>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's The Cube, with digital coverage of PagerDuty summit 2020. Brought to you by PagerDuty. >> Welcome to the Cube's coverage of PagerDuty Summit 2020, the virtual edition. I'm Lisa Martin and I'm pleased to welcome back to the program Cube alumni, Jonathan Randy, the Senior Vice President of Product at PagerDuty. Jonathan, welcome back. >> Good to be here. Great to be here again, Lisa, thank you. >> Quite the week for you guys, just wrapping up the three day virtual event this year reaching thousands of folks. Lots of news coming out, as we even kind of talked about the other day announcements, you said this was the biggest product release in the company's history, which is amazing to achieve during a pandemic, but AIOps, integration with Microsoft Teams, customer service solution. And we've heard a lot about automation in the keynotes and of course, with respect to the acquisition of Rundeck. Give us a quick little 60 second kind of overview of some of the things that you announced this week at the summit. >> Oh, it's been busy, as you said, and it has been really the biggest set of investments that we've brought all together at one time in the history of the company and so kind of leading the list was everything we're doing around, the category of AIOps. And so there's been a focus on automation, there's been a focus on what we're doing around event intelligence, and many new enhancements and updates to that product that's a part of the PagerDuty platform. We've also applied machine learning to our analytics, which is great with a recommendation engine to help organizations mature and really understand where they are and then, as you mentioned, big announcements around communication and collaboration with zoom, and Microsoft Teams, and even a new product from PagerDuty built on our core platform called PagerDuty for customer service. So it's been incredibly busy. >> And I'm sure lots of great feedback from customers and partners across the globe. You know, one of the things that you and I have already talked about is in the last six months, this explosion and a number of incidents that your customers are having to deal with and how PagerDuty is helping them to respond to those a lot faster. We talked about automation a lot last week, but as we think about the folks on the digital front line, have to be empowered with the information should be able to respond immediately to a customer inquiry, or risk the customer churning, talk to me a little bit about how automation, is this really kind of the next essential for combating that digital stress that the frontline workers are facing? >> Yeah, so automation has always been important to PagerDuty, and there really a couple kinds of automation that are so important. The first of which, and this is what many people know PagerDuty for is what we always refer to as people orchestration, it is automation, but it's automating is really the identification of issues and then engaging responders, these frontline workers on the right issues at the right time to make the right decisions with the right information. And so that's been the type of automation PagerDuty has really been focused on and more recently, we've taken some baby steps in the area of machine automation. We've done some things with custom actions in our web hook technology that we've delivered, but really to address some of the issues that you're referring to for workers on the front lines. We've had integrations with Rundeck, runbook automation vendors before and we have several partners in this area that do what's referred to many times as machine learning, not people orchestration and automation but machine learning. And we really felt it was important to have a world class capability as a part of PagerDuty, because it's one thing to engage individuals. But then if they still have to undergo manual toil, manual work and resolving issues, and much of that can be automated with machine automation. It's just a perfect match and it should be something that I would expect if I was a customer of PagerDuty ultimately to have. >> So PagerDuty has been working with Rundeck for about a year now, so to talk to us about some of the things that you saw from the capabilities, compatibilities rather, perspective, that you guys thought this is going to be a phenomenal addition to what PagerDuty delivers and exceeding our customer expectations. >> Well, this acquisition and the coming together of Rundeck with PagerDuty, we're super excited about, it's the first really major acquisition that PagerDuty has done and it's an extension to PagerDuty in multiple ways and it's an extension to PagerDuty in the use cases. And that customers can use us, you know, with Rundeck and PagerDuty. It's an extension to, as I just mentioned, people orchestration automation with machine automation. It's an extension of value. There's no overlap anyway, anywhere. But it's also, there's a lot of synergies and the coming together of these two organizations in particular as you know working more closely with Rundeck now, is really about their culture. Their culture is very similar to PagerDuty. And more importantly, like, as I've gotten to know, many of their customers, many of their users and there are, we have some of the same customers in the enterprise and mid market, which is really exciting, is that, although many of them are in the ITOps area, and while we have customers in ITOps, as well as in development, they all refer to themselves, those customers have Rundeck today as DevOps. And so they're very much along the same philosophy, as, you know, empowering self service, being able to take action as somebody on the on the front lines, and being able to take that action, not just be notified