(upbeat digital music) >> Welcome to theCube's coverage of PagerDuty Summit. I'm your host for the cube Natalie Erlich. We're joined with a special guest, Sean Mack, the CIO and CSO of Wiley. Thank you very much for joining the program. >> Great to be here, Natalie. Thanks for having me. >> Terrific, well tell us about Wiley. What do you do? >> Sure, Wiley is really wonderful company. Wiley drives the world forward with research in education through publishing and services. We help researchers, professionals, students, universities, and corporations to achieve their goals. Wiley's primarily known as a publishing company, but really now more than ever, we're a tech enabled research and education company, and we have three major areas of impact, research, education, and professional learning. >> Well, obviously the pandemic, the big topic of the last year and hopefully new topics as we move forward, but how has education community evolved during this pandemic? And what's the next step for hybrid learning? >> Yeah, it's been amazing to be part of education and research during this pandemic, during a time when these things have never really been more important. Wiley is a company that's transforming at every level and to many extensive pandemic accelerated those changes and this is nowhere more evident than in the education space. For a long time we'd been building these online and computer-based education platforms and really trying to get folks to move there. And that's been a long, long process and it's been wonderful 'cause we've seen the pandemic has really accelerated that. And we've seen huge increases in usage on our online education platforms, which we've been pushing towards for years. So in many ways it's really enabled us to move forward in a way that that nothing else could have. >> Yeah, I mean, that's really incredible, you mentioned incredible silver lining with the pandemic accelerating digital transformation, especially in education. What do you see as the next phase now that this has really developed over the last year? >> So as I mentioned, we're transforming at every level and at a business level, we just talked a little bit about that. Education is moving more and more to on online and hybrid models. Research, we're moving more and more to open access models where everybody has access to research. Again with the pandemic this has been critical to make sure that we're getting out good medical research and that it's available as widely as possible. But we're also transforming internally. I've been with Wiley about a year and a half now. And when I started, so this is actually prior to COVID, our CEO Brian Napack, said that we're not in a single market that's not going through major disruption, and he's right. And it's so exciting to be part of this company. And on the internally, we have to make sure we're going through a transformation so that we can deliver the products and services that the world's demanding at the speed at which they're demanding them. And so we're also going through transformations from Agile to cloud to DevOps, and it makes it a really exciting place to be as a technologist and also someone who is passionate about education and research. >> Yeah, well terrific. Why did you choose PagerDuty? >> I think there are a few key elements that PagerDuty really enables for us. So as I mentioned, we're going through this DevOps transformation and some of the core competencies, the core principles of DevOps are ones that are enabled by PagerDuty. I think a couple of key ones that I love about it are the ability to empower the users rather than having a centralized service desk that is looking up things and paging out and needs to manage a registry of all the technology people. We can put that power, that control in the hands of what we at Wiley call the functional delivery teams. These teams that are fully responsible for their staff, fully responsible for their research and education solutions that they're delivering. And we using PagerDuty can put that responsibility and empower those teams to take full ownership of their on call schedules, their team management, without having to go through several hops to get there. And I think this also drives another key element, which is that accountability. Look, we're asking these functional delivery teams to take responsibility for their applications and services. We don't work in an environment where we say, "Oh, that's a operations team's responsibility," we're working in a DevOps model. And we can't rightfully ask teams to take responsibility if we don't provide them the tools to be in control of their own fate. And I really think that PagerDuty is a key element of that tool chain, which enables them to manage their full stack and thereby drives that accountability and ownership. >> Yeah, well, I'd love it if you could tell us some of the challenges you were trying to solve by implementing PagerDuty. >> There were several, I think it speaks to some of the underlying principles of DevOps and Agile that we were trying to enable. More than anything it's really about driving better, meantime to resolution when incidents do arrive through faster escalation directly to the right person. And breaking out of this tiered service model where it has to go through a tier one, a tier two, tier three, before the technical issue gets to the right person. Now with PagerDuty, the issue goes directly to the person who can solve it and they're there, they're able to solve it. And we have made huge strides in reducing our meantime to resolution. I have never seen improvements like I've seen in the past year and a half in Wiley using PagerDuty as a part of our overall tool chain. >> Yeah, I mean, if you have a concrete example that something really stood out, we'd love to hear that. >> So I'm not going to go bring up the charts and data to show you, but I'll tell ya the concrete data is there. We track how long it takes us obviously to resolve problems when they occur, and I was blown away by what this team has achieved. And I don't want to take away credit from all the work they've done either. Tools alone doesn't solve any problem, we have amazing technology team, an amazing team willing to take that responsibility. But if you look at the numbers over the past year and a half, in terms of the reduction in time to resolve across every team, it's truly impressive. >> And what are you looking forward to at the summit? >> Well, I'm always excited