(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of PagerDuty Summit '22. I'm Lisa Martin. I'm here with one of our alumni. Jonathan Rendy joins me, the SVP of products at PagerDuty. Jonathan, great to have you on the program. >> It's wonderful to be here. Thank you, Lisa. >> Lisa: It's great to be back at PagerDuty Summit. So much news this morning. So much buzz and excitement. Talk to me about some of the things that you're most excited about as we are in such a massively different work environment these days. >> Yeah, so much has been going on and we've been innovating in so many areas. I think you heard in the keynote this morning, automation is such a foundational part of PagerDuty now, and that comes to us via the Rundeck acquisition from a couple of years ago. And we've also extended PagerDuty to new audiences. So we've been a big part of the back office for a long time with SREs and developers and ITOps, and we've really come to realize that the front office is so important, and one of the leading departments there that we can make an impact and extend into with our solution is customer service. >> Lisa: Customer service is absolutely critical these days as we all know. One of the things that was in very short supply the last couple of years is patience. Patience when you're a consumer, patience when you're a business person. And so the voice of the customer, being able to get things escalated quickly and resolved quickly, to those customer service folks is critical for any organization. Without that, people easily go to Twitter or Reddit and escalate problems publicly, and suddenly that becomes a brand reputation problem for the organization. >> Yeah, you're spot on. I mean expectations are at an all time high. People's tolerance is at an all time low. And that gets translated, I always think, to the front door of the organization when there is something that doesn't go right, and that's typically the poor customer service agents who have to deal with that kind of feedback and open up cases and deal with it. And, you know, unfortunately they're not armed a lot of times with the information that could help them not only be better reactive but be better proactive and have information to actually turn what could be a bad experience into a really good one. >> Lisa: You mentioned something really interesting. Jonathan had a great fireside chat this morning that I was able to watch. And you said it takes, for every negative experience that a customer or consumer has, it takes seven additional positive experiences to turn them back around. And I thought, wow, do we even have the patience or the tolerance to your point, to give a business seven more options to turn our experience around? >> Yeah, it's tough. And it's very, very hard for a lot of organizations and nobody's exempt from it. The connection between the front office and the back office, there is no real gold standard for that. And so, is there a path forward? Is there a way forward? We believe there is and we believe there's a way to help, but teams really need to focus on getting information to those folks so that these very negative kind of situations can become a customer satisfaction, can become something where a customer feels like, "Wow, I didn't expect that." There was another statistic that we heard about the other day, which is, you know, greater than 50% of issues are often identified from customers, not from the monitoring products. So, you know, whether it's 50, or 40, or 30, it doesn't really matter. The customer is a signal and it's so important to be attentive to that signal. >> Lisa: What are some, well... you'd rather have that found out before the customer even notices. Talk to me about some of the things that PagerDuty just announced that are going to help not just the front office, back office kind of blurred lines there, but also to ensure that the incident response is smarter, it's faster, and it's being able to detect things before the customer even notices. >> Yeah, so the trick, the $64,000 question, however you want to phrase it or characterize it, is all about getting teams ahead of problems. And while I think it's unrealistic to ever, like every single customer, get ahead of any issue that any customer could see, it's so important that the first customer that comes in with an issue becomes near to the last customer that comes in with an issue, meaning that one, everybody knows about that and they know how it's related to existing issues. That's important so that other customers can be preemptively explained, but then given what PagerDuty's always done, sometimes we know about issues on the back end that may be impacting customers that they don't know about yet. So a shopping cart may not be working correctly, but before somebody hits it, if the customer service team knows about that right away, they can proactively get ready for communication to their customers to let them know, "Hey, there might be an issue here. We know about it, we're working on it. Please stay tuned", or direct them to something else that can help them. >> I can imagine that goes a long way to CSAT scores NPS scores, brand reputation, reducing churn. >> Jonathan: Oh, big time, big time, whether it's CSAT or NPS, you know, everybody is familiar on that big shopping day of the year, of getting that big sale, going to, wanting to order