of it, but complete that work. And so, that notion of, you know, ubiquitous use, self service, empowerment, that's very consistent in Rundeck's culture, and their customers as it is with PagerDuty and our customers and our culture. >> I know both companies are steeped in DevOps and digital transformation, but it's nice to hear about the cultural alignment, because it's a big thing. It's not just a big thing for the two companies coming together, but also for your customers to ensure not just a seamless transition, but they really get to unlock the value of what Rundeck is going to add to PagerDuty's technologies, right? >> Very much so, very much so. In talking to some of their customers, who are our customers as well, it's just been so clear that it's a very similar use in many ways, although it's a different product, meaning a small group will start to use Rundeck and then other teams in the organization see the value of that and it grows virally. PagerDuty works in much the same way. And their product can be used for a lot of different automation uses in an organization from automating a data processing ETL process to provisioning systems for internal development teams. But one use case that really brings us both together is the focus on the incident response process, the incident response lifecycle and that's where we really got excited. And I'm seeing this week that our customers, our mutual customers are excited. Also, this notion of being able to not only identify, but also engage the right teams, prevent issues from happening in the first place, and then automate the diagnosing and the resolving of these issues before then you learn from that. So it's better the next time. So those automation steps in there, the diagnosing, and the the resolution, it's such an important part of the incident process that our customers just need in these times when digital services are more important than ever. >> Right digital services are the new norm. So is Rundeck, sort of a piece that allows PagerDuty to automate 100% of the incident response lifecycle? >> Much more than ever before, yes. So again, I look at it as take people orchestration and automation, add machine automation, the ability to bring down and bring back up a service as a part of a Rundeck set of steps or jobs, like having that together in one solution really does automate all of the incident response and gives the ability to incident to automate more and more of that incident response process. You know, the other key thing too, I was thinking through the other, obviously, throughout this process, in the other day was the synergy between, not only our customers, but our communities. And I always think of communities as a little different than just customers and PagerDuty has a thriving, growing community around it, in addition to our paying customers. One of the things that's in common with Rundeck is they have the same thing. They are an open source product with an enterprise product on top and it's a open source community of 60,000 DevOps professionals that we're bringing together with the PagerDuty community. So very excited about that synergy as well. >> Tell me a little bit about some of the feedback that you've heard from that community as these announcements including Rundeck have been made and this real obvious pivot towards automation. What are some of the things that you've heard that pleased you? >> Yeah, a couple things. From the community, from the customers, from internal teams, both on the Rundeck side of the house and on the PagerDuty side of the house. Sometimes it's just when things are, it's a good match, you don't have to explain it that much. People just see the natural synergy in it, you don't have to spend a lot of time explaining why machine automation and runbook automation is such a natural hand-in glove fit with PagerDuty and what we do today. And I think that's a huge validation. And, that message has been very consistent in what I've heard back. Some other specifics that were exciting to hear is some of our existing customers today who attended summit, who obviously had no background as to the announcement we were going to make with with Rundeck, contacted the Rundeck leadership, who then forwarded that information to me saying how excited they were, as they were attending summit, sitting in the virtual audience during our keynote addresses, as they heard the coming together of Rundeck as a part of PagerDuty, and immediately sent notes to the leadership on Rundeck saying how excited they were about that and how they wanted to expand the use, which then got forwarded to myself which nothing can be better validation. Nothing's more exciting than to see the community really understand what we're doing and see the benefits of it. >> You're right. That's the most public objective validation that the brand, any brand could get. So what would be the next steps, for example, you know, we talked last week about a whole bunch of PagerDuty customers, 13,000 plus great brands, many types of brands, Zoom, Slack, AWS, they were on main stage with you and Jennifer and the team. But if we think about some of those existing customers, what would be the next step for them to start leveraging the value that Rundeck can deliver to their environment? >> So a couple things. First, there's so much that can be automated today, if you think of just like the two big departments that use Rundeck, and PagerDUty, and there are more frontline teams than just these two. But if you think of just Dev and development, and then ITOps as two organizations that are working more closely together than ever before. You know, the real opportunity is for them to really start to shorten the time it takes for them to do so many things in their world on via Rundeck, you