(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)

>>Hey everyone. Welcome to the cubes coverage of PagerDuty summit 22. I'm Lisa Martin, and I'm on the ground with Michael cooky, the VP of product and marketing at PagerDuty. Michael. It's great to have you on the program. There is great momentum right now at PagerDuty. The company's fourth quarter fiscal 22 financials showed a revenue rise of 34% year over year with figures of 85.4 million for the quarter, for the first time ever. Awesome stuff. Let's talk Michael, about what some of the great things are that, um, attendees can expect from this year's summit. You know, automation has been always at the forefront of PagerDuty's focus on managing critical work, but it's a big focus for this year's summit. Let's unpack why that is. >>Sure, absolutely. Thanks so much for having me, Lisa. It's great to be here. Um, we did just finish a grade quarter. We're super excited about it. I think Summit's a good example. It kind of is aligned around the areas that we've been seeing a lot of success and momentum with our customer base. Um, and automation is definitely one of those pillars without a doubt. Um, you know what we've seen, uh, we've been at this now, uh, for over well over a decade, uh, and we've been investing in automation in kind of two major areas and I'll, and I'll explain why, um, we study our customers and what they need. And I think we can all talk about the limited time that everybody has to get their jobs done today, limited people, right? The, you know, the great rotation or the great resignation is definitely hit hitting, you know, every single industry. >>And so it results in limited skills, uh, and a lot of strain on the people that are trying to get their jobs done every day. Um, we also saw that the more you interrupt someone, so you have a very skilled worker, let's say it's a developer for example, and you're constantly interrupting them to try and get them to help you fix something. Uh, they get super unhappy and we actually on our platform prove they quit their jobs more often when they are interrupted more often. Uh, so you know, that is an area where we think automation can have huge impacts and huge returns to take limited resources and really stretch them a lot further, um, by taking care of repeat work, but also taking some of those higher skilled capabilities and handing them to more people across the enterprise. So the work could be shared across the enterprise. >>That's critical to share that work, but I also find it fascinating that you studied that and actually saw direct correlation of, of developers actually resigning from their jobs. And as you mentioned, the great resignation, something that many companies in every industry are dealing with. Let's talk a little bit about some of the things that we're announced recently. I know you guys are weaving automation actions everywhere to empower more users, to be able to, to be, to take action, to resolve issues faster, which is critical for the customer experience. It's critical for revenue. Talk a little bit about automation actions. What are some of the key things that, that delivers and enables PagerDuty to do for its customers? >>Yeah, great. So, you know, two years ago we acquired an automation company named Rundeck and we got right to work integrating their technology across the PagerDuty operations cloud and automation actions is, is the ability to execute automation from wherever you are. And so that is, um, you know, I think there's two directions to talk about automation. One is kind of what can we automate inside of an incident response? So when something's going wrong, what can we automate? What can we automate inside of our own platform? And then there's, what can we automate out in the customer's environment? So whether that's fixing something that's going wrong on a cloud or in a data center, or, uh, provisioning new resources out on the cloud so that, uh, people can scale their applications more rapidly. Um, all of that is done with automation actions, which you just mentioned. >>And so it's not enough to just be able to send work, to be done somewhere else. You have to kind of do it E everywhere. And so at summit this year, we announced that you'll be able to fire off that automation in real time using event intelligence, which is our machine learning product. So as machine learning learns something, it can then run off and try and take action based on it. And then we're delivering it to all of our users. So inside of, you know, for a responder, who's responding to a problem for a customer service representative who might be working with a customer who's having a problem, giving them automation can totally change the customer experience because now the customer service person is actually empowered, uh, to do diagnostics and try and solve problems. So, so that's right. Automation actions being delivered both in real time and to every different, uh, type of user that that leverages PagerDuty today, >>That's really quite transformative. Michael, it sounds like getting the first line responders, the corrective information that in an automated fashion, because as we know, one of the things that's been in short supply the last couple of years is patients. And one of the risks, several of the risks associated with that are customer churn, you know, poor customer experience, brand reputation, et cetera. What are some of the expected outcomes, um, with, with, uh, automation actions and one obviously speeding, mean time to repair, lowering interruptions, getting problems fixed faster, but from a customer's perspective, what are some of the outcomes that they can expect? >>Awesome. Um, great question. The there's a lot of different ways you can leverage automation, right? You just mentioned a bunch of super high return ones when something's broken and your company's actually losing customer experience or, or revenue, uh, or you're unable to deliver a service to your employees or your users. That is obviously a moment of massive return for automation in those cases. Like you said, you're gonna see a reduction in the requirements to escalate, which means that the first responder can actually solve the problem themselves. Uh, and they're not gonna have to go interrupt that more higher skilled employee. Like we talked about, uh, we see that over 50% of the time, we're actually reducing escalations by using this technology. That also means the problems are getting solved a lot faster, which you also mentioned. Um, so using automation actions to both diagnose what's going wrong, but then actually try and remediate it. >>Um, and as I mentioned earlier, we can do that before you even have to get a human being at all. We can do that with machine learning in real time, which is, uh, super powerful. And then there's a long tail of other ways to leverage, uh, automation in an environment from service provisioning and redundant tasks that are used, that are done for maintenance across an environment or provisioning, uh, provisioning services to developers so that they can get to work faster. So there's a lot to do there. Um, and, and then we're also exploring ways to, to automate, uh, outside of just technical use cases, um, which we talked a little bit about in the product keynote as well. >>One of the things that, that you mentioned earlier is that the, the data that PagerDuty has that demonstrates, um, from a resignation perspective, what happens when developers are, are really taken away from their core job? Is there any data that shows that auto, uh, automation actions, you mentioned, um, a big reduction, 50% reduction in time to respond there is that, is there a direct correlation in actually helping the folks on the front lines stay in the front lines? >>That's right. So, um, and, and also those that are coding coding, right? So, um, the, that 50% reduction means 50% time given back for them to do their primary function, which in this case is building amazing new digital services, whether that's a new customer experience, uh, or a piece of, uh, uh, digital service to drive the business and business efficiency. And so driving this automation access kind of a shock absorber for your business and for the people in your business that are, that are super taxed. And we actually release something called the state, uh, state of digital operations. And, uh, we are updating all that data actually, and announced, uh, today that that is now available on our website as well. So you can hop on there and actually see live statistics off of our platform that we culminate, uh, along with some survey statistics that are trending all of this information you're mentioning in terms of people being interrupted and then, uh, you know, churning actually from their job because they've been interrupted so many times. And so that's right, this will directly impact that. Um, and, and as we bring automation out from just developers, we hope to have an impact across the rest of the business in a very similar way, >>Absolutely transformative. I mean, you know, we, when we think about churn, it impacts to revenue. I always think the customer experience and the employee experience are inextricably linked. And, and I think what you're talking about really demonstrates that you need to be able to empower the right employees to resolve incidents, to absorb that shock as you talked about. And that's really something that for any organization in any industry globally, is no longer a nice to have. It's really something that I think sounds like a competitive differentiator that PagerDuty can help organizations really uncover and bring to the surface. >>Yeah, you're, you're hitting on one of my favorite topics, I think in, in the service of the customer in service of like customer delight and customer obsession, all of the business is now centered on the customer, which, which means that the back office is the front office they're coming together. And, um, and with the pandemic and kind of the transition that we all took into dependency on digital services, it's all starting to look very similar. And so, um, because of that, we're able to now expand our impact at PagerDuty across so much more of a business, uh, out to, uh, everything, including employee experience, um, and also accelerating the time to productivity for your, for your business, so that you can serve your customer faster. Um, we, we acquired a company recently, uh, named catalytic and, uh, their help, their technology helped us kind of accelerate a couple of pieces to market that are just the tip of the iceberg, uh, for kind of being able to rapidly automate and configure workflows for anyone at the enterprise, whether that's for a customer, uh, experience or whether it's, uh, it's to keep your business productive or efficient, uh, for business users. >>So unpack those incident workflows, you talked about the, the catalytic acquisition that was just from March. Talk to me about the incident workflows and what were customers asking for that really kind of generated this new capability that PagerDuty recently announced. >>So, you know, people lean on PagerDuty at, at all types of times, but as we've already kind of talked about the most critical time is when something is broken for the business that is vital to their business. And so when those moments happen, you know, we call those major incidents and when you're responding to a major incident across a business, you really have to do everything you can because every second really matters. And so, um, we, you know, Catalytics technology enables flexible, automated workflows of behavior when certain conditions exist. And so the first thing you're seeing from that technology is called incident workflows, which when something's going wrong, enables you to kind of automate steps of processes very, very quickly that can be carried out company wide. So this could be something like when we see that, uh, critical service is impacted, we wanna automatically send out updates across the business. >>We wanna automatically create a, an area to go troubleshoot on a, on a collaborative, you know, collab, ops platform. We wanna automatically invite the right people into that room and automatically deliver diagnostics to them and automation to them. So they can troubleshoot faster instead of a human having to take those steps in terms of firefighting and trying to re, trying to pull those coordination steps together. Now we can configure that quickly and have it, you know, happen automatically and it, and it can actually happen without a human having to trigger it. So again, this is about something's broken, we're responding. We need to be as fast as possible. You can't rely on a human anymore. You really need, you know, the, what the earlier automation we talked about was automating off our platform. Incident workflows is automating on the operations cloud. So taking steps to solve the problem when it goes wrong without needing a human being to take those steps, >>When you're in customer conversations, Michael, and you, you talk about these capabilities. What are some of the things that, that you talk to the customers about, about why automation is going to be, I wouldn't even say critical for, or, I mean, business critical table stakes for organizations it's no longer okay. To just default to depend on humans. You know, the, the customers on the other end don't want to, you know, a couple seconds delay is hugely impactful. >>Yeah. We, we call that the abandonment threshold, but that's absolutely right. So we've already talked a lot about why you have, why the, why our businesses and our employees depend on digital. I think we've covered that what's important to understand is what is digital. So contemporary applications and digital services, there, there are tens and hundreds of microservices that are powering these things. And then there's thousands of different dependencies between those services. Um, and so supporting these and understanding these is difficult. So, so being able to interpret are they operating correct correctly? And if not, what do we do about it? It's actually a problem that humans can't calculate. Um, then you throw into change, right? So everybody's now competing with the digital service. So they want to innovate as fast as possible, get new capabilities out, keep that customer excited and happy with your offering. >>And so we need to push change on that complex environment. Very often, it's a pretty hairy mess to try and solve and to do that in real time. So we, we use two arms of an area that, that we call AIOps. One is using machine learning to interpret all of those signals and figure out is what is going on? Is it happening correctly? Is something going wrong? Is, is something looking like it's going wrong. And also to determine how to fix it, if it is going wrong, do we need a person to do this or not? And then that other side is, is what we've talked about today, which is you can't bring a human in to do all the work. So you have to know how to solve the problem. So the combination of is, is what we call AIOps it's it's event intelligence, which is machine learning to understand the situation. And then it's automation to actually go out and react to it and solve the problem. That's that's this branch of our, of our platform. >>Got it. You guys have PagerDuty has 19,000 customers, including 60% of the fortune 100. Is there a customer example that, that jumps to mind to you that really articulates the value of AI ops for example, and what it is at PagerDuty is able to allow its customers to do >>Sure. Um, and, and now a million users on this platform, which is just phenomenal. And so that, that actually helps us design better machine learning, because we have so many people using this platform. Um, you know, there's, there's a great example that was just shown on in our kickoff. So if you haven't seen the product, uh, keynote, you really have to see it. We run what are called, uh, day in the life demos. And in this case, this kind of hit close to home for us, because a lot of us have been sitting in delays in airports around the globe, as we get back to our travel, uh, and, and get back to seeing people face to face. Um, but, but what we showed there is, is, uh, very, very, uh, close to real world example where, um, you know, a, a ticketing, uh, service goes down for a travel agency and it impacts everything from directly their end users, customer satisfaction, but also partner engagements and employee behaviors. >>And whether they can get the right people booked to staff, that flight, et cetera, it really throws logistical chaos on the entire business. And it's all based on digital systems. And in that you can see our, our platform helps them react and manage customers at the customer service layer. It gets the developers and the infrastructure, and it teams reacting to solve the problem instantly. They use automation to solve the problem, and they actually learn some new things in that situation. And they bring that back to the flexible workflows. So it's a, it's basically what I call a virtuous loop as they solve a problem, and they realize they could do it faster, better, quicker, or automate more of it. You're now able to bake that back into the platform so that you're basically getting better and better and better every single time you are called to solve a problem. And so over time, we like to bring our customers up. We what we call the operational maturity model. And, uh, it, in, in, in, at the end of that journey, you should really be focused on critical work for you and for your business. And the rest of it should really be handled by our platform. >>An operational flywheel that is constantly learning is impactful. As you described in that example across an entire enterprise. So many different facets there, last question, Michael, as we're running out of time, here, you, as I mentioned in the very beginning, PagerDuty is coming off amazing momentum from FY 22. What are some of the things that you're seeing, uh, for the year ahead that, that you're excited about or that we can expect? >>Uh, great question. Um, so you just saw us release automation in every area for every user. Um, I think what you're gonna see us do across automation is bring faster and more powerful value out of the box with our automation capability. Some of that will be, for example, finding homogeneous, what we call runbooks or automation calls that you can make shared across all platforms. One of our recent announcements was the ability to host process automation, either in the PagerDuty operations cloud or behind your own firewall. We also have a hosted SAS offering for process automation. And what we're gonna do is enable the very common set of automation capabilities across all of those. So it's a homogeneous environment, no matter how you are hosting or scaling your automation. So that's one, and I think number two is this workflow stuff we touched on very, very much just the tip of the iceberg, uh, leveraging kind of a no code rapid interface to build workflows, to solve the highest ROI problem, but then we're gonna take that technology. We're gonna apply it to every downstream, repetitive service in your environment. So everything from employee onboarding to critical sales processes, or legal contract management, um, you know, anything that is time critical, you're gonna be able to build these rapid workflows around, um, and PagerDuty's gonna help you keep your business, uh, you know, healthy and, and operating around them. And so that's, that's where we're gonna be focused, uh, is for the, for the next 12, uh, months I would say. And, uh, it's gonna be an exciting run. >>It is gonna be exciting run. I better let you get back to work as VP of product and marketing. You got a lot to do Michael >>That's right. Well, I'll get back to it. I appreciate the time though. Thanks for so much for the chat, Lisa, >>Thank you so much for Michael Cook. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes on the ground coverage of PagerDuty summit 22.