that, and then either not being able to complete the order or having to wait too long for it to be delivered. And then you end up having to go to a brick and mortar outlet to buy it there anyway. So there's so many opportunities and those situations will happen, outages will occur, it's just a matter of when. Those can be avoided in those bad situations via the use of other discounts, coupons, other customer satisfaction areas. You can turn those bad experiences into really good ones. >> Definitely. And I think we all have that expectation that that's going to happen, when outages do happen, 'cause to your point, those are the things that it's not, "Is it going to happen?" It's when, and how quickly can we recover from that so we minimize the impact on everybody else? Couple of the things that you announced this morning, Incident Objects and Service Cloud, talk to me about what that is. It looks like a deeper partnership integration with Salesforce. What are some of the benefits that your customers can expect? >> Jonathan: Yeah, so we have several partners in the front office, and one of the biggest known to the world is Salesforce. And so we've been working with the Service Cloud team there for going on a couple of years now, better integrating our platform into what they're doing. And we've actually built an app that runs inside of Service Cloud. So a customer service agent doesn't need to swivel chair around and look at other products in order to understand what's going on in the back office, it's all built into their experience. That's one, number one. Number two, we've upped that relationship and invested more where Service Cloud, Salesforce has come out with a new incident capability. And so we're integrating directly to that so we can sync up with that system of record from PagerDuty. So wherever the issues are found, whether it's in distributed DevOps teams, or whether it's in a central team, or whether it's a case agent working on the front end, everything will be kept in sync. So we're really excited about that bidirectional integration >> That bidirectional sync is critical. We have, you know, one of the biggest challenges, we've been talking about it since we were back at HP days back in the day, Jonathan, silos, right? That's one of the biggest challenges, is there's still silos between teams and systems, which impacts, you know, time to identify an incident, time to repair that incident, and then of course let alone repair the relationship with the customer on the other end. >> Jonathan: Yeah, yeah, and there's some great examples, working with our own customers, that we run into where when we can make that golden connection between the front office and the back office and sync up customer cases with incidents, magic starts to happen. So we've seen situations where the back office team working on an incident doesn't realize that the issue is customer impacting. They don't realize that there were three, and then four, and then five case tickets opened up, that it's really impacting customers. And when they see that rise in customer impact, they change the priority. They get other people involved. The urgency changes on that issue. Imagine working in a world where that visibility doesn't exist, people continue to work at their own pace and who suffers? The customer, the customer experience. >> Lisa: Without that visibility, so much can suffer. And quickly, we also have this expectation, I mentioned one of the things that was in short supply in the pandemic as patience and tolerance, but another thing is we expect things in real time, realtime access to data, realtime access to the customer, to a product or service, is no longer a nice to have, it is business critical for organizations in every industry. >> Yeah. Yep. And you know, customer service is such a obviously service-centered activity, that it can be, you know, death by a thousand paper cuts to a customer experience. And to the point that you're raising, nobody likes to contact finally someone as an agent, and then get passed to another agent, who gets passed to another agent, and have to repeat the problem that you're having so many times. What if we could capture all that context together. What if we could empower that agent to be able to manage that case from beginning to end more effectively? Like what would the reflection be on the customers who are calling in? They would feel taken care of. They would feel like they were heard. They wouldn't feel ignored, so to speak. So all of that is a part of our solution that we're partnering not only with Salesforce, but also with Zendesk and others to deliver. >> Talk about the automation in CS Ops and some of the main benefits. Obviously, you mentioned this a minute ago, but the ability to empower those agents to have that context is night and day compared to, you know, the solutions from back in the day. >> Jonathan: Yeah. Automation is so fundamental and foundational to everything we do at PagerDuty and if you look at all the audiences that make use of PagerDuty today, whether it's developers, whether it's IT operations and now customer service agents, it's no surprise that, you know, everyone has to do more with less, everyone's working in a more siloed, disconnected manner. So the amount of potential toil, potential manual steps, having to open up a system to get the status of something