I Named AIOps. It Was a Highway to Nowhere
Why operations needs a foundation model, not more agents
Three times in thirty years this industry has shipped the same idea. Micromuse made it event correlation. Moogsoft made it AIOps — I named that category. This generation wraps a language model around the same telemetry and calls it agentic operations. Every one of them rests on a single assumption: that the job is to reduce machine data until a human can cope with it.
That assumption was correct when the consumer was a human. It is wrong now, and it is why autonomy keeps stalling at the boundary.
Every other great corpus got a foundation model trained directly on it — language, images, protein structure. Machine data is among the largest and most structured corpora in existence, and it is the only one that never did. So the industry did the reverse. It took models trained on human prose, pointed them at dashboards designed for human eyes, and called the result autonomous. An agent reading a dashboard is a faster human. Faster humans are not a new operating model.
“Controlled autonomy, humans at the boundary” is not an architecture. It is a symptom. You need someone standing at that boundary because nothing beneath it holds a model of the estate it operates.
Phil Tee — founder of Micromuse (NASDAQ), RiverSoft (LSE) and Moogsoft — argues the substrate has to change before the boundary moves, and reveals what he has been building since May: the first operations foundational model, trained on telemetry itself.
Phil Tee is the Chairman & CEO at CrazyCatz Inc and the former CEO and co-founder of Moogsoft, the pioneer and leading provider of artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps). Phil is a serial entrepreneur, inventor, and expert in IT service assurance — a category he was instrumental in shaping through his invention of Netcool (acquired by IBM) nearly 25 years ago. Within 5 years of graduating from Sussex, he co-founded Omnibus Transport Technologies Limited (OTT) to build and market Netcool/Omnibus. Since then, Phil has led numerous companies to successful exits, including RiverSoft (IPO) and Njini (acquired by Riverbed).
More recently at Moogsoft that he co-founded in 2011, he invented the technology that supports over 200 customers worldwide, including SAP, American Airlines, Yahoo!, Verizon, Outsystems, BNYM and HCL Technologies. Moogsoft has 72 patents and more than two dozen peer reviewed publications covering the technology, many of them authored or co-authored by Phil. Phil holds a PhD in Informatics and is also a Royal Society Entrepreneur in Residence.
Andy Brown currently serves as CEO of Sand Hill East, LLC, which provides strategic management, advice and marketing services to emerging companies. Mr. Brown is also a member of the boards of directors of Guidewire inc. a public traded company in the PNC insurance business, Zscaler, Inc., a publicly traded company providing cloud security services, Pure Storage, Inc., a publicly traded software-defined data storage solutions company, Digital Asset, a company providing solutions in the DeFi and Digital Ledger workflow world, Moogsoft, a next generation AI-Operations company, Skyhive, a company providing Digital Reskilling & Education.
He is also CEO and co-owner of Biz Tectonics LLC, a privately held consulting company. From September 2010 to October 2013, Mr. Brown served as Group Chief Technology Officer of UBS, an investment bank. Prior to that, Mr. Brown served in a variety of executive management and leadership roles at a variety of leading banking companies including Bank of America, Merrill Lynch and Credit Suisse. Mr. Brown holds a BSc Honors Degree in Chemical Physics from University College London.