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone, welcome to theCUBE's coverage of PagerDuty Summit '22. I'm Lisa Martin, and I'm on the ground with Mandi Walls, developer advocate at PagerDuty. Mandy, welcome to the program. >> Thanks, Lisa, thanks for having me. >> So there is great momentum at PagerDuty right now. I just was looking at the fourth quarter fiscal '22 financials. Revenue rise of 34% year-over-year with figures at $85.4 million for the quarter, for the first time ever. So lots of great stuff going on at PagerDuty. I wanted to talk with you about digital operations, the maturity of that, why from your perspective, is it important for organizations that PagerDuty works with to assess and progress the maturity of their operations? >> Yeah, it's good for organizations to kind of, to have a goal. To have a place where they know from industry practice. What's going to help them better or best serve their customers, serve their user base in a digital first and sometimes digital-only world. And have those sort of benchmarks so they can be continuously improving, and continuously working towards that better experience, that more reliable model that customers expect now. We don't want to get into their app on your phone and not have it work. So everyone's expecting more and more from our organizations that we're working with, and then those organizations have to be progressing and improving so that their customer experience is keeping up. >> Yeah, one of the things that's definitely rising these days is customer expectations to your point. We just expect that whatever app we're engaging with, or whatever it is that we're trying to buy online, it's working, it's there, we're going to be able to transact it in the time, usually real time, that we want. Talk to me about, with rising customer expectations, with the emergence of automation, machine learning, AI, goals are definitely evolving within businesses. What are some of the things that you're seeing in the market or hearing from the customers? >> Yeah, lots of folks are still trying to do more work with the stuff that they have, with the resources they have available. They're trying to make the best of the new platforms that are available. And be flexible and reactive to the market pressures that they're seeing. So working with, focusing on innovation versus the sort of reliability or technical dept work that they still have to do, and sort of balancing those things out. So we see folks moving towards more and more automation-driven solutions so that they can focus more on that innovation, those new features, those things that are going to delight their users more so than the sort of hygiene that still has to get done, but isn't the stuff that's going to make people excited about their offerings. So looking at more sophisticated automation solutions, relying more on automated production there, as well as artificial intelligence, or machine learning driven solutions that are going to learn off of your ecosystem and make better decisions for you, so that your human employees are doing all that really great forward looking innovative work. >> When you're talking with folks about this, what do you distill down as, hey guys, this is the biggest benefit of digital operations maturity? Obviously, organizations are going to perform better, but what do you think is that single biggest key driver benefit from digital operations maturity? >> Yeah, we see so many folks that are hesitant to get started, or they're not sure where to begin, and how to approach it. The whole journey starts with a step, like any other journey. But can feel so overwhelming to a lot of organizations. So we're helping them just find those projects that they can get started on and build that sort of internal momentum. So many things, technologically driven, internal to large organizations, start with a large project it has a success, and then everybody wants to do it. It's very much a sort of internal word of mouth, and it snowballs into these amazing programs that then spread out that success across the organization. So we're really in there helping all of these folks like, just get started and find those first successes, so that they can build off of those and build like that organizational enthusiasm as well as the internal practices, the technological practices that they're going to need to improve things across the entire organization. So really just getting folks going is the biggest place we can help drive folks forward there. >> Starting to kind of create that flywheel that then kind of self generates that momentum. So then in your expertise and experience, where are most organizations in terms of their digital maturity? If we look at it as a spectrum, where are most of the organizations these days? >> A lot of folks finally are sort of above average, we'd say, are above sort of the median, where they are looking at, we say about a third of organizations are in a mature proactive mode. They're surfacing issues and problems before customers notice. Like you want to be in there before someone's complaining on Twitter that there's something wrong with your product. So, they are maturing their monitoring practice, they're maturing their response practice, they're maturing their ability to remediate issues so that customers never see those problems, even if they're surfacing. We know that when we put software into production, things are going to happen, things go wrong occasionally. But we want to get ahead of those things before our customers notice. No one wants to be the front page on the "New York Times" for having an outage or any of those kinds of issues. So we want to get in front of all those kind of things. We see another sort of fraction of organizations that are even beyond that. They're getting to a preventative level of maturity, where they're kind of continuously learning, getting ahead of anticipated problems, and working on bringing all of that sort of operational reliability into their entire software development practice, so that when a new idea is being thought about in engineering, they're like, okay, when we get this into production, here's what it really needs to be, so that we don't have some of the issues that we've seen in the past. And lots of organizations are moving towards that sort of continuous learning, sort of a trend that we've seen over the last five or six years for. Just constantly getting feedback out of their production systems. >> So you said about a third of organizations are in the most mature proactive mode, others are in that top tier preventative group. There's still room there to grow, but what are some of the things that are new in digital operations? I understand PagerDuty has a new model. >> Yeah. We're looking for those folks that are really just getting started. There's plenty of organizations that haven't started leveraging automation. There's plenty of opportunities out there for them to be looking at smoothing out their processes, whether it's deployments, or working with their software when it gets into production, working with lots of the new tooling, and taking advantage of all the other innovative platforms that are available, plugging all of that stuff back into their PagerDuty platform so that they're getting all of this really great data and telemetry out of their systems that can help them then raise the bar across their reliability, and their performance, and their customer delight, so that they have all these measurable pieces. These organizations are ready to start using more, say machine learning, or other automation to help them identify their issues and respond to other things before they become really deep problems. So that they're getting more out of the platforms that they're already using. >> Are you seeing those organizations that are maybe leading edge there, proactive? Are they on the maturity curve of advancing machine learning into AI ops? Is that what some of the things are that you're seeing? >> Yeah, the folks that have sort of been at this the longest have the biggest set of learning materials. So your machine learning needs a place to build its' rules. So the folks who have the sort of head start on all that stuff have the, are best positioned to be able to take advantage of those components because they have the largest training data, really great. But as more folks have more data coming in and more things that they've plugged in, then the machine learning capabilities become more available to other organizations as well. So, we definitely see the folks that were in the forefront and really using that telemetry in really powerful ways, are getting the most rewards out of what's available now for machine learning and AI ops and taking advantage of seeing the signal come in and human beings don't have to be involved. We can just pass that over so the automation, because we've seen that thing before and know what it looks like and how to fix it without involving human responders. >> When you're in customer conversations, what are some of the reasons that you give them or talk to them about why automation is so important when it comes to digital operations? >> Yeah, there's a lot of time that can be freed up from these in, the SRE model is kind of referred to as toil. I kind of think of it as hygiene of the things that you need to do but aren't super exciting. Like you need to brush your teeth. And there's a lot of technical work that's kind of like brushing teeth, where you have to do it on a regular basis to keep things clean and to keep things safe. Whether it's security updates or making sure, that you are on the most recent versions of other software, or other things that are going to keep you up-to-date. They're not interesting, really, for a lot of folks like it's just work that has to get done. You need to do them on a regular basis so that you're not accidentally exposing yourself to a security risk, or to a compliance problem, or whatever the other cases might be. But you don't necessarily have to have a human being doing them all of the time. They are things that you can automate, you put some scripts together, you employ some other tools that help you deploy updates and push them through your software processes so they get tested appropriately. So those things can be done on a regular basis and your human beings don't have to be involved unless a problem is surfaced through that process. So you're keeping yourself clean, you've got your hygiene going. You're keeping all that toil at sort of a low place on the amount of work that your humans need to do. >> Got it. Speaking of humans, let's talk about employee efficiency. One of the things that employees are dealing, we're all dealing with is application ecosystems are getting more and more complex. There's more tools, there's more platforms. For organizations that are facing that complexity, how is PagerDuty helping them to keep their employees efficient? >> Yeah, we have some internal processes is there we've been working on and trying to share out. Where our SREs are setting what they call the golden path. They are paving the road for our internal engineers, and then we're using that as a place to sort of evangelize outward to other organizations where we can say, here's how you make things easier for your application engineers by utilizing these sort of automation practices, SRE practices, other types of work that make everyone else more efficient. There's a lot of choice, there's a lot of places for individualization or customization across all of the tools that we use. But a lot of that stuff creates unnecessary complexity. It means that team A and team B might be using the same tool in completely different ways. And it's very hard to share knowledge and to share best practices across your organization when that happens. So what we're seeing and what we're helping SRE teams with is sort of creating these baselines for operational teams and for application teams to say, here is your best practice, here is your paved road for getting your innovative ideas and your innovative applications into production. You don't need to customize or worry about any of the other crazy things that are here. There's lots of options, but we've picked this middle road for you. And if you take this, this is the fastest way for you to get into production. So that when application engineers are working on their great ideas and they're like, we can't wait to get this in front of customers, that road is as smooth as possible and we take as much of the complexity out of it as we possibly can. So that all that work gets straight into production in front of customers without being sidetracked by, should we change the settings on this one particular application or not? >> Reducing that complexity is critical. Especially, these days as we are in still an interesting time in our global society where the great resignation is still happening. What are some of the things that you're seeing organizations do to manage burnout, and to manage the fatigue that the on-call duties teams are facing? >> Yeah, we hear this a lot from folks, especially, since that's sort of our kind of our road in a lot of times to discussions with organizations is what they do for learning? What they do for on-call management? And there's still a lot of fear around being on-call. I am a former assistant administrator that was always kind of part of the job. But a lot of other folks who are coming in from application engineering, maybe haven't been on-call before. So we do talk to a lot of organizations with, here's a plan how to set a plan to make the whole experience less harrowing for people. But understanding that, if it's a new requirement for application teams to be on-call, you want to manage how those out of hours interruptions are going to be impacting your team health. Folks that weren't necessarily expecting to be on-call out of hours. You're disrupting maybe their family time and their sleep, most definitely in those cases. And being flexible around the expectations and the plans that you put together for these teams, is super important. A platform like PagerDuty gives you a lot of flexibility for changing the way your team handles on-call. Maybe you want to employ more of a follow the sun. You have folks in the west coast in the US, and you have folks in Europe and you can set up different hours so that folks aren't interrupted in the middle of the night as often as they might otherwise be, or you have certain services that you can deprioritize to say, well you know what, we don't really need these pages to come in all the time. We can fix this in the morning when folks are back at their desks, or are more ready to work. And being very cognizant of how that impacts folks engagement with their work and the fatigue that can set in. We do see the flexibility to have not necessarily a full week of on-call. And that's sort of the traditional schedule is a week of on-call, but you don't necessarily have to be on-call for a week. You can be on-call for 48 hours or 36 hours and then switch it off. So having that kind of granularity and that kind of flexibility is really going to help teams when so much other stress is in folks' lives right now. >> Absolutely. And that is so critical for employee experience, for customer experience, for revenue, for brand reputation, it's all really inextricably linked. >> All there. >> Mandi, thank you so much for joining me today, >> Yeah. >> Talking about digital operations, automation, and what PagerDuty is doing to help organizations really revolutionize their businesses. We appreciate your insights. >> Thank you so much. >> For Mandi Walls, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE on the ground at PagerDuty Summit '22. Stick around, we got more great content coming up next. (bright music)