to hear about what's going on at PagerDuty. I think there are a couple key items or key sessions that I'm excited to see. I'm really looking forward to hearing more about the future of work, the views from the C-suite. I think PagerDuty always has a really unique and fresh perspective, and so I think that's going to be very pertinent and timely as we look to what's coming next in hybrid world. I'm also excited about the what's next in DevOps presentation. Some great folks speaking there. And I think DevOps is maturing and we can... (laughing) for a longest time we were asking, What is DevOps? Can we define it? Can we define it in a consistent way? And I think we're at a point now where we can, and we know the components. So it's a really good time to ask what's next in DevOps. And finally, I'm just excited to hear what's next for PagerDuty. It's been a great tool for us and I'm excited to see where the company is going next. >> Yeah, terrific. Well, let's shift gears a bit. Staying on point with digital transformation. How is that in line with some of the broader organizational goals that Wiley has, such as bridging the higher education gap? >> Yeah, I think that as I mentioned, all our businesses are changing dramatically and we're not going to be able to meet the rapidly changing technology demands, unless we have technologies and teams that can rapidly change with those demands and rapidly expand with those demands. So whether that's auto scaling, whether that's more resilient systems, we need to be there. And I'll also mention the key element that security plays here, because the other change we're seeing is a huge increase in the threat landscape and the depth of some of the attacks we're seeing. And so this focus on security is another important part of the transformation and the transformation from just security to DevSecOps is something that's key for Wiley. It's critical because security for Wiley is security for our customers. And one of the things that we offer is the promise of reliable and secure services. >> And what are some of the innovative ways that Wiley is now delivering content solutions? >> So we're always trying to push the envelope of education in many different ways. I think that there's huge possibilities with AI, machine learning, adaptive learning to really push that envelope to really... I mean, one of the things that I love about being at Wiley is that I get to be involved with education and research. Like my job gets to be helping people learn better, helping people learn quicker. If we can, through technology, make learning easier, let's make it quicker to learn and also look at reducing the cost and availability of that education, we can make an impact around the world, and that's an exciting thing to be part of. >> So in terms of digital transformation, obviously that's a priority for you, security, tell us more about specifically the main points that you're going to be focusing on in this next year in 2021. >> There's a few key key elements that we're focusing on as we go into... It's actually coincidentally the start of our fiscal year, We have a bit of an interesting fiscal year. But that kicks off or just kicked off last month. So we've spent the last four months doing a lot of planning for this year. For me, I think some of the keys are going to be driving agility through simplicity. And one of the places that comes into play is through our tool chain. Making sure we don't have every tool, but we've got the right tools to connect our users, and that, that tool chain is very much interconnected so that we can hit on another key concept for me, which is the enablement of our business. We enable our developers, we enable content editors, we enabled all of Wiley to do the best job they can through technology. We want technology to be seamless for our users. And these three concepts, seamless, enablement and simplicity, agility through simplicity, really work hand in hand to enable our users, our community, to develop, to build at the speed that business demands. >> And obviously, security a really key feature of your role. We don't often think about security going hand in hand with education, but for some of our viewers that are not directly involved in education, why is that so critical? >> Well, I think anyone who's involved with technology today can grasp the criticality of security. Not many days go by that we don't hear of new threats, new ransomware attacks. And Wiley is now more than ever a technology enabled and driven business. When we talk about education, we're talking about technology. When we talk about research, we talk about technology and the underpinning systems and the threats that are out there, impact education and research technology just as they do any other research in education or any other line of business. We have amazing security team at Wiley. I am really blown away by the work this team does every day, and I'm excited about where it's going to. It's so critical for us because we need to provide... If we talk about enabling education for more people in a more effective way around the world, part of that is making sure that all of our users are secure and safe and confident. So we are investing heavily in security and going beyond just spending more money, but really taking a innovative DevSecOps approach, focusing on application security, focusing on making security, not just a team, but part of what everybody in Wiley does because technology can't just be a set of tools and it can't be one team that sits in a dark corner of the environment and tells people what they can't do. Security has to be core to everything we do. And so when we're talking about people building new products and services, we have to make sure that they're part of the security solution. When we talk about our finance users, they need to be part of our security solution. Only by making sure that security is integral to everything we do, are we truly going to be able to make sure we have a secure set of products and services for our users. >> Terrific. Well, thank you so much for your insights and thoughts on PagerDuty Summit as well as digital transformation at Wiley. Really appreciate it, Sean Mack, the CIO and CSO at Wiley. Thank you for joining the program. >> Great, thank you. Thank you so much for having me here. >> And that's all for this session of PagerDuty Summit coverage by "theCube." I'm your host Natalie Elrich. Thanks for watching. (upbeat digital music)