know, Rundeck automation and going back to some of the comments, you know, questions you asked me earlier about where some of the synergies they've made it so easy, they being Rundeck, to automate to create what they call jobs, and then make those jobs, you know, everybody be able to run those in a standard way. And then from a compliance standpoint, get the reporting on that, that the use, I think will really not only grow within IT, but for the most part, a lot of the development community, the core DevOps teams out there that use PagerDuty on the dev side, I think that you know, run books have been largely a manual activity for them, manual steps that they do. If I had to guess, the majority of our, you know, partners, community, customers today, who use PagerDuty when they actually get pulled into a real event and they're walking through the steps that they need, whether it's pulling together all the diagnostics information, and then going out in action to solve a major incident, a major event, the majority of that is manual today. And so the fact that we're allowing the equivalent of a big red easy button for those individuals for those teams on the development side, who really have been doing this unassisted today, to automate more of what they're doing, to cut down on the time, to cut down on the toil, to reduce the time that digital services are out in their organization. I think that's a huge opportunity for the larger PagerDuty customer base. >> I was looking at the press release, and with respect to the Rundeck acquisition, and about Rundeck saying and customers have experienced up to 50% reduction in incident response time using Rundeck automated run books. So from a team productivity perspective, that's huge. >> Especially when, you know, minutes are millions of dollars. And we were talking about this the other day that so many casual services are now mission critical, they're critical path for all of us, we need them, both in our professional and in our personal lives. So given that, given what's riding on these services, and how PagerDuty has always been about, you know, behind all of those services, our people and those people have to respond in the most effective efficient way in those really critical important moments, that type of savings, you know, reducing the time that it takes by another 50% on top of that, hopefully our customers will see the value in that Just like we do today. >> Big reduction in digital strategy, which I think we could all use today. Let me ask you one last question. Since this was the fifth PagerDuty summit, but the first virtual, you got to interact, or rather had the chance to impact a lot more customers than our traditional in-person event. But what was your take on having this virtual experience? Did you feel that you were able to really engage those customers as much as you would like to in a digital world? >> I'm really glad you asked. So much of us put so much of our time and effort into this, and I know our customers depend on us to do that. That usually, when you meet in person, you know, as you say, this is our fifth PagerDuty summit, and the other four have all been live, but they've all been in person, that nothing does substitute for the interaction, the live interaction you get, whether it's delivering something on main stage, or interacting one on one, with customers and clients, nothing, I think is a substitute for that. We are where we are and I do believe we're making, you know, obviously the best of it. And it has been great, we've generated probably five times as much content in this event than we do for a normal in person event. So while the the interaction isn't quite what you would expect in a three dimensional versus a two dimensional world, and I think the positive is, there is more content, and all of that content is kind of imminently more shareable than ever before, I personally have gone in to look at some of the track sessions, more in, you know, via zoom than I have in the past when they were recorded, but you know, it was a live event because I was so busy with other things. So I think the downside is some of the real personal interaction, we can still have personal interaction, of course, but it's not quite the same, but the content, the material, and then the reuse of that over time. I see that as being positive. >> Absolutely, I couldn't agree more. Well, congratulations on a very successful event. I imagine you must need a good weekend rest after delivering the most product news and announcements in the history of the company, especially in the last six months. Jonathan, it's been great having you on the program. >> It's always a pleasure, Lisa, thank you so much for having us and I hope you get some rest this weekend too. >> Likewise, I'm looking forward to that. For Jonathan Randy, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching The Cube. (lighthearted music)