>> Welcome back to theCube's coverage of PagerDuty Summit 22. Lisa Martin with you here on the ground. I've got one of our alumni back with me. Sean Scott joins me, the Chief Product Officer at PagerDuty. It's great to have you here in person. >> Super great to be here in person. >> Isn't it nice? >> Quite a change, quite a change. >> It is a change. We were talking before we went live about it. That's that readjustment to actually being with another human, but it's a good readjustment to have >> Awesome readjustment. I've been traveling more and more in the past few weeks and just speaking the offices, seeing the people the energy we get is the smiles, it's amazing. So it's so much better than just sitting at your home and. >> Oh, I couldn't agree more. For me it's the energy and the CEO of DocuSign talked about that with Jennifer during her fireside chat this morning, but yes, finally, someone like me who doesn't like working from home but as one of the things that you talked about in your keynote this morning was the ways traditionally that we've been working are no longer working. Talk to me about the future of work. What does it look like from PagerDuty's lens? >> Sure. So there's a few things. If we just take a step back and think about, what your day looks like from all the different slacks, chats, emails, you have your dashboards, you have more slacks coming in, you have more emails coming in, more chat and so just when you start the day off, you think you know what you're doing and then it kind of blows up out of the gate and so what we're all about is really trying to revolutionize operations so how do you help make sense of all the chaos that's happening and how do you make it simpler so you can get back to doing the more meaningful work and leave the tedium to the machines and just automate. >> That would be critical. One of the things that such an interesting dynamic two years that we've had obviously here we are in San Francisco with virtual event this year but there's so many problems out there that customer landscape's dealing with the great resignation. The data deluge, there's just data coming in everywhere and we have this expectation when we're on the consumer side, that we're going to be that a business will know us and have enough context to make us that the next best offer that actually makes sense but now what we're seeing is like the great resignation and the data overload is really creating for many organizations, this operational complexity that's now a problem really amorphously across the organization. It's no longer something that the back office has to deal with or just the front office, it's really across. >> Yeah, that's right. So you think about just the customer's experience, their expectations are higher than ever. I think there's been a lot of great consumer products that have taught the world, what good looks like, and I came from a consumer background and we measured the customer experience in milliseconds and so customers talking about minutes or hours of outages, customers are thinking in milliseconds so that's the disconnect and so, you have to be focused at that level and have everybody in your organization focused, thinking about milliseconds of customer experience, not seconds, minutes, hours, if that's where you're at, then you're losing customers. And then you think about, you mentioned the great resignation. Well, what does that mean for a given team or organization? That means lost institutional knowledge. So if you have the experts and they leave now, who's the experts? And do you have the processes and the tools and the runbooks to make sure that nothing falls on the ground? Probably not. Most of the people that we talk to, they're trying to figure it out as they go and they're getting better but there's a lot of institutional knowledge that goes out the door when people leave. And so part of our solution is also around our runbook automation and our process automation and some of our announcements today really help address that problem to keep the business running, keep the operations running, keep everything kind of moving and the customers happy ultimately and keep your business going where it needs to go. >> That customer experience is critical for organizations in every industry these days because we don't to your point. We'll tolerate milliseconds, but that's about it. Talk to me about you did this great keynote this morning that I had a chance to watch and you talked about how PagerDuty is revolutionizing operations and I thought, I want you to be able to break that down for this audience who may not have heard that. What are those four tenants or revolutionizing operations that PagerDuty is delivering to ORGS? >> Sure, so it starts with the data. So you mentioned the data deluge that's happening to everybody, right? And so we actually do, we integrate with over 650 systems to bring all that data in, so if you have an API or webhook, you can actually integrate with PagerDuty and push this data into PagerDuty and so that's where it starts, all these integrations and it's everything from a develop perspective, your CI/CD pipelines, your code repositories, from IT we have those systems are instrumented as well, even marketing, more tech stacks we can actually instrument and pull data in. The next step is now we have all this data, how do we make sense of it? So, we think we have machine learning algorithms that really help you focus your attention and kind of point you to the really relevant work, part of that is also noise suppression. So, our algorithms can suppress noise about 98% of the noise can just be eliminated and that helps you really focus where you need to spend your time 'cause if you think about human time and attention, it's pretty expensive and it's probably one of your company's most precious resources is that human time and so you want the humans doing the really meaningful work. Next step is automation, which is okay. We want the humans doing the special work, so what's the TDM? What's the toil that we can get rid of and push that to the machines 'cause machines are really good at doing very easy, repetitive task and there's a lot of them that we do day in, day out. The next step is just orchestrating the work and putting, getting everybody in the organization on the same page and that's where this morning I talked about our customer service operations product into the customer service is on the front lines and they're often getting signals from actual customers that nobody else in the organization may not even be aware of it yet So, I was running a system before and all our metrics are good and you get a customer feedback saying, "This isn't working for me," and you go look at the metrics and your dashboards and all looks good and then you go back and talk to the customer some more and they're like, "No, it's still not working," and you go back to your data, you're back to your dashboards, back to your metrics and sure enough, we had an instrumentation issue but the customer was giving us that feedback and so customer service is really on the front lines and they're often the kind of the unsung heroes for your customers but they're actually really helping and make sure that everything, the right signals are coming to the dev team, to the owners that own it and even in the case when you think you have everything instrumented, you may be missing something and that's where they can really help but our customer service operations product really helps bring everybody on the same page and then as the development teams and the IT teams and the SRA has pushed information back to customer service, then they're equipped, empowered to go tell the customer, "Okay, we know about the issue. Thank you." We should have it up in the next 30 minutes or whatever it is, five minutes, hopefully it's faster than longer, but they can inform the customer so to help that customer experience as opposed to the customer saying, "Oh, I'm just going to go shop somewhere else," or "I'm going to go buy somewhere else or do something else." And the last part is really around, how do we really enable our customers with the best practices? So those million users, the 21,000 companies in organizations we're working with, we've learned a lot around what good looks like. And so we've really embedded that back into our product in terms of our service standards which is really helps SRES and developers set quality standards for how services should be implemented at their company and then they can actually monitor and track across all their teams, what's the quality of the services and this team against different teams in their organization and really raise the quality of the overall system. >> So for businesses and like I mentioned, DocuSign was on this morning, I know some great brand customers that you guys have. I've seen on the website, Peloton Slack, a couple that popped out to me. When you're able to work with a customer to help them revolutionize operations, what are some of the business impacts? 'Cause some of the things that jump out to me would be like reduction in churn, retention rate or some of those things that are really overall impactful to the revenue of a business. >> Absolutely. And so there's a couple different parts of it. One is, all the work what PagerDuty is known for is orchestrating the work for a service outage or a website outage and so that's actually easy to measure 'cause you can measure your revenue that's coming in or missed revenue and how much we've shortened that. So that's the, I guess that's our kind of the history and our legacy but now we've moved into a lot of the cost side as well. So, helping customers really understand from an outage perspective where to focus our time as opposed to just orchestrating the work. Well now, we can say, we think we have a new feature we launched last year called Probable Origin. So when you have an outage, we can actually narrow in where we think the outage and just give you a few clues of this looks anomalous, for example. So let's start here. So that still focus on the top line and then from an automation perspective, there's lots and lots of just toil and noise that people are dealing with on a day in, day out basis and then some of it's easy work, some of it's harder work. One of the ones I really like is our automated diagnostics. So, if you have an incident, one of the first things you have to do is you have to go gather telemetry of what's actually happening on the servers, to say, is the CPU look good? Does the memory look good? Does the disc look good? Does the network look good? And that's all perfect work for automation. And so we can run our automated diagnostics and have all that data pumped directly into the incident so when the responder engages, it's all right there waiting for them and they don't have to go do all that basic task of getting data, cutting and pasting into the incident or if you're using one of those old ticketing systems, cutting and pacing into a a tickety system, it's all right there waiting for you. And that's on average 15 minutes during an outage of time that's saved. And the nice thing about that is that can all be kicked off at time zero so you can actually call from our event orchestration product, you can call directly into automation actions right there when that event first comes in. So you think about, there's a warning for a CPU and instantly it kicks off this diagnostics and then within seconds or even minutes, it's in the incident waiting for you to take action. >> One of the things that you also shared this morning that I loved was one of the stats around customer sale point that they had 60 different alerts coming in and PagerDuty was able to reduce that to one alert. So, 60 X reduction in alerts, getting rid of a lot of noise allowing them to focus on really those probably key high escalations that are going to make the biggest impact to their customers and to their business. >> That's right. You think about, you have a high severity incident like they actually had a database failure and so, when you're in the heat of the moment and you start getting these alerts, you're trying to figure out, is that one incident? Is it 10 incidents? Is it a hundred incidents that I'm having to deal with? And you probably have a good feeling like there's, I know it's probably this thing but you're not quite sure and so, with our machine learning we're able to eliminate a lot of the noise and in this case it was, going from 60 alerts down to one, just to let you know, this is the actual incident, but then also to focus your attention on where we think may be the cause and you think about all the different teams that historically have been had to pull in for a large scale incident. We can quickly narrow into the root cause and just get the right people involved. So we don't have these conference bridges of a hundred people on which you hear about. When these large cottages happen that everyone's on a call across the entire company and it's not just the dev teams and IT teams, you have PR, you have legal, you have everybody's involved in these. And so the more that we can workshop their work and get smarter about using machine learning, some of these other technologies then the more efficient it is for our customers and ultimately the better it is for their customers. >> Right and hopefully, PR, HR, legal doesn't have to be some of those incident response leaders that right now we're seeing across the organization. >> Exactly. Exactly. >> So when you're talking with customers and some of the things that you announced, you mentioned automated actions, incident workflows, what are you hearing from the voice of the customer as the chief product officer and what influence did that have in terms of this year's vision for the PagerDuty Summit? >> Sure. We listen to our customers all the time. It's one of our leadership principles and really trying to hear their feedback and it was interesting. I got sent some of the chat threads during the keynote afterwards, and there's a lot of excitement about the products we announced. So the first one is incident workflows, and this is really, it's a no code workflow based on or a recent acquisition of a company called Catalytic and what it does is it's, you can think of as kind of our next generation of response plays so you can actually go in and and build a workflow using no code tooling to say, when this incident happens or this type of incident happens, here's what that process looks like and so back to your original comment around the great resignation that loss institutional knowledge, well now, you're building all this into your processes through your incident response. And so, I think the incident workflows, if you want to create a incident specific slack channel or an incident specific zoom bridge, or even just in status updates, all that is right there for you and you can use our out of the box orchestrations or you can define your own 'cause we have back to the, our customer list, we have some of the biggest companies in the world, as customers and we have a very opinionated product and so if you're new to the whole DevOps and full service ownership, we help you through that. But then, a lot of our companies are evolving along that continuum, the operational maturity model continuum. And at the other end, we have customers that say "This is great, but we want to extend it. We want to like call this person or send this or update this system here." And so that's where the incident workflows is really powerful and it lets our customers just tailor it to their processes and really extend it for them. >> And that's GA later this year? >> Later this year, yes, we'll start ING probably the next few months and then GA later this year. >> Got it. Last question, as we're almost out of time here, what are some of the things that as you talk to customers day in and day out, as you see you saw the chats from this morning's live keynote, the excitement, the trust that PagerDuty is building with its customers, its partners, et cetera, What excites you about the future? >> So it's really why I came to PagerDuty. I've been here about a year and a half now, but revolutionizing operations, that's a big statement and I think we need it. I think Jennifer said in her keynote today, work is broken and I think our data, we surveyed our customers earlier this year and 42% of the respondents were working more hours in 2021 compared to 2020. And I don't think anyone goes home and if I could only work more hours, I think there's some and if I could only do more of this like TDM, the TDM, more toils, if I could only do more of that, I think life would be so good. We don't hear that. We don't hear that a lot. We hear about there's a lot of noise. We have a massive attrition that every company does. That's the type of feedback that we get and so we're really, that's what gets me excited about, the tools that we're building that and especially when I think just seeing the chat even this morning about some of the announcements, it shows we've been listening and it shows the excitement in our customers when they're, lots of I'm going to use this tool, that tool, I can just use PagerDuty which is awesome. >> The momentum is clear and it's palpable and I love being a part of that. Thank you so much Sean for joining me on theCube this afternoon, talking about what's new, what's exciting and how you guys are fixing work that's broken that validated me thinking the work was broken so thank you. >> Happy to be here and thanks for having me. >> My pleasure. For Sean Scott. I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCube's coverage of PagerDuty Summit 22 on the ground from the San Francisco. (soft music)