and then pivot over to my other system, or do research, or ask a customer multiple times when it could automatically be captured what their problem is, what the environment is, and all that information from an agent could be automatically inserted into the case. How valuable is that? Not only for the case, but then the teams on the back end, that helps them diagnose and fix those problems. So the amount of automation that we've built and now just announced and made available as a part of Customer Service Ops just like in DevOps with our automation actions, really important to automating some of those manual toil steps for those agents where, again, 50, 60% of their time is spent doing manual activities. We can get rid of that. We can empower them to do more, to do more with less. >> To do more with less and do more faster and it makes such a huge difference there. Talk a little bit about the DevOps-CS Ops relationship. You know, one of the things that's kind of ironic is here we are in 2022, we have so many tools to collaborate and connect, yet there's still so many silos, and that can either break trust between a customer and a vendor or a solution provider, or it can really facilitate trust. And that was a big theme of the keynote this morning is that trust. But talk about the trust that is you, PagerDuty, really thinks essential between the DevOps folks and the CS Ops folks. >> Yeah. It's critical, as I kind of mentioned before, there really isn't a golden path, a golden connection, a standard that's been set between CS, the customer service organizations and the back office. And how I like to characterize it and what I've seen over the years working with customers is frequently it's almost like when I was a little kid I lived nearby a semi-pro baseball team and I could never get tickets and I would ride my bike to the back of the fence and I would look at the game through a little knot hole in the fence and I'd be like, "Man that would be so great to be in there" Well, that's essentially customer service, sitting there looking at the game happening, constantly trying to interrupt the teams and saying, "Hey, what about us?" And so, by making that a seamless connection, by making customer service a part of the solution, a part of the team in a non impactful, intrusive way, everybody gets what they need, no one's interrupted, and now those customer service agents, they're sitting in the stands. They're not looking through the little knot hole at the back of the center field. >> Lisa: Well you got to tell us, did you ever get tickets? Can you go to pro games now? >> No. No. >> Aww >> Still waiting. >> Oh man. Talk to me, last question here, I asked you before we started filming if you had a crystal ball or a Magic 8-Ball, so next time at least bring me a Magic 8-Ball. What are some of the predictions that you have as you see where we are in... now half of calendar '22 almost gone, the announcements coming from PagerDuty today, this synergy is between PagerDuty, its, what, 21,000 plus customers, your partners, What are some of the things that you're excited about that are coming? >> Jonathan: So a couple things. One is I really think the first example, we talk about the Operations Cloud, what PagerDuty is. And to me, what it really is, is it's not just the DevOps audiences and the ITOps and the SRE teams in the back offices that have to deal with interrupted realtime work, but it's other parts of the organization as well that have to get proactive versus reactive. And the first of those, the first step that kind of personifies the Operations Cloud outside of that back office is customer service. But there will be more, there will be more, whether it's security or other teams. So it's the audiences that can participate and engage in realtime work, that's one. And then I think in the area of customer service and Customer Service Operations, where we are, what we've been doing and what we've been so focused on is making sure that those agents can start to get proactive and start to get to the next step. But wouldn't it be amazing if we could help them, proactively, in a targeted way, talk to their customers and provide that as an automated part of the process. Today that's very manual, so we can empower them with information, but a lot of their communication with their customers is manual. What if we could automate that? And that's our plans, and that's what I'm really excited about doing. >> Can you imagine the trust built between an empowered, proactive CS agent and a customer on the other end. The sky is the limit on that one. >> If I'm a platinum customer or I'm a silver customer, I'm paying for a certain level of customer service. How great would it be if based on the extra that I'm paying, I'm actually getting that service proactively and I'm hearing about issues long before I see them. That to me is building trust. >> Lisa: Absolutely. Jonathan, thank you so much for joining me on theCUBE today. Great to see you back in person. Great to hear some of the things coming down the road for PagerDuty, and we're excited to see your predictions come true. Thanks for your time. >> Likewise, Lisa. Thank you very much. >> My pleasure. For Jonathan Rendy. I'm Lisa Martin covering theCUBE on the ground at PagerDuty summit '22. Stick around, I'll be right back with my next guest. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of PagerDuty Summit '22. I'm Lisa Martin. I'm here with one of our alumni. Jonathan Rendy joins me, the SVP of products at PagerDuty. Jonathan, great to have you on the program. >> It's wonderful to be here. Thank you, Lisa. >> Lisa: It's great to be back at PagerDuty Summit. So much news this morning. So much buzz and excitement. Talk to me about some of the things that you're most excited about as we are in such a massively different work environment these days. >> Yeah, so much has been going on and we've been innovating in so many areas. I think you heard in the keynote this morning, automation is such a foundational part of PagerDuty now, and that comes to us via the Rundeck acquisition from a couple of years ago. And we've also extended PagerDuty to new audiences. So we've been a big part of the back office for a long time with SREs and developers and ITOps, and we've really come to realize that the front office is so important, and one of the leading departments there that we can make an impact and extend into with our solution is customer service. >> Lisa: Customer service is absolutely critical these days as we all know. One of the things that was in very short supply the last couple of years is patience. Patience when you're a consumer, patience when you're a business person. And so the voice of the customer, being able to get things escalated quickly and resolved quickly, to those customer service folks is critical for any organization. Without that, people easily go to Twitter or Reddit and escalate problems publicly, and suddenly that becomes a brand reputation problem for the organization. >> Yeah, you're spot on. I mean expectations are at an all time high. People's tolerance is at an all time low. And that gets translated, I always think, to the front door of the organization when there is something that doesn't go right, and that's typically the poor customer service agents who have to deal with that kind of feedback and open up cases and deal with it. And, you know, unfortunately they're not armed a lot of times with the information that could help them not only be better reactive but be better proactive and have information to actually turn what could be a bad experience into a really good one. >> Lisa: You mentioned something really interesting. Jonathan had a great fireside chat this morning that I was able to watch. And you said it takes, for every negative experience that a customer or consumer has, it takes seven additional positive experiences to turn them back around. And I thought, wow, do we even have the patience or the tolerance to your point, to give a business seven more options to turn our experience around? >> Yeah, it's tough. And it's very, very hard for a lot of organizations and nobody's exempt from it. The connection between the front office and the back office, there is no real gold standard for that. And so, is there a path forward? Is there a way forward? We believe there is and we believe there's a way to help, but teams really need to focus on getting information to those folks so that these very negative kind of situations can become a customer satisfaction, can become something where a customer feels like, "Wow, I didn't expect that." There was another statistic that we heard about the other day, which is, you know, greater than 50% of issues are often identified from customers, not from the monitoring products. So, you know, whether it's 50, or 40, or 30, it doesn't really matter. The customer is a signal and it's so important to be attentive to that signal. >> Lisa: What are some, well... you'd rather have that found out before the customer even notices. Talk to me about some of the things that PagerDuty just announced that are going to help not just the front office, back office kind of blurred lines there, but also to ensure that the incident response is smarter, it's faster, and it's being able to detect things before the customer even notices. >> Yeah, so the trick, the $64,000 question, however you want to phrase it or characterize it, is all about getting teams ahead of problems. And while I think it's unrealistic to ever, like every single customer, get ahead of any issue that any customer could see, it's so important that the first customer that comes in with an issue becomes near to the last customer that comes in with an issue, meaning that one, everybody knows about that and they know how it's related to existing issues. That's important so that other customers can be preemptively explained, but then given what PagerDuty's always done, sometimes we know about issues on the back end that may be impacting customers that they don't know about yet. So a shopping cart may not be working correctly, but before somebody hits it, if the customer service team knows about that right away, they can proactively get ready for communication to their customers to let them know, "Hey, there might be an issue here. We know about it, we're working on it. Please stay tuned", or direct them to something else that can help them. >> I can imagine that goes a long way to CSAT scores NPS scores, brand reputation, reducing churn. >> Jonathan: Oh, big time, big time, whether it's CSAT or NPS, you know, everybody is familiar on that big shopping day of the year, of getting that big sale, going to, wanting to order that, and then either not being able