>> Illustrator: From around the globe, it's the cube with digital coverage of PagerDuty summit 2020. Brought to you by pagerduty. >> Welcome to the cubes coverage of PagerDuty Summit 2020, the virtual edition. I'm Lisa Martin, and I'm pleased to welcome the Senior Vice President of Product for PagerDuty. Jonathan Rendy. Jonathan, welcome back to the cube. Thank you, Lisa. It's great to be here. So this is our virtual cube, virtual summit 2020. But one of the things that I know from talking with Jennifer yesterday 6is that this is the opportunity to reach way more people because there's, you know, no travel restrictions and budget and things like that. But one of the things that is quite impressive is that you're going to be in your keynote talking about a lot of changes and enhancements to the products the biggest release in pagerduty's History During COVID-19 really impressive. Talk to us about why this is such an exciting time. >> Well, it's it's exciting for a lot of reasons. And great to be here, although I'm getting so tired of working from home these days. But be that as it may, yeah, we we do have the biggest set of releases and investments and innovation that we're unleashing in the history of the company, which in these times is is no small feat. I want to thank all the teams have done a wonderful job. But we're using our summit event, as you know, to to talk about that to bring that out to discuss and we have some very high profile speakers coming. Joining us at the event. We have Andy Jassy, we have Eric Diwan, Stewart Butterfield and more. So it'll be a fantastic event, for executives and for practitioners alike. So sharing what we're doing new with all of this, these leaders joining us is going to be a great thing. >> One of the things that's become so critical in the last six months is digital services. And I think so many of us don't realize or don't think about the folks under, I don't want to say under the hood, but behind the scenes really, that are critical for you mentioned, the CEOs of AWS and zoom, and Slack, which are all essential. I mean, zoom is a household name, right? My mom even uses zoom, she's 75 that's pretty cool. But all of the criticality under the hood to ensure that these services continue because we're all now even more dependent on them than we ever have been before. >> Yeah, it's really interesting, I was thinking about this the other day, there were so many casual services that we all relied on, you know, pre March pre February, that now have become just mission critical and, and to everything that we do professionally and personally. And to your point, whether you're working out at home with, you know, your peloton, or whether you're in the two dimensional world with zoom all the time, we just expect all these services to be up and running and be available for us. And behind all those services that we expect to be there is a an amazing amount of complexity and dependencies. And behind all those complexity and dependencies our people and and that's a big part of what PagerDuty focuses on which is engaging people on the right issues at the right time. And of course, allowing them not just to be engaged but complete the work work, major issues, unexpected work, unplanned work, and complete all that in when moments and seconds and microseconds matters. So Pedro duty has a unique place in that whole ecosystem of what's considered crucial and critical now. >> We'll we've been hearing the term essential workers for since March right and thinking of them in a traditional sense of doctors and nurses and firemen and obviously grocery workers and, and deliver companies. But looking at it from pages through your lens, it's this the whole like digital frontline, the DevOps folks, the IT folks, the customer support folks who are really on the front lines of helping that brand be protected. Now it's, you know, the fact that everything is real time that now is now more important than ever is never been more important. So talk to us about sort of this switch to this digital default and what that means for operations. >> Yeah, as we were just saying, to your point, it's never been the services have never been more important and more essential to everything that we do. So it just makes perfect sense that all of the individuals who are responsible for building and delivering and supporting those services are essential. Now also and as a part of that we talk a lot about going from what everybody knows as DevOps to digital ops. And while it may sound like a marketing phrase, words matter, and it really means going from being responsive to being proactive and predictive. And that's so important for these individuals. To get ahead of this, we've seen super interesting data, when we look at our platform where there 13,000 customers of how life has changed for all of those customers and those half a million users of our platform today, pre COVID. And now that we're in the middle of this with, again, reflecting how important services are the increased use of those, and then the rise in issues. And what's the great news is that individuals and companies using the platform are actually getting better at addressing them than they were pre COVID. So with the bad news, there's, there's good news, too. >> I agree, there are always silver linings, I was looking at my notes here. And one of the things when PagerDuty evaluated your platform, and as we mentioned over 13,000 customers, during COVID, seeing an increase in traffic and demand for digital services, more than a 38% increase in incidence compared to the prior period. But you also talked about how the big impact that pager duty is helping your customers make and resolving those incidents faster. And I guess maybe sorting through the noise, and a better more automated way. >> Exactly. And a lot of it has to do with what we've been doing. And then another piece is our new releases. And so again, we've looked at our data to your point. And we've seen this over a third rise, in the number of issues, that organizations are running into across the board. And with our new releases, we're able to reduce interruptions by over 65%. So it's great news that again, with with the rising use and the rise in interruptions and people having to context switch from what they're doing to you know, firefight and jump in the middle one and collaborate across organizations that there's light on the horizon, the light at the end of the tunnel, I should say, and then things are going to get better. And our new releases are going to help in a big way. >> Okay, I'm assuming you have a crystal ball, which is great. So I'm going to