>>Hey, everyone, welcome back to the cubes on the ground. Coverage of Pedro Duty Summit 22. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I'm very excited to be joined by Manjula Toleration, the S VP and chief customer officer at page duty. Welcome to the programme. >>Thank you, Lisa. It's great to have chatted with you this morning as well, >>isn't it? I have had the great fortune of watching her fireside chat. That Mandela did, um, with is the logic monitor that was >>she of logic. >>And I thought, She's got great energy. We're gonna have a great conversation. So let's talk about the customer experience these days. One of the things I think that's been very, very short supply in the pandemic is patience. I know it's been in short supply with me and, of course, in our consumer lives in our business lives. The customer experience, though, has been something that every company needs to really pin their businesses on. Because if it's not a good customer experience, that customer goes right to social media. They churn. They leave, but they take others down with them. Talk to me about how the customer experience fits into this year's summit. Especially for this, we have to be ready for everything in a digital world environment. >>I love this question, and I reason I love this question is I even look at my own behaviour. But before we get into that, let's talk about data. I'm just reading an article. Mackenzie did a survey. Did you know that from pre covid to today customer interactions that have moved to digital are from 41% to 65%? That's exponential. That's huge. And guess what? We've all got impatient. You become like our kids, and I think about myself as an individual. If I need tied right now to do my laundry, I need it right now. So if I go to Costco website to order it so that it can get delivered in the next hour, and even if there's a second glitch on it, I'll swap over to Amazon and I'll swap over to target. That's what's happening in real world, whether it be to see or it's b to B, and why is it important to the points we are making in terms of ready for anything in the world of digital everything. It's important because customers are impatient. It's a digital world. I don't walk into the store to do any interactions anymore. And the reality of all of this is it's grounded on trust. Customers have to trust you and the window of choice not only in the B two b, but a lot in the enterprise and the B to B world. It's about trust, right? And what does pager duty do? Pager duty is at the heart of this pager. Duty is at the heart of making every second matter, and every second is equal to money. Absolutely. And it's about customer experience. And it isn't about just the experience where of an employee who may not sleep at night because they got a disruption due to an incident which is also super important during the mass resignation. But it is also about the CEO agenda and the boardroom, because how our CEO s driving customer trust in order to keep customers and drive this new era of digital everything as digital transformation is occurring. Well, >>I know patriarchy was doing that. I had the chance to watch um, CEO Jennifer to, uh, fireside chat, her keynote, and then her fireside chat with the CEO of Doc, You Sign And you. The Storey was very bidirectional, very symbiotic in terms of the trust that he has in Houston and Austin has and Pedro duty. But talk to me as the chief customer officer. What is it that's unique about how patriarchy works with its customers? 21,000 plus now to build and maintain that trust, especially in such volatile times? >>You know what is really cool? I joined page duty a little less than two years ago. In the next few days, it'll be two years now. What do I find exciting as a chief customer officer and the go to market teams differentiation versus other customers? We had a born SAS company and what do we have access to form our customers? We have access to their operations data and that combination of our core values that is championing the customer and the data science that we have about how customers are using our data is a differentiation. That's the magic. So if you think about why pager duty is bringing this level of trust to the customers, it's because we know how many and let's take an example. Employee retention, mass resignation. We know which employee was called. How many times at night during an outage. Can we give that guidance to managers and leaders in order to drive that trust? Absolutely. And on the other hand, we are driving amazing return on investment at the executive levels for the customer experience that they are driving. So Peter Duty is becoming the trusted advisor all the way from practitioners, where we are improving their work life balance to the executive levels, >>improving work. Life balance is so critical. There was a stat that Sean Scott shared this morning that that was looking at the amount of work volume from 2020 compared to 2021 42% of people said, I am working more hours. I don't think I've ever heard anyone say, Can I work more? Please? No. That work life balance is critical, but also the ability to deliver that seamless digital customer experience that we all expect, Um, and and to get it right the first time is critical. But using that customer data as you're saying, empowering the organisations, not just the customer support folks or the SRS or the develops folks but all the way up to the C suite to ensure that their brand reputation is valuable, it's maintained, and that trust is really bidirectional. That's the secret sauce. >>You're absolutely right. You know, there's a different dimension to this as well. We think about how we're using customer data in order to achieve the results. We want three vectors here. Number one is we'll use customer data to really understand what is best in class on up time. What is the best in class to reduce noise during alert, what is best in best in class for customer service operations? And because we have customer data, we can benchmark we can benchmark. What industry? What's happening in the financial services industry? What's happening in the technology industry? What's happening in the retail industry. Our customers love that, so we will share with them. The customer success organisation, especially the customer success managers, will go in and meet with the customers and say This is where you stand in reference to your peers and customers love here about that. This is the differentiated value proposition, right? The second thing that our customer success managers do is share with the customers This is where you are in reference to your peers in your vertical other vertical. But let me tell you how you can improve your deployment, the performance of our technology and you're all operating model. As a result of the data we've got, >>there's the proactive nous. That's another differentiator of of what I was hearing today from pager duty. That you're enabling those CSM is to be proactive when so often many are reactive, and it's the customer that's found the problem first. >>Yes, I'll even talk more about the reactive to proactive. We build a methodology, and I'm sure Shaun Scott covered it as well, which is a maturity curve moving from reactive to proactive because so many of our customers are saying we are reacting when we have a disruption on our digital platform, but 30% of the times we are hearing from customers before we are hearing from ourselves. So how do we become proactive? And how does that data signs actually start showing the signs when a potential disruption could occur? And that is about moving reactive to overall proactive. I'd also like to add one more dimension to this, you know, when customers are doing really well. They're optimised on our platform. They don't want to hear from our post sales organisation all the time. They want a human touch when they need it. They want a digital touch when they need it. By using our data and our data science, we are becoming one of the best world class customer success organisations in the world and you ask why? The reason is because we are using data science in order to build and we have built the early warning system. The early warning system tells us how every single of our customers is doing in terms of both their growth as well as the risk that they may leave us. So if a customer is very healthy on a scale of 1 200 if we have a healthy customer, we will engage with them potentially just digitally and engage with them with our services are customer success team and our entire post sales organisation, when there is an optimisation and when they really need us. So data scientists being used not only in terms of giving customer the right information to grow them, but how we interact with them as well, >>that's brilliant. And there's so many organisations that I talked to across industries that cannot get that right. >>And >>so customers are being contacted too frequently. They may have said. I opted out, I don't want and then suddenly that that the first responders, the incident responders, is marketing. But that happens so frequently, you think. But there's an opportunity there. It's not rocket science, but it's about leveraging that data in an optimal, smart way. But you guys are light years ahead of a lot of other companies that haven't figured that >>out. No, we are leading edge and we are leading edge because we had a born SAS company and we've got effective operations data of the customer, and we have some of the best data scientists and the analysts within my organisation. Looking at this, engaging with the customer and only optimising the magic is data science and humans coming together to engage with customers and drive customer success for the customer and ultimately building their customer experience for their customers. >>Let's talk about some of the numbers Mandela, because they are really impressive. I was looking at some stats. You're paid your duties renewal rates are over 95%. Your growth is incredible, just coming off the biggest quarter ever, but also the gross annual benefit from customers. Talk to me about that alone. That can be up to $10 million. These read these tangible business outcomes that pager duty is delivering to customers are significant, >>and again, it's based on data science. This is not making you know what traditional companies do. Traditional companies will go to the customer and say, Tell me your business imperatives. Tell me your what are the business problems you're solving are because we have the data science. We have our oi arranging from 309 100% very impressive within a couple of months. We think about it if we are able to drive incidents that are very, very significant. And I know you've got the numbers in terms of growing our reducing the workload on very expensive engineering. Uh, individuals within the organisation from, I believe, 3200 and 25,000, and I know you have those numbers think about If 30% of your organisation focuses just on innovation and product development, worse is on an incident, and they work, life balance, the quality of life increases, the retention of the employees, and yet the company's only driving their growth. That is why our customers love us. That is why our renewal rates are greater than 95%. That's why a net retention scores are greater than 100 and 2020% over five quarters. And that is why we have more than 30% growth year over year, quarter over quarter. >>When I saw that stat Manville about you know, the number of incidents reduced, >>that >>translates to employee productivity and and looking at it in terms of FTE. From a quantity perspective, that's the first time I've seen a company and I interview a lot of companies actually put it in that perspective, and I thought, That is huge. That's how organisations should be talking about that rather than reducing feeds are going. We are victims of the great resignation is look at the impact that can be made here by using data science by using the right mix of human and automation together. It's that's the first time. So congratulations to you and Pedro duty for the first time I've seen that and I think everybody needs to be working to be able to explain it that way, especially the fact that we're still in a volatile environment. >>Absolutely. It's about customer experience, but it is just as much employee experience. There is so much that the industry is talking about. That's top of mind for board levels. That's top of mind from CEO S. How do I retain my employees and drive greater operational efficiency? And now, with the macro economic challenges that are occurring in terms of inflation and in and the cost to serve and increasing the profits are customers are making. Operational efficiency is becoming even more important so that the employees are focusing more on innovation rather than downtime or disruptions. And it's actually about growing the business rather than just running the business. And if we can optimise running the business growth is what our customers are looking >>for, right? I always think, and we're almost out of time here. But I always think the employee experience and the customer experience are like this, and they should be. But it's critical to optimise both. How do you when you talk to some of those big and our price customers. We have Doc Watson on the main stage this morning, but I was looking at the website and three that jumped out to me that I use peloton, salesforce and slack. How do you advise them? You have this wealthiest gold of information on customers. This is how you need to leverage it in the right way to grow your business. What are some of the top three things you recommend those customers do, for example, >>that so let me talk about a couple of customers as an example. There are some customers of ours in the retail business, or it is a telecommunication company that is trying to increase their, um, up time from 98.7% to 3 nines as an example, or a tech company that doesn't even know that they were down for six hours in one small part of their business. And we're trying to figure out how do we solve for that as customers are overall complaining. So for us as a organisation, the magic is again bringing data together employee engagement, and what we do is we use the data to engage with their customers to ultimately understand what is their business value proposition. If you don't do it in isolation, you do it in. What is the customer trying to achieve? Are they trying to achieve the best in class website? Are they trying to achieve increased operational efficiency? What are their metrics? What are their numbers? And we take our data, our people, to marry all of that together. And that's the magic. >>I love it. I wish we had more time. Angela. We are out of time but talking about the value of the customer experience, the impact that is possible to be made leveraging technologies like pager duty. It's It's revolutionising operations. It's revolutionising customers 21,000 plus one million plus users at a time. It's awesome. You have to come back so we can talk more because I can. No, we're just scratching the surface here. >>Yes, we are. This is a very, very exciting area right now, and it is a great opportunities for chief customer officers on really rallying the whole company on championing the customers because whether it's a product, our capabilities, it's really a major transformation happening in the in the industry, and we need to stay very close to it? >>Absolutely. Thank you so much for joining me today. It's been such a pleasure talking to you. I look forward to seeing you again. >>Real pleasure, Lisa, To get to know you. And the gun was she was awesome. >>Good. Thank you for Manjula. Televisa. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes on the ground. Coverage of pager duty. Summit 22 from San Francisco. Thanks for watching. And bye for now. Mm mm. Mm mm.