to complete the order or having to wait too long for it to be delivered. And then you end up having to go to a brick and mortar outlet to buy it there anyway. So there's so many opportunities and those situations will happen, outages will occur, it's just a matter of when. Those can be avoided in those bad situations via the use of other discounts, coupons, other customer satisfaction areas. You can turn those bad experiences into really good ones. >> Definitely. And I think we all have that expectation that that's going to happen, when outages do happen, 'cause to your point, those are the things that it's not, "Is it going to happen?" It's when, and how quickly can we recover from that so we minimize the impact on everybody else? Couple of the things that you announced this morning, Incident Objects and Service Cloud, talk to me about what that is. It looks like a deeper partnership integration with Salesforce. What are some of the benefits that your customers can expect? >> Jonathan: Yeah, so we have several partners in the front office, and one of the biggest known to the world is Salesforce. And so we've been working with the Service Cloud team there for going on a couple of years now, better integrating our platform into what they're doing. And we've actually built an app that runs inside of Service Cloud. So a customer service agent doesn't need to swivel chair around and look at other products in order to understand what's going on in the back office, it's all built into their experience. That's one, number one. Number two, we've upped that relationship and invested more where Service Cloud, Salesforce has come out with a new incident capability. And so we're integrating directly to that so we can sync up with that system of record from PagerDuty. So wherever the issues are found, whether it's in distributed DevOps teams, or whether it's in a central team, or whether it's a case agent working on the front end, everything will be kept in sync. So we're really excited about that bidirectional integration >> That bidirectional sync is critical. We have, you know, one of the biggest challenges, we've been talking about it since we were back at HP days back in the day, Jonathan, silos, right? That's one of the biggest challenges, is there's still silos between teams and systems, which impacts, you know, time to identify an incident, time to repair that incident, and then of course let alone repair the relationship with the customer on the other end. >> Jonathan: Yeah, yeah, and there's some great examples, working with our own customers, that we run into where when we can make that golden connection between the front office and the back office and sync up customer cases with incidents, magic starts to happen. So we've seen situations where the back office team working on an incident doesn't realize that the issue is customer impacting. They don't realize that there were three, and then four, and then five case tickets opened up, that it's really impacting customers. And when they see that rise in customer impact, they change the priority. They get other people involved. The urgency changes on that issue. Imagine working in a world where that visibility doesn't exist, people continue to work at their own pace and who suffers? The customer, the customer experience. >> Lisa: Without that visibility, so much can suffer. And quickly, we also have this expectation, I mentioned one of the things that was in short supply in the pandemic as patience and tolerance, but another thing is we expect things in real time, realtime access to data, realtime access to the customer, to a product or service, is no longer a nice to have, it is business critical for organizations in every industry. >> Yeah. Yep. And you know, customer service is such a obviously service-centered activity, that it can be, you know, death by a thousand paper cuts to a customer experience. And to the point that you're raising, nobody likes to contact finally someone as an agent, and then get passed to another agent, who gets passed to another agent, and have to repeat the problem that you're having so many times. What if we could capture all that context together. What if we could empower that agent to be able to manage that case from beginning to end more effectively? Like what would the reflection be on the customers who are calling in? They would feel taken care of. They would feel like they were heard. They wouldn't feel ignored, so to speak. So all of that is a part of our solution that we're partnering not only with Salesforce, but also with Zendesk and others to deliver. >> Talk about the automation in CS Ops and some of the main benefits. Obviously, you mentioned this a minute ago, but the ability to empower those agents to have that context is night and day compared to, you know, the solutions from back in the day. >> Jonathan: Yeah. Automation is so fundamental and foundational to everything we do at PagerDuty and if you look at all the audiences that make use of PagerDuty today, whether it's developers, whether it's IT operations and now customer service agents, it's no surprise that, you know, everyone has to do more with less, everyone's working in a more siloed, disconnected manner. So the amount of potential toil, potential manual steps, having to open up a system to get the status of something and then pivot over to my other