, and customer sessions to spark real dialogue and learning. And this is how we turn interest into momentum and momentum into measurable customer success together. Wow. What great information today. Thank you to all of our presenters. So just wanted to remind everyone to stay tuned. We are going to have a a part two as we release more details on positioning, pricing, and packaging, and more details related on all of our AI capabilities. And I couldn't let the opportunity slip by to remind everyone to please also join us for the June 4 webinar where we will be announcing and introducing the new 2026 partner program. We have really optimized this program with more benefits through tiered based discounting and a lot more clarity around competency, rules of engagement, and how we can create pipeline together. So please don't forget to register for this important announcement, and the webinar is on June 4. And, of course, hopefully, all of you are aware, we are traveling the world, our SolarWinds world tour, meeting with customers and you as our partners in person in many cities around the globe. Here's some of the ones that are coming up next across several of our geos, and we welcome you to to join us to hear more about our product road map innovation, some more detail on the partner program, network with your your sol Solarian counterparts, meet with your channel team, and spend time with customers. Thanks so much, Barb. And I personally look forward to meeting many partners down in Bogota in Colombia in July as well. So, listen, everybody. Thanks so much for joining today. Hopefully, it was a good learning experience for you in terms of the initial introduction to SolarWinds AI. And as Parv says, we've got a second part in the series upcoming as well. In the meantime, what we're gonna do is we'll leave the q and a chat open for a number of minutes. So please continue to add any questions that you may have, and we will get back to you with answers as soon as possible. So thanks again. Have a good day wherever you may be. Take care.