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of PagerDuty Summit. I'm your host, Natalie Erlich for theCUBE. We're now joined by our guest Jonathan Rende. He is the SVP and General Manager of Products at PagerDuty. Thank you very much for joining the program today. >> That's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me, Natalie. Well, Summit 2021, an exciting time for PagerDuty. What are you looking forward to most? >> Well, finally, I'm looking forward to at some point, hopefully, not having to wear my mask in public anymore. I know that's the right thing to do still, and I am doing that, but it seems like things are starting to get back to normal. And because of that, what we're finding is a lot of our customers and clients business practices, especially in certain industries like the hospitality and entertainment, they're coming back as well, and to pre-COVID levels and their same level of usage and everything obviously, that got a little bit dampened during the pandemic. So I'm just looking forward to businesses normal and probably the biggest is talking to my colleagues in three dimensions in person versus two dimensions on a zoom. >> Right. Right. And yeah, I mean, it seems like, unfortunately, not this time we get to see each other in person. But looks like customer service is a big focus at the Summit. Why is it so important right now for companies to provide a seamless customer and digital experience? >> Well, we've learned a lot in the last 12 to 15 months. And one of those is that our historical audiences, developers, ITOps folks who have been on the front lines. And for the, a big part they've been distributed already. Customer service teams have always been on the front lines whenever there's a customer experience problem. And they're no longer working in the office across cubes being able to communicate they're remote now as well. And so with a couple of really interesting things have happened. One with the rise of digital services, the use, the demand on them, heck my own parents are now ordering groceries online, which they never did before. And with the increase with many of our clients and customers, the customer success organizations have to deliver a whole new level of customer experience for that digital experience versus just the brick and mortar in on-premise type of experience. And it's created a whole new set of needs around collaboration, communication. And we've seen that customer service teams are a critical component working with development and IT part of kind of like a three-legged stool that has to work together really well for great customer experience now in the digital age. >> Well, you mentioned this big push for digital and especially in light of the pandemic and what other ways did the pandemic impact customer service? >> So first, like maybe building on what I was just saying, just the collaboration aspect. Most customer service teams have historically that I get an opportunity to work with, they have to work for better, for worse in reactive mode. Cases get opened up, something isn't working, a customer is unhappy, there's a customer satisfaction issue, and so they're pulled in. And those individuals, they're lacking all the contexts that they need, and oftentimes, they're in a world where they have to pull in other individuals. And I think gone are the days where they can pass that customer case off to just another individual and then another individual and another individual, that's incredibly frustrating from a customer business experience. And so this notion of eliminating hand-offs and empowering that individual to be able to reach out to the people that they need and handle that case kind of from beginning to end and communicate directly bidirectionally with engineering teams when they're fixing an issue with electronic shopping cart, digital shopping cart, that's critical. They need to have that flow of information because they're a member of the team so that they can proactively communicate with their clients and give them updates of what's happening. >> Well, last year you announced a customer service solution. What are you announcing this week? >> So a couple of big things, we've recently just made available kind of like a complete in context experience or PagerDuty for customer service app for Zendesk and upcoming with Salesforce. It's really all about an agent, not having to switch out of their help desk, their contact center environment. They can get all the information they need in their world without having to move to other applications. They can instantly know if there's a really important issue in the back office with the systems, with the digital services that they need to be aware of. So we have a whole new set of PagerDuty for customer service products that we've made available. And then also a couple of different options for our customers and how they can consume that. We have a professional version and a business version. And really the difference between the two is if you want your customer service agents to really have full case ownership, to be able to be empowered to do everything, pull in the folks that they want to, they can do that in the business version of our package. >> How and why should DevOps and customer service work together in your opinion? >> So historically, I've always felt that in many times engineering teams will identify because of monitoring and many other technologies that they're using that they'll understand, that there is something that could be customer impacting and they'll work that diligently. Unfortunately, it's been more of a, kind of a stakeholder relationship only with customer service. Yes, they need to know about it. But what we've really worked towards is making sure that customer service is not just the stakeholder, they're an active participant because issues can be identified from customers on the front end or proactively by items issues that are identified in the back office. So being able to be right in the center of the customer world is super, super critical. >> And when you look at the next year and even the next five years, what are you most excited about? >> I think it's really empowering helping our customers, our community, customer service agents on the frontline do more, have more power at their fingertips. I know over and over again, I think, greater value is delivered to customers through those individuals that are contacted not always in the best of times. And there's some amazing statistics out there sets that it takes 10 good experiences to make up for a bad experience if you're a customer. So there's a big impact to this or if there's a particular pricing or product issue that a customer service issue is way more important, way more impactful, will lead somebody to use an alternative service versus the product itself or the pricing of it. It's the service element that's most important. Given all of that, when somebody does in their time of need have a customer service issue, when they do have a positive experience, three quarters of the time, they're super open to sharing that with others. And so if I look at some of that, again, what I'm excited about looking forward is how can we empower those agents to be able from cradle to grave. Take a case that comes in proactively communicate with their customers to provide a great experience to address some of those statistics. And we're really focused on automating that process. It's another truism is that, well, every business wants their customers to exponentially grow. You can't grow your customer service organization exponentially. You can't hire an infinite number of bodies. And so technology plays a really important role in that. And having PagerDuty for customer service as an integrated part of your Salesforce or your Zendesk or your fresh desk implementation will help those teams scale a little quality of life for those agents is important. And we believe that we can really help in that area. Minimize stress disruptions and help them provide better service to their customers. >> Yeah. Well, we touched on a lot of areas in terms of customer service, but another key feature of your role at PagerDuty is in product. So if you could outline some of the key products at PagerDuty and perhaps some insight on what you have in the pipeline. >> Yeah. So outside of just customer service, one of the huge parts of our community are those in ITOps and DevOps. And one of the areas of responsibility I have working with the team that I'm super proud of is what we're doing with what was recently announced last September, our Rundeck acquisitions. So we're announcing something called Runbook actions as a part of the PagerDuty platform. Think of it as a very simple, safe level of automation that every DevOps team can use to better address issues and kind of eliminate a lot of the toil and manual activities when they get pulled into a major event. And so we're releasing this new add on product, very excited about it. It's the first introduction of our Rundeck technology, new as a part of the integrated within the PagerDuty platform. So the reception we've gotten so far in early days has been tremendous and people are really excited, again, to eliminate toil, eliminate a lot of manual activities, allow them to fix items faster when seconds really matter. >> Terrific. Well, really, really appreciate your insights, Jonathan Rende, SVP and General Manager of Products at PagerDuty. Thanks very much for your insights. >> Thank you, Natalie. >> Terrific. And that's all for this session of the PagerDuty Summit. I'm your host Natalie Erlich. Thank you for watching.

(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)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of PagerDuty Summit, I'm your host from theCUBE Natalie Erlich. Now we're joined by Sean Scott, the Chief Product Officer at PagerDuty, thank you very much for joining the program. >> Glad to be here, thank you for having me. >> Terrific. Well, you've been with PagerDuty for about six months, how's it going? >> It's going great. So, I joined PagerDuty because I saw the entire world was shifting to digital first and PagerDuty is key infrastructure for many of the world's largest companies, in fact over 60% of the Fortune 100 are customers. And more importantly, I see a much broader future our platform will play in digital operations for these companies going forward, and I'm excited to be part of that. >> Terrific. Well, you have really robust experience, over 20 years in the Valley leading product, marketing, and engineering teams. What prompted the move? I mean, you explained a bit, but just really curious why you made that? >> Sure, so yeah I had a long career at Amazon where I was responsible for much of the shopping experience, I ran the homepage, product page, checkout, a lot of the underlying tools and tech that supports that worldwide across all devices. And then more recently I built and launched the Scout autonomous delivery robot from the ground up, so. But after 15 years, and I was starting to look for a change and I started talking to Jen, our CEO, and the more we talked, the more excited I became about the platform and what it can be going forward for our customers. You know, the fact that we are already integrated with so many customers around the world and playing such a critical role as part of their infrastructure, and yet, I think we're just getting started, and we can help out companies in so many more use cases across our organizations and really eliminate a lot of time and waste from their processes. Well, this is your first PagerDuty Summit, I would love it if you could share perhaps some insight what you're planning to announce this week? >> Yeah, sure. So, we have a few things that we're announcing. One is, we announced last year, probably the biggest news last September was our acquisition of Rundeck; and so as part of that we're announcing our first integration of PagerDuty and Rundeck in the form of Runbook actions. So this is a, you could think of it as kind of quick, kind of micro-automations or short automations to give responders much more insights into what's actually happening with an incident. So maybe it's running a MIM command or a script on a server, we can actually run that directly from the PagerDuty interface so you don't have to SSH into a box for example, which is all just takes time and effort, and so when you're trying to remediate an issue of maybe a site being down or a service being down, it all happens right there. And even your frontline responders can now do those remediations as well, and those automation actions, to again, before they need to escalate to the next tier or bring in other devs to help troubleshoot. So that's pretty exciting. We're also announcing Service Craft, which is a new way to model your services and to show your services, and really understand your dependency graph. So if you think about one of the biggest challenges often when you're trying to remediate an issue is understanding is it me, or is it one of my dependent services? And so now we actually have new visualizations to really show the responders exactly what's happening and you can quickly see is it you, or is it maybe some dependency, maybe multiple teams are having the same issue that because one of the core services that everybody leverages is down and you can quickly see that. So that's pretty exciting as well. We have change correlation and incident outliers. So change correlation, you know, most incidents occur because of changes that were made by us people, and so being able to spotlight things like here's a change that was recently made, or here's a change based on our machine learning algorithms that we detected that could be a culprit here. So providing much richer insights, to again, reduce that mean time to resolution. So this whole team, our Event Intelligence team, that's our whole purpose in life is really just to reduce that mean time to resolution for our customers. Imagine waking up, you know, tomorrow, and your mean time to resolution just magically goes down because of our software updates, and that's how that team focuses on. And then the last one in this group is internet outliers, which is all about telling you if an incident, is this rare, or is this a frequent incident? And just giving you a little more insights into what you're seeing, which will again, help the responders. We have some other announcements coming up, but I'll save that for Summit. >> Perfect. Well, you know, I'd love it if you could share some insight on the competitive landscape, and how PagerDuty is, how you see its product that they're offering different from the others? >> Sure. So, we go head-to-head with a lot of competitors, and we, we have the, you know, being in the fortunate position that we do have a few competitors coming after us and some big names as well. But, you know, when we go head-to-head with these companies, we generally win. And we see we're constantly getting put in bake-offs with these other competitors. We had one customer I was talking to a few weeks back and they paired us against the incumbent, and out of the box, we saw a 50% improvement in mean time to acknowledge, so this is how quickly we can pull in the responder. And then in addition, I thought was more interesting, is we saw a 50% improvement in the mean time to resolution over the incumbent. And so while we do have competitors coming at us, I'm really happy with the way our product performs and our customers are too. So after these bake-offs, it's usually pretty clear who's staying and who's going. >> Yeah, so, when you were helping develop this program this week, what were some of the key areas that you really wanted to highlight? >> Yeah, so one of the big areas is really talking about our vision, and what is our go forward plan. Because I think while we're really known for incident response, I think, you know, some of the exciting things you'll hear about at Summit are kind of where we're going in terms of four pillars to our vision. One is flexibility. Flexible workflows, and enabling flexibility. So, if you think about all the things that our product is doing beyond DevOps. So for example, you know, we had a customer telling us about they had put PagerDuty in front of everything they're doing, so their whole building is IP enabled, and so they had a contractor drill through a water main, and it was instantly able to shut off the water. So they, you know, within 30 seconds, PagerDuty had notified the right responders of building maintenance, and within a minute and a half the water was shut off, and they made the comment that PagerDuty just paid for itself with this one incident. We see IOT device management, we see even organ transplant delivery using our product, and so we want to continue to fuel that with our flexibility. Second pillar is connect to everyone. We see that we have a lot of people connected, but we just launched fairly recently a customer service offering, so now we can get customer service not only informed what's going on, but also connecting to the dev teams, and engineering teams, and the service owners, to really give them more insights into the blast radius and what they may be seeing. The next one is connect everything. So we have over 550 out of the box integrations, and so that makes it seamless to connect to apps like Datadog. But then also we work where our customers work, so we can actually do work in Slack or MS Teams and take action right in those tools. And the last one is automate away to toil. So we want to automate what can be automated, and this goes back to the Rundeck acquisition that I mentioned, and getting that more deeply integrated with the stack, and with processes across an organization. And we're seeing that when our customers really take advantage of that platform they can really automate away to toil, and automate a lot of redundant work, and work that is just busy work that keeps people from doing their day jobs, so to speak. >> Yeah, well, obviously we had a really unusual last year with the pandemic. How do you think that it changed up business for you? Did it inspire you to move in a new direction? What do you see next in the near future? >> For sure. So, I saw that, and it's probably the reason why I came to PagerDuty, because I saw the transformation industries are making to digital first. Right? And so there was a lot of teams, a lot of companies struggled, but then a lot of companies also, florists, you'd take companies like Instacart, and DoorDash, and Zoom, you know, had a terrific year. And so, you know, PagerDuty, even with the pandemic, and companies that were struggling, we still grew pretty rapidly last year, and that's, I think it's pretty exciting, and it really speaks to that migration to digital where digital is now becoming, you know, table stakes, and just part of what you have to do as a business as opposed to it used to be a goal that oh, we need to do more on digital platform, and now it's like, you have to, you know, focus on your digital platform if you want to simply stay relevant today. And so I think that's really important for PagerDuty because that's where we really help companies thrive. >> Sean, that's really interesting. To close out this interview, do you have any last thoughts? >> No, I think that covers it, I think we're, you know, really excited to grow with our customers and we're seeing great traction in the market, and look forward to a bright future, and our platform really helping customers solve new problems that they might've not even considered us for yet. >> Terrific. Well, thank you very much for your insights. Sean Scott, the Chief Product Officer at PagerDuty. And that wraps up our coverage today for the PagerDuty Summit. I'm your host Natalie Erlich for theCUBE. Thank you for watching. (upbeat music)