be looking for some more predictions, but talking to your customers. And you know, I can imagine now there's more noise. You mentioned this switch from DevOps to digital ops and this now this digital default that I know, Jennifer has talked about, and it's this probably going to be one of the things that that shapes the winners and the losers of tomorrow in every industry. But tell me a little bit about how you're helping how you're using, you know, the traditional buzzwords, AI, machine learning, and putting them really effectively to work so that it's now not just a buzzword that companies in any industry should be thinking about, but it's actually machine learning is going to be critical to sorting through this increased volume of data and helping resolve incidents faster to not just, you know, prevent customer churn, but also to make sure that your folks on the digital front lines aren't burned out. >> Well, with the transition that we were talking about before, you know, everybody realizes that they have to be all in now, there's no, we're migrating to the cloud. And there's reasons for that, moving from on prem systems to to the public cloud, in many ways, we've seen that massively accelerate. And with that comes and how the systems are, have to be built and managed and delivered there, you see this increasing complexity. And going back to what we were talking before, individuals are behind all of that complexity. And so it's so important that in our new releases, we really up the bar, we've really raised the game, so to speak on what we're doing to take advantage of our data that we capture. And also this increase in information that's coming in, we refer to it a lot of times as telemetry when you, you know, start to refactor and rebuild your systems in the public cloud, and you have all those dependencies and you have more information, more data flowing to you, which can translate to more interruptions. And very easy, It's very easy for organizations and teams to get overwhelmed by that. And so our new releases, focus on making sense of that we talked about the reduction in interruptions and the reduction in noise. But we've also focused equally, on helping folks with context with information when something goes south, when something is different than what a team expected. How do you fix that once you engage the right people, they're so big part of our releases also been about applying machine learning to add context to speed up fixing and resolving and finding the root cause of these issues in a big way. And we do that through a number of different ways in our in our products, in our PagerDuty platform, event intelligence, and also our analytics, again, to draw these relationships around service dependencies and our analytics, we've included a recommendation engine. So now we can show organizations and teams predict. If you make these changes, you will see these improvements. And this will be your returns and using our data combined with the data that's coming in, That's a big part of what the PagerDuty platform is all about. >> well that analytics piece is, critical as as the machine learning because the volumes of data are getting bigger and bigger and bigger such that it can't be can't depend on just humans. There's something that I'm curious about, too, is with the rise in incidents, how can PagerDuty help customers kind of sort through the noise and maybe Park things that might be able to be resolved on their own without having to escalate? >> It's a great question. And we do it through a couple of ways. One, we've applied machine learning so many times when, when interruptions when issues alerts come in, and they can look different, but they're all related to the same thing. So we're applying machine learning to better group and intelligently organize and group all of those informations into the singular incidents that really matter that you really need to pull teams together on which is important. The next thing we're doing is we're using machine learning to say, Hmm, okay, it looks like these, these issues, these incidents are happening on different services that teams own. And what we're also using the machine learning to do now is to show the dependencies between those services. So we often see situations where you can have a couple of teams in your organization, working on issues that are delivered to them, not knowing that they're related. And in some ways they can be working against each other. So having information to know that one issue is upstream. And the other issue is downstream allows one team to step forward and the other team to step back. And we're using our machine learning for that, to give that additional context and help pinpoint where the issues are. So it's the most effective use of these teams when they come in, Nothing's more frustrating by the way than being interrupted, whether it's the middle of the day or the middle of the night, only to find out that either you're being unproductive or you didn't need to be there in the first place. >> Oh, absolutely, yes. And I'm seeing some stats that people are the folks on the digital front lines are working an average of 10 hours more a week. And so many more of those interruptions are happening and when you'd like to be off on the weekends and the middle of the night. But one of the things that that you took context, absolutely critical, but also collaboration, different teams that need to be to your point, are we working on the same thing, and we don't know, the collaboration now that work is distributed is even more critical than ever? What are some of the things that you're hearing from customers about what PagerDuty is doing to facilitate that collaboration so that things just run much more smoothly, and the demanding consumer