system, or do research, or ask a customer multiple times when it could automatically be captured what their problem is, what the environment is, and all that information from an agent could be automatically inserted into the case. How valuable is that? Not only for the case, but then the teams on the back end, that helps them diagnose and fix those problems. So the amount of automation that we've built and now just announced and made available as a part of Customer Service Ops just like in DevOps with our automation actions, really important to automating some of those manual toil steps for those agents where, again, 50, 60% of their time is spent doing manual activities. We can get rid of that. We can empower them to do more, to do more with less. >> To do more with less and do more faster and it makes such a huge difference there. Talk a little bit about the DevOps-CS Ops relationship. You know, one of the things that's kind of ironic is here we are in 2022, we have so many tools to collaborate and connect, yet there's still so many silos, and that can either break trust between a customer and a vendor or a solution provider, or it can really facilitate trust. And that was a big theme of the keynote this morning is that trust. But talk about the trust that is you, PagerDuty, really thinks essential between the DevOps folks and the CS Ops folks. >> Yeah. It's critical, as I kind of mentioned before, there really isn't a golden path, a golden connection, a standard that's been set between CS, the customer service organizations and the back office. And how I like to characterize it and what I've seen over the years working with customers is frequently it's almost like when I was a little kid I lived nearby a semi-pro baseball team and I could never get tickets and I would ride my bike to the back of the fence and I would look at the game through a little knot hole in the fence and I'd be like, "Man that would be so great to be in there" Well, that's essentially customer service, sitting there looking at the game happening, constantly trying to interrupt the teams and saying, "Hey, what about us?" And so, by making that a seamless connection, by making customer service a part of the solution, a part of the team in a non impactful, intrusive way, everybody gets what they need, no one's interrupted, and now those customer service agents, they're sitting in the stands. They're not looking through the little knot hole at the back of the center field. >> Lisa: Well you got to tell us, did you ever get tickets? Can you go to pro games now? >> No. No. >> Aww >> Still waiting. >> Oh man. Talk to me, last question here, I asked you before we started filming if you had a crystal ball or a Magic 8-Ball, so next time at least bring me a Magic 8-Ball. What are some of the predictions that you have as you see where we are in... now half of calendar '22 almost gone, the announcements coming from PagerDuty today, this synergy is between PagerDuty, its, what, 21,000 plus customers, your partners, What are some of the things that you're excited about that are coming? >> Jonathan: So a couple things. One is I really think the first example, we talk about the Operations Cloud, what PagerDuty is. And to me, what it really is, is it's not just the DevOps audiences and the ITOps and the SRE teams in the back offices that have to deal with interrupted realtime work, but it's other parts of the organization as well that have to get proactive versus reactive. And the first of those, the first step that kind of personifies the Operations Cloud outside of that back office is customer service. But there will be more, there will be more, whether it's security or other teams. So it's the audiences that can participate and engage in realtime work, that's one. And then I think in the area of customer service and Customer Service Operations, where we are, what we've been doing and what we've been so focused on is making sure that those agents can start to get proactive and start to get to the next step. But wouldn't it be amazing if we could help them, proactively, in a targeted way, talk to their customers and provide that as an automated part of the process. Today that's very manual, so we can empower them with information, but a lot of their communication with their customers is manual. What if we could automate that? And that's our plans, and that's what I'm really excited about doing. >> Can you imagine the trust built between an empowered, proactive CS agent and a customer on the other end. The sky is the limit on that one. >> If I'm a platinum customer or I'm a silver customer, I'm paying for a certain level of customer service. How great would it be if based on the extra that I'm paying, I'm actually getting that service proactively and I'm hearing about issues long before I see them. That to me is building trust. >> Lisa: Absolutely. Jonathan, thank you so much for joining me on theCUBE today. Great to see you back in person. Great to hear some of the things coming down the road for PagerDuty, and we're excited to see your predictions come true. Thanks for your time. >> Likewise, Lisa. Thank you very much. >> My pleasure. For Jonathan Rendy. I'm Lisa Martin covering theCUBE on the ground at PagerDuty summit '22. Stick around, I'll be right back with my next guest. (upbeat 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)