(gentle music) >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of PagerDuty Summit. I'm your host for "theCUBE", Natalie Erlich. And now we're joined by the CEO and Chairperson for PagerDuty. We're joined by Jennifer Tejada. Thanks very much for joining the program. >> Hi, Natalie. It's great to have you, and "theCUBE", with us again. >> Fantastic, well, let's do an overview of what PagerDuty does and how it's helping its customers. >> Well, PagerDuty is a digital operations management platform. And what that means is that we use software to detect real-time issues and events from the complex ecosystem of technology that's really hard for humans to manage. We then intelligently orchestrate that work to the right teams, the right people with the right expertise, in the moments that matter the most to your business. And that's become especially important as the whole world has moved to a digital-first world. I mean, pretty much everything we do we can experience on demand today but that's only made possible through the complex technology and infrastructure that's managed and operated by responders all over the world. And PagerDuty's digital operation solution communicates issues in real time to ensure a perfect customer experience every time. >> Terrific, and if you could go through some of the key features like on-call management, incident response, event intelligence and analytics, it would be really great. >> Sure, so, our heritage started with automation of the on-call situation for engineers. So, back in the day, many organizations had software engineers building apps, platforms, infrastructure, but then they would throw that over the wall to an ops team who would manage it in production. That led to poor code quality, it led to lots of challenges when people would release software in the middle of the night on a Saturday, et cetera. And it meant that it took a very long time for companies to manually get a problem into the hands of the right person to solve it. We automated all of that using an API-based ecosystem that connects to over 460 of the most popular applications, observability stacks, monitoring systems, security applications, ticketing environments, cloud environments, et cetera. And so, all of that is now seamless. What that data enabled us to do was build an event management solution, which we call Event Intelligence, which now uses AI and machine learning to help responders understand the nature of all the different events coming at them. So, for instance, instead of seeing 100 events coming at you from 16 different monitoring environments in your infrastructure, PagerDuty will use AI to know that of those 175 are part of the same incident. They're events conspiring to becoming a business-impacting incident. And that allows our teams to get ahead of things, to become proactive versus reactive. We've also built analytics into our solution which helps our customers benchmark themselves and their operational efficiency versus their peer group. It helps them measure the health of their teams and understand which services are causing them the biggest challenges and the most expense whether that's labor expense or customer impact. And most recently, we've been really thrilled with our acquisition of Rundeck which helps us automate the remediation of events which now means that PagerDuty can automate incident management and incident response, both upstream, in terms of identifying events as they flow in, and also downstream, safe self-healing of infrastructure, application and platform environments to get things back to the way they need to work in order to serve end customers and serve employees across an enterprise. We're really excited as our vision has expanded to become the ubiquitous platform, the de facto platform, for real-time work. And what we've seen over the years is our customers coming up with very imaginative ways to use our software to solve real-time unstructured, unpredictable work across the company. That can be legal teams managing across different geographies and business units to close contracts at the end of the quarter, it could be financial services companies that are managing their physical security as well as their digital security through PagerDuty where time really, really matters if you have a data breach or a potential physical security incident. It could be customer service where customer service and support teams are working very closely with engineering teams to identify issues that are causing customers problems and to manage those issues collaboratively so that the customer experience is protected. So, just some examples of how PagerDuty is getting leveraged. And we're really excited to talk about some new innovations at Summit. >> Terrific, well, you really have your thumb on the pulse of corporate America, and as you know, last year, we talked about the pandemic and now we're looking at going back to the workforce, we're looking at the future of work. What does that look like for you? >> Well, the future of work is here and one thing is for sure, it has changed permanently. I think we all learned from the past year that remote work can provide a lot of flexibility and can level the playing field for people all around the world. It means you can access talent from different geographies. It means you can have a different level of work-life balance, but it also comes with its own set of complications. And one of the reasons we pulled Summit earlier from September into June was we really wanted to be a part of this kind of grand moment of reopening that we're seeing around the world. And that means that every organization that we're working with is redesigning their future. But that didn't start today, that started several months ago, as companies learned from their remote work experience, learned from their on-demand experience in dealing with their own customers. And it took some of those innovations and brought them forward into kind of the new design for the way teams will work, the way brands interact with their customers. And at Summit, you're going to hear us discuss why now is the moment, now is the moment to harness your digital acceleration because that's really the way that business is getting done. I mean, frankly, every business is now a software business and all business is now digital business. And PagerDuty has proven itself as the essential infrastructure on which all companies, all brands, can build their success. And as we widen our aperture we think about building the platform for not just today's challenges, but tomorrow's challenges. So, at Summit, you'll hear us talking a lot about resilience and how your entire organization and your brand will be judged on your ability to stand up a resilient business, a resilient brand experience for your customers. Today, uptime is money and resilience and reliability are the currency of tomorrow. We're entering into this era where autonomy is everything when it comes to work. I mean, employees, and generally humans, do not want to be stuck managing mundane tasks. And the hybrid work arrangements that we're anticipating mean that PagerDuty's platform will become even more essential for customers because hybrid work drives more complexity. It means your teams are distributed, they maybe distributed across regions, co-located, remote at home, in different time zones. And when something's going down that's really causing a problem in your business, you need to orchestrate work across the right people that can make a difference in that moment. Autonomy and flexibility, frankly, is what people expect from work. And they also expect to engage with apps and platforms that are easy to use, that are intuitive, that deliver really fast time to value. And that has long been at the core of PagerDuty's offering and value proposition. And none of these autonomous or automation investments replace human expertise. They allow our platform to channel that expertise and the expertise of your users to give them context and visibility to make the best possible decisions in the moment that matters. And I think that is so empowering as we think about this flexible new hybrid way of working. And then lastly- >> And I love the points. >> Oh yeah, go ahead. >> Yeah, I love the points that you make about resilience and autonomy. I'd love it if you could just drive a little further how we can build more connection now that we're going into the office and also integrating this kind of hybrid system. >> Well, I think it's really interesting because in some ways I feel super connected to my employees 'cause I'm engaging with them one-to-one, my box and their box. I have had the opportunity to stay connected to customers and executives across the industry over course of the pandemic. And yet, I'm an extrovert, I miss the in-person opportunity that kinetic energy that comes with being together in a room. And I'm looking forward to being back in studio, doing interviews with you, Natalie. But at the same time, I appreciate the convenience that I've gained. Like, I'm not looking forward to commuting again. I mean, I plan to only get on the road during off hours in the future. And I realize that I don't have to travel six hours for a two-hour meeting on the other side of the U.S., or 15 hours to have a meeting in Europe, I can get a lot of business done online. Having said that, that connection is so important. The social contract that you create with your customers and your businesses is so important. And making sure that we can connect the complex technology that runs the world today is also really important. And that's where PagerDuty plays a role. PagerDuty really helps you know who you need, what you can leverage them for, and gets them in touch when you need them, like I said, on the work that is somewhat unpredictable but can be very high priority, the highest priority in the case of a security breach or a major customer-impacting incident. And so, using AI apps, or sorry, using AI and automation to make sure that we can intelligently route work to the right people is a big part of how our platform has come together and really become the central nervous system of the digital economy. >> Yeah, I mean, these are really great points and it's a bit of a silver lining actually with the pandemic, learning that we can really stay connected despite not being in the office and now have more hybrid systems of work. But let's switch now gears to talk about leadership in our communities and how we can truly activate change and a far more just and equitable world. >> Well, I am a huge believer in social responsibility and social impact, and I really appreciate how all of our employees have come together to leverage PagerDuty's platform for good. When we went public, we launched pagerduty.org which was led by Olivia Khalili. And I know you'll hear from her and some of our impact customers this week at Summit, but I think what's really important is how engaging it is for our employee base. Last year, 93% of PagerDuty employees have volunteered their time for social causes and philanthropy. And that's in a time when we were all enduring a hardship of our own, we were all facing an unprecedented pandemic. We've donated over a million dollars in financial grants to over 400 organizations through strategic giving and employee-match programs. And we've opened civic engagement. We've opened source civic engagement with our Day for Change for our employees and our toolkits which we've shared broadly throughout the industry. We signed on to the Board Challenge which I was thrilled to do because I'm a big believer that more diversity in the boardroom is going to lead more equity in corporate America. And thrilled to add Bonita Stewart and Dr. Alec Gallimore to our board last year. And I think representation is so important at the board level, not just because it's the right thing to do, not just because it's the right thing for business, but it's the right thing for career growth for your employees, showing them the path to what's possible for them with your company. And finally, we published PagerDuty's first ever "Inclusion Diversity and Equity Report", which is part of our effort to provide transparency around not just what we're doing, but how we're measuring it, how we're progressing, so that we can get better every year. And we've highlighted our work to support time-critical health, our work to support equity in the response to COVID including vaccine distribution. And I really enjoy some of the impact stories that we hear from our non-for-profit partners that are working with us at pagerduty.org. So, leadership is what you make of it and you can lead from every chair in an organization. And I'm so proud of the leadership, our employees, and many of our customers have demonstrated in this time of particular challenge around the globe. And we're not through it entirely yet, and so, I'm just really hopeful that we can all come out of this better together. >> Right, and speaking about leadership, why do you think that diversity is so critical for effective leadership? >> Well, first of all, I think it's our responsibility to reflect the communities that we serve. My users do not all look the same, they don't come from the same background, they're from over 150 countries around the world. They're solving a diverse set of problems. And in fact, the problems they're solving with our platform is growing every day as they imagine how to apply our technology, our digital operations platform, to different types of real-time work around their companies. But diversity is also important in problem solving, in looking at challenges through different lenses, in thinking about the different stakeholders that you serve in that process, and in creating an equitable community around you, creating opportunity for people around you. I mean, one of the things that we did that was a business decision a couple of years ago was to open an office in Atlanta. And part of that was to create a path, create opportunities for Georgians and people in the Metro Atlanta area to participate in the tech industry. This was before everybody was working from home, before those geographical barriers were broken down. And I'm thrilled to say, we have a thriving community now in Atlanta that's growing and we're hiring. But that's just one example. That was the smart thing to do for our business, but it was also a great thing to do, I think, for the community. And we've brought new minds and all kinds of new people into our business. And this month we're celebrating Pride Month at PagerDuty, which I'm thrilled to do. We have very active LGBTQ community who contribute hugely to our efforts and to our customers' success. And we think that everybody deserves an equal shot at opportunity at the lifestyle they want and the opportunity to build their own bright future. >> Great, and just lastly, what's the main focus for PagerDuty in the next year? >> The main focus for PagerDuty next year is really executing on our strategy to become the defacto platform for real-time work, ensuring that we can leverage the largest domain-agnostic ecosystem of connected apps and services, that we can leverage the largest dataset based on responder data, workflows, events and incidents to help our customers deliver the resiliency, the autonomy, and the connectedness that they're looking for to serve their customers and accelerate their digital prospects and frankly, to prosper in the future. So, it really is about becoming that de facto platform for action for all your real-time, unstructured and important work. >> Well, Jennifer Tejada, the CEO and Chairperson of PagerDuty, loved having you on this program. Really appreciate your insights on diversity and leadership, and, of course, the next phase for PagerDuty itself. I'm your host for "theCUBE" now covering the PagerDuty Summit. Thanks for watching. (bright music)

>> 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)

>> Narrator: From around the globe. It's theCUBE with digital coverage of PagerDuty summit 2020, brought to you by PagerDuty. >> Welcome to theCUBES coverage of PagerDuty summit 20, I'm Lisa Martin. Very pleased to welcome back to theCUBE, one of our alumna, distinguished alumna, the CEO of PagerDuty, Jennifer Jehada. Jennifer it's great to be talking with you today. >> Thanks Lisa, it's great to be here with theCUBE again and great to see you. >> Yeah, so lots happened in the last six months alone with that whiplash from all that, but you've been fifth year of the PagerDuty summit. The first year virtual, lot of things have changed. Talk to us about the evolution of PagerDuty over the last few years in particularly the last six months. >> Well, let's start with the last six months. I mean, I think we have all seen a society go through a big transformation with a global pandemic, kind of underpinning a volatile economic environment, a very difficult jobs environment. But in many cases, we've also seen tremendous acceleration. We've seen companies pull forward 10 years of transformation into a matter of months. And we saw that recently in some Kinsey research. And this is really been driven by the compulsory need for brands to meet their consumers online, for companies to enable and empower their employees online and for children to be able to learn online. And so, as we've moved, made this shift to doing everything in the digital world, it means that all of our customers, the biggest brands in the fortune 500, the most innovative tech companies that you're aware of. They've all had to really transform quickly to deliver an entire, nearly perfect customer experience online. And the stakes are higher, because they can't depend on their bricks and mortar revenue for business success. And that's meant that IT teams and developer teams have become the frontline of the digital default era because digital really truly is, the new operating system. That kind of fits squarely into how PagerDuty is evolve. Because we started out as a platform that served developers and helping them manage on-call notifications and alerting. So, engineers who wanted to be alerted when something went wrong and make sure they could address an issue in a service they were responsible for, before it had customer impact. Over the last five years, we've really evolved the platform, leveraging over a decade of proprietary data, about events, about incidents, about people, responder behavior, with machine learning, to really help our customers and engineering and IT, and IT ops and security and in customer support, truly manage what is an increasingly complex digital tech ecosystem. And this means that we're using software and automation to detect issues. We're then intelligently routing those issues in that work, that unplanned spontaneous work to the right people in the right moments. So that a customer and employee doesn't even feel any pain. There is no issue with availability. They can continue to engage with a brand or a service the way they want to. And that's become increasingly important because that's where all the revenue is today. >> It's essential, it's like, we've been talking for months about essential frontline workers and we think right away of healthcare, fire police, things like that. But, the digital default that you talked about, there's new digital frontline. I know PagerDuty has over 13,000 customers and some of the new sort of digital frontline that are enabling people to do everything from work, shop, learn, zoom, Netflix for example, Peloton helping us, keep fit in this time of such isolation, are now considered essential and depending on PagerDuty to help them be able to do that. To meet those increasing customer demands. >> Sure, all of these are PagerDuty customers. And the thing about the digital frontline is they can be invisible. You don't necessarily see them because they're behind the scenes trying to manage all the complex technology that makes that on demand Peloton class efficient and amazing for you. And when that class doesn't work, you're unhappy with Peloton. It really directly impacts the brand. Luckily Peloton is very reliable. I'm a big Peloton fun myself. And I really like to acknowledge and just let the frontline know that we do see them. We know that digital workers have been putting in on average, an extra 10 to 15 hours a week. During this environment, many of them are also either living in isolation on their own because of shelter in place rules, or they're trying to manage their own children's schooling. And, we all ask ourselves this question, are we working from home or are we living at work? It's sometimes those lines are blurred. So, anything that we can do as a platform to automate more and more of this work for the digital frontline, is really our focus. And this year at summit, we're going to be talking in particular about freeing our users from complexity about helping them orchestrate and automate work more effectively. And about leveraging machine learning and analytics to improve the cost efficiency, the productivity and the team, the health of their digital teams and their digital operations. >> So, in your keynote, you're going to be talking about digital ops. That's kind of dig into that. Cause we've shifted from this very structured way of working to sort of this chaotic approach, the last six months. Digital ops, what does it mean from PagerDuty's perspective and how is it going to impact every business? >> Well, I think when we look forward in a couple of years, we won't even use the word digital. It'll just be the operations of a company of a modern organization. How do you bring together all the application technology, the infrastructure technology, the networking, the Wi-Fi connectivity, the customer engagement data. How do you bring all of that together, to deliver these wonderful experiences that we've become reliant? You use the word essential, right? Well, PagerDuty essentially become the critical foundation or infrastructure that helps companies manage all this technology. And the problem is, with architecture becoming more distributed with powerful tools like the cloud, that's actually proliferated the complexity. It's actually increased the speed of the number of applications and services that an organization has mattered. And so, adopting the cloud can be very powerful for a company. It can be very freeing. It can allow you to innovate much faster. But it also, is not an easy thing to do. There's a lot of change management associated with it. And you have to make sure, that your team is ready for it. PagerDuty really facilitates a cultural shift, leveraging DevOps, which really, in a DevOps culture really in methodology allows companies to empower people closest to the action, to make better decisions. If you think about this digital world, we're living in, a consumer wait a nanosecond, a microsecond, maybe a couple of seconds. If you don't get that experience to be perfect for them. And yet traditional ways of solving technology problems, or ticketing systems and command and control environments that would take hours, maybe days to resolve issues. We don't have that time anymore. And so, digital operations is all about instantly detecting an issue, being able to run correlation and consolidate those issues to start to become more proactive, to predict whether or not, this small issue could become a major incident. And address it, resolve it, leveraging automation, before customers feel any pain before you see any impact to the business, the bottom line or brand reputation. >> All of those, are absolutely critical for every type of company, every size, every industry, because as you talked about, customers are demanding, we're also ready to, if something doesn't happen right away, we're going to go find the next service that's going to be able to deliver it. And the cost of that to a business, is I saw some numbers that you shared that if that costs you a hundred, a second of a minute, rather of downtime. A year ago, costs you a $100,000. That's now 4 to 5X. So, that costs can actually put a company adding up out of business. And we're in this. Let's not just survive, but thrive mode. And, to be able to have that immediate response. And as you say, shift from being reactive to proactive is I think absolutely business critical. >> Lisa, you should come work for us. >> You have this down pat. >> (laughs) And you're exactly right. I mean, I remember back in the day when I used to work in an office and walk out onto the street before I went home, you would see employees standing outside, switching back and forth between their rideshare app, their food delivery app, maybe their dating app, or their movie entertainment app. And if one thing is not serving them fast enough, they just switched to the other one. And, consumers are very fickle. They've got become increasingly more demanding, which means there are more demands on our teams and that digital frontline and our technology. And in fact, to your point, because all of that revenue has shifted online over the last six months. We've seen the cost of a minute and that cost is really calculated based on loss, labor productivity, but also lost revenue. We've seen that cost go up, from if you lost a $100,000 during disruption last year, you're maybe losing half a million dollars a minute when your app is disrupted. And, these apps and websites don't really go down very often anymore, but small disruptions, when you're trying to close out your shopping cart, when you're trying to select something, when you're trying to do some research. It can be very frustrating, when all of those little pieces backed by very complex technology, don't come together beautifully. And, that's where PagerDuty brings the power of automation, the power of data and intelligence and increasingly orchestrates all this work. We don't start our day anymore by coming into an office, having a very structured well laid out calendar and environment. We often are interrupted constantly throughout the day. And PagerDuty was designed and architected to serve unpredictable, spontaneous, but emergent, meaning time critical and mission critical work. And I think that's really important because that digital environment is how companies and brands build trust with their consumers or their employees. PagerDuty essentially operationalizes that trust. The challenge with trust, is it can take years to build trust up and you can destroy it in a matter of seconds. And so, that's become really important for our customers. >> Absolutely, another thing that obviously has gone on, in the last six months is, you talked about those digital frontline workers working an extra 10 to 15 hours a week, living at work basically, but also the number of incidents has gone up. But how has PagerDuty helping those folks respond to and reduce the incidents faster? >> Well, this is something that I'm very proud of, and PagerDuty's entire product and engineering team should be extremely proud of. I mean, we were held to a very high standard. Because we're the platform that is expected to be up, when everything else is having a bad day. And in this particular environment, we've seen a number of our customers experience unprecedented demand and scale, like zoom and Netflix, who you mentioned earlier. And when that happens, that puts a lot of pressure, events transiting across our platform on PagerDuty. PagerDuty has not only held up extremely well. Seeing some customers experiencing 50 times the number of incidents and other customers experiencing maybe 12 times the number of incidents they used to. Those customers are actually seeing an improvement in their time to resolve an incident by about 20%. So, I love the fact that, not only have we scaled almost seamlessly in this environment with the customers of ours that are seeing the most demand and the most change. And at the same time, we've helped all of our customers improve their time to resolve these incidents, to improve their overall business outcomes. >> One of the things I saw Jennifer recently, I think it was from McKinsey, was that 92% of this, is the survey before the pandemics. That, yeah, we've got to shift to a digital business. So, I'm curious customers that were on that cussing. We're not there yet, but we need to go. When this happened six months ago, when they came to PagerDuty, how did you advise them to be able to do this when time was of the essence? >> Well, first of all, one of our first company value, is champion the customer. So, I think our initial response to what we saw happen as COVID started to impact many industries was to listen. Was to lean in with empathy and try and understand the position our customers were in. Because just like our employees, every person is affected differently by this environment. And every customer has had a different experience. Some industries have done very well, and we hear a lot about that on the news, but many industries are really having a very difficult time and have had to massively transform their business model just to survive, much less to thrive. And so, PagerDuty has really worked with those customers to help them manage the challenge of trying to transform and accelerate their digital offerings and at the same time, reduce their overall costs. And we do that very effectively. We did a study with IDC about a year ago, and found that, most of our enterprise customers experience a 730% return on investment in four months. And that's because we automate what has traditionally been a lot of manual work, instead of just alerting someone there's a problem. We orchestrate that problem across cross-functional teams, who otherwise might not be able to find each other and are now distributed. So, there's even more complicated. You can't just sit in a room and solve these problems together anymore. We actually capture all of the data that is created in the process of resolving an incident. And now, we're using machine learning and AI to make recommendations, to suggest ways to resolve an incident, to leverage past incident experiences and experts within the platform to do that. And that means that we're continually consolidating the time that it takes to resolve an incident from detection all the way through to being back to recovery, but also reducing the amount of manual work that people have to do, which also reduces their stress when they're under fire and under time constraints. Because they know these types of incidents can have a public and a financial impact on their companies. We also help them learn from every incident that runs on the platform. And we're really bringing a more power to the table on that front, with some of the new releases. I'll be talking about later on this morning with analytics and our analytics lab. >> As we look at the future, the future of life is online, right? The future of work is online, but also distributed teams. Cause we know that things are going to come back to normal, but a lot isn't. So, being able to empower organizations to make that pivot so quickly, you brought up a great point about it's not just the end-user customer who can churn and then go blast about it to social media and cause even more churn. But it's also the digital frontline worker who totally needs to be cared for, because of burnout happens. That's a big issue that every company has to deal with. How is PagerDuty kind of really focused on, you mentioned culture on helping that digital frontline worker not feel burnout or those teams collaborate better? >> Well, we look at operations through the lens of sort of humanity. And we think about what's the impact of the operational environment today on what we call team health. And in our analytics solution, we can heat map your team for you and help you understand who in your team is experiencing the most incident response stress. they're having to take on work during dinner time, after hours on weekends, in the middle of the night. Cause these big incidents, for some reason, don't seem to happen at one on a Tuesday. They tend to happen at 4:00 AM on a Saturday. And oftentimes what happens is what I call the hero syndrome. You have a particularly great developer who becomes the subject matter expert, who gets pulled into every major difficult puzzle or incident to solve. And the next thing, that person's spending 50% of their time on unplanned, unpredictable high stress work. And we can see that, before it becomes that challenging and alert leaders that they potentially have a problem. We also, in our analytics products can help managers benchmark their teams in terms of their overall productivity, how much their services are costing them to run and manage. And also looking after the health of those folks. And, we've often said PagerDuty is for people. We really build everything from design to architecture, in service of helping our users be more efficient, helping our users get to the work that matters the most to them. And helping our users to learn. Like I said, with every incident or problem or challenge that runs on the platform. And likewise, I believe culture is a business imperative. Likewise is diversity and equality and PagerDuty as a platform from a technology perspective that doesn't discriminate. And we're also a company that is really focused on unbalanced, on belonging, on inclusion, diversity and equality in everything that we do. And I'm really excited that at summit, we have Derek Johnson who is the president of the NAACP, speaking with us to talk about how we get out the vote, how we support individuals in having a say in leveraging their voices at a time when I think it's more important than ever. >> And that was one of the things that really struck me Jennifer, when I was looking at, Hey, what's going on with PagerDuty summit 20. And just even scanning the website with the photographs of the speakers from keynotes and general session to break out influencers, the amount of representation of women and people of color and diversity, really struck me. Because we just don't see that enough. And I just wanted to say, congratulations as a woman who's been in tech for 15 years. That is so important, but it's not easy to achieve. >> Well, thank you for saying that. I mean, honestly, I think that when you look on that summit website and at those speakers, it really is a great picture or snapshot of the richly diverse community that PagerDuty serves and engages in partners in. Sometimes you just have to be more intentional about identifying some of those phenomenal speakers, who are maybe not like the obvious person to have on a topic because we become accustomed used to having the same types of speakers over and over again. So, this started with intent, but to be honest, like these people are out there and I think we have to give them a stage. We have to give them a spotlight. And it's not about whether you're a man or a woman at our stage. It's making sure that the entire summit environment really brings a diverse and I think rich collection of expertise of experience to the table, so that we all benefit. And I'm really excited. There are just so many fantastic folks joining us from Brett Taylor, who is the president and CEO of Salesforce and was the founding CTO of Facebook to Andy Jassy, who is leading Amazon web services right now. There's Ebony Beckwith who's going to speak about some of the great things that we're doing with pagerduty.org and the list goes on and on. I could spend, all morning talking about the people I'm excited to hear from and learn from. But I would encourage everybody who's putting an event together, to have a strategy and be intentional and be insistent about making sure that your content and the people providing that content, the experts that you're bringing to bear really do reflect the community that we're all trying to serve. >> That is outstanding and congratulations on PagerDuty summit by the first virtual, but you're going to have the opportunity to influence and educate so many more people. Jennifer, it's been such a pleasure talking to you and having you back on theCUBE. I look forward to seeing you again soon. >> Thank you so much, Lisa. It's been great to be with you. >> All right, for Jennifer Tejada. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE conversation. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe. It's theCUBE with digital coverage of PagerDuty summit 2020, brought to you by PagerDuty >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of PagerDuty summit 20, I'm Lisa Martin, and I'm pleased to welcome back, one of the PagerDuty alumni of theCUBE, Rachel Obstler the VP of product for PagerDuty. Rachel, it's great to talk to you today. >> Oh, it's great to talk to you too, Lisa. Thank you for having me. >> So one benefit of this, you know, massive pivot in the last six months is companies like PagerDuty get to reach even more folks that would come in person. So, I know the summit is expecting a lot more people to attend because there's no travel limits, but since this massive pivot happened in the last a few months, I want to to understand what some of the things are that you've observed as the VP of product. What have you seen that really is revolutionary? >> You know, one thing that we saw, and this is back a couple of months when COVID first happened, we thought, you know, it seems like there's an unprecedented shift to people using online services and so we wanted to check and see if that load was represented in our platform. And of course, you know, we help companies manage digital operations, respond to incidents. And so we actually looked at the incident load and we saw that some industries or some verticals had seen an unprecedented growth in incidents. So, this load was really impacting their platforms and in some cases like with online learning or e-learning, we saw they had over 10 times the number of incidents and the period immediately following the start of the pandemic and everyone shifting to work from home, from what they had seen just before. >> So, was this, some of the things that you looked at at your platform, and then it was that what prompted the survey that you guys just released last week? >> Yeah, that's exactly right. So, we saw that in our platform, we've also seen since then it is calmed down a bit. So, if we look at the six months after the pandemic really started and everyone moved to work from home versus the six months before, we saw about a 38% increase. So it's still an increase even now and so then this did prompt us to do a survey because we wanted to see not just what was reflected in our platform, but we wanted to talk to maybe companies that may not be PagerDuty customers as well as customers, and also understand how their attitudes you know were changing and what they were seeing. So, it's not just about the data, but it's also about the beliefs and what sort of stress people are feeling. >> And that stress is so real and it's something that if it's not addressed, we're talking about customer support, folks who are on the digital front lines and can affect a customer churning, for example, the brand reputation is on the line. So, what are some of the interesting things that you've found talking to these, IT practitioners, these Devops folks about what they've experienced in terms of incidents and their time in the last six months? >> Yeah, that is a great question. So I'll share some of the data that we found. I mean, one is that responders said that pressure on their digital services has increased about 80%. So that's, a pretty significant number, 62% of IT and Devops practitioners are working in additional or spending an additional 10 hours per week, on responding to incidents and so if you think about, you know, the average work week, maybe it's 40 hours, I know most of us don't actually work 40 hours, maybe they're working 50 hours, even in that case, like that's a 1/5 of their time. So, this is pretty significant amount of their time that they're spending on responding to issues as opposed to innovating, which is really what they want to be doing is building new goods and services and, you know, capabilities for their customers. >> So spending some, you know, 10 hours extra a week reacting, and I imagine that a good amount of those 10 hours are in the middle of the night or kind of random hours, whereas before the volume they didn't see. So, what are some of the things that PagerDuty is can do to help with that, What are some of the things that these practitioners talk to you guys about? This will help us tremendously because we know that this crazy time it's going to be TBD for a little while longer. >> Yeah, that's a really good question and just some stats on that, because we also have stats on that from the survey, we saw that more than half of the respondents of the survey are being asked to respond to incidents five plus times, more than five times on personal time during the week. And so that could be, it doesn't have to be in the middle of the night. It could be in the middle of the night, it could be after hours, dinner time, breakfast time, but that's still a lot of interruptions for you know, your life. And so there are a number of things that PagerDuty can do. One of a couple of the things that we really focus on are around intelligence and automation and so examples of intelligence are, if you have a lot of issues that are coming at you, you may not know which ones are important, which ones you should work on, which ones you can ignore, which ones are part of a larger problem. And so we have a lot of capabilities in the system that group things together, help you understand which ones are critical, which ones are not critical, get them to the right person and also provide important context for fixing them. So, you may want to know things like, this is impacting my service right now, our other services impacted, which teams are working on that. Who should I collaborate with? Or you may want to know, Hey, I've never seen this before myself. Has it ever happened before? I'd like to see past that are similar. So, those are just some examples of the things that we can provide. It's intelligence when someone is, you know, interrupted and has to immediately figure out, what do I do with this issue? When it comes to automation, you know, we can help customers in a number of different ways. One is we can automate menial tasks, like let's imagine that you find out there's an issue, you think this is a very serious issue, you need to pull in more people, well, pulling them into a bridge a chat channel, making sure they have the right information. We make it super easy for customers to do things like that. But we also make it easy for them to automate maybe diagnostics. Like maybe they want to call out to assist them and pull in more information. Maybe they want to actually be start a server. So there's all sorts of ways that you can automate. We also help you automate communication to the broader environment or the broader set of people. So, you mentioned earlier customer service teams. Well, if you're a development team and you know, there's an issue and you know, that customer service teams are soon going to be getting a whole bunch of tickets. They need to know what's going on, so that they can answer those tickets and maybe get ahead of them, maybe even post something on a status page, telling customers, yes, we know we have an issue so they know it's being worked on and they know that it's being taken care of. >> You know, one of the things I didn't think about when in the beginning of this pandemic, because there was such chaos, there still is chaos, is the demand for digital services dramatically increased and it wasn't just ordering groceries online or okay, I can't go to a store so, I'm going to depend even more on Amazon than I have before. And we have this culture where we expect, we can get anything we want and some cities overnight, or rather in a couple of hours, the demand is there. The customer expectation is there and the patient system enabling if I think of like a Netflix, which is a customer of PagerDuty's and all of the competing streaming services, if I'm not going to get what I want, within a second, I'm going to go find somebody else, who's going to be able to deliver the service that I'm expecting. To the demand on the digital services is greater and greater and one of the things I saw in that survey that you guys just published is that 40% of the respondents think it's actually going to get worse from here. So they got to be able to implement a AIOps tools and automation. Now, if the volume isn't going to decrease, right? >> Yeah, you've really nailed it Lisa. That's exactly what's happening out there and I think it's not going to decrease. We've basically not just had a, a blip in time, people have shifted how they're operating to being online and now they're used to it. And this is probably not going to change in the foreseeable future. And so absolutely when you're seeing these types of increases in demand for your services, which leads to more incidents that leads to more noise, it leads to a lot more operational work, basically you have to find a way to manage it if you want to keep innovating and to your point, customers or end users expect more innovation, right? They're not going to expect that a company is going to stop innovating just because they have a got a lot more users now. So, absolutely the main way or one of the big ways that customers really need to address this is to be able to work smarter and, you know, tools that help you automate things and help you gather data faster and provide intelligence to things and help you find the signal from the noise like the PageDuty are really important to serving that bigger need that is not going away as you said. Yeah, that's theCuBEs tagline extracting signal from the noise and the thing that's important about that is right now, as you talked about there's blurred lines, right? We either work from home or we live at work and I think it every day it can change and that's challenging. Not only is there no commute so you can work or the expectation is you going to to be online, you going to to be accessible but also one of the very real challenges that we're all experiencing, no matter what industry you work in is burnout is real. It's been real for a long time, but right now it's critical for organizations to help reduce, address it and help reduce it. What are some of the things that you're hearing when you're talking to customers about, hey guys, PagerDuty, how can you help my practitioners, my DevOps folks become less reactive? How can you help us manage these incidents so that they can go back to innovating, which is what they like to do, because we want to be able going to have productive, happy employees? >> Yeah, that's a great question. So, some of the things that we can do is help you look across all your incidents and understand where are you getting repeat incidents. We can also help you look at things that are showing up as incidents that are notifying people, but aren't real incidents. So, for instance, we've looked at our system and we've seen that a decent percentage of incidents auto resolve within two minutes or three minutes and so those are incidents that are still notifying someone, but then maybe there's auto resolution capabilities in the platform, maybe there's maybe it was just a very delicate monitor that was finding something wasn't really there. But in any case, this is disturbing someone and maybe waking them up for no reason and so there are tools that we can provide that allow you to set rules around things like this. Like, don't tell me about this, unless it's still going for three minutes, don't tell me, unless it happens three times in a row. Like, there's really easy ways to cut down on a lot of noise that distracts people that interrupts them that maybe bothers them off hours, which you really want to avoid. And then beyond that, there's also things that you can do in our system and in general, that help you just understand when someone had a bad on call. So, knowing when there's certain people that are getting, woken up a lot or responding off hours or spending a lot of time, responding to issues or responding to just a lot of issues in general, that's something that we can provide so that, you know, any manager can look across team and just see like, which people really need a little bit of relief. >> And I'm sure that would be welcomed by everybody in every industry. You know, we talk about customer experience all the time, pandemic or no pandemic, but really ultimately something that I've always believed and seen it is that, if the employee experience isn't really good, then that is directly able to negatively impact the customer experience. But one of the things I was looking at too, like with respect to like first Gen AIOps tools, with respect to ROI companies saying, I'm not really getting that yet. So give me an insight into how PagerDuty thinks that second Gen AIops tools are going to help dial up that ROI for companies to really invest in this so, that they are the winners of tomorrow? >> That's a really good question. So, a lot of the earlier AIOps tools require a lot of training. So, you know, people to spend time telling the system, this should be grouped, or that should be grouped and also requires not just that upfront training for them to work, but also ongoing training. So, continually training the system. And so second Gen AI really uses the data and the system to automatically make suggestions about things. And that's very straightforward with a tool like PagerDuty because we have all this information about what happened in the past. What happened when you were responding to incidents, who responded to them, how long they took, how bad they were. And so we can really leverage a lot of that data to help automatically reduce noise and point out the things that are important, without having people needing to spend a lot of time with the system upfront, before anything actually works. And so, in fact, like we can just have you turn it on, it works and it continues to learn and get better. >> And that's critical because in this digital default, as I know you've got PagerDuty is talking about, I spoke with Jennifer Todd about that. There is no more luxury of time about a company determining, well, how should we go on our digital transformation? That time luxury is gone