on the other end is satisfied? >> Well, to your point, one of the most critical things, since we're talking about not just a technology issue, we're talking about a people issue is communication, and collaborating. And that is so important, not only in general, but in these moments that matter. And so one of the things we've done in the new platform is we're introducing industry firsts, video war rooms, with our partners and customers zoom, as well as Microsoft Teams. And so we're also updating our slack integrations as well. But as we live in this two dimensional world, those responders, those teams that have to come together to fix issues with the single click of a button, now they can participate in those issues, in a video sense, in a video war room, but not just engage in that way. We've also added the ability to manage the issue through zoom through Microsoft Teams as a part of PagerDuty. So individual don't need to context switch from one product to another, they can do everything they need to do from from that world. So a big part of that collaboration and communication is all about the in the moment, you know, teams working together in those forums. But there's another side of communication collaboration in these major events. That's critical as well. And that has to do with what I always think of as the ripple effect. There's there are the teams working the issues. And then there are all the teams adjacent to that, whether they're business stakeholders, whether they're customer service teams, that also need to take action. They may not be fixing the issue, but they have to engage and they have worked to do they have actions they need to take equally, that are different. And so for those other organizations, it's we've increased the scalability of our stakeholder notification into the 10s of thousands. So those folks can keep in touch in tight alignment to what's happening to an issue being fixed, which, again, in today's world, this effect, affects everyone in an organization, not just the teams tasked with addressing the problems. >> Right. And of course, the demanding consumer on the other end isn't considering the fact that the customer support person that they're talking to might not have access to everything they need. And it's critical. It's business critical for any type of organization to understand that, even their customer support folks, and I shouldn't say even those guys and girls are on the digital front lines. And brand reputation hangs on the data that they have the context that they have, and their ability to resolve a customer issue because we were more demanding as consumers before COVID. And now I think even more than other because we're dependent on it. We're dependent on zoom, or dependent on Slack, we're dependent on Amazon and AWS, and so many other digital services. And we don't get what we want as consumers, right, we're going to go I'm going to go find someone else who's going to be able to respond to this in in one second, because I'm only going to give it a half a second. So last question, Jonathan for you so much announced this PagerDuty Summit 2020, unique in that way unique in the virtual asset. But what are some of the things that you see on the horizon, say, the next six months, because I'm pretty sure you have a crystal ball, let's open that up. >> Well, I see a couple of things. And while I never said that I'm Nostradamus, I see a couple of things. And one is that there is a material, seismic shift towards full service ownership. and so teams, and this was happening before as a part of DevOps. But when I was talking previously about moving to digital Ops, we're seeing large organizations have major initiatives around this notion of the frontline teams have to be empowered to work directly on these issues. And we always call that this phrase, full service ownership, which means you build it, you ship it, you own it. And that's both for development and IT organizations. And I think you brought up a really interesting point before, in this trend that I see happening and only accelerating, it's happening because people want to innovate faster. And those individuals, those teams, whether you're, again, in Dev, it Ops, or even in customer service, it's important that you're empowered to do this to help in that innovation. So I see that as the first seismic shift. And actually, as a part of that. The other big part of our announcements is where we're at summit, announcing PagerDuty for customer service. It's a curated product, just for customer service teams, because they're part of that big triangle with Dev and IT teams that they need to be in the loop, they need to be empowered with the same types of tools, they need to be able to act as a, essentially an incident commander, they have cases that come in, and they need to be able to engage the right individuals to provide that customer service to what you were saying before. And they need to have a direct link to everything that's happening in Dev and it so they can be proactive and get ahead of customer cases also. So again, to your question of, like, what do I see? I think that shift is brought on by people being all in, you know, with with their, their cloud migrations and refactoring. And then full service ownership being something that empowering individuals on the front lines, democratizing, you know, decision making and empowering those teams. I see that as the biggest shift happening overall. >> Excellent, Jonathan, thanks for sharing what you are unpacking at summit 20 and the opportunities that had a lot of silver linings. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you, Lisa. It's been a pleasure being here. >> For Jonathan Randy. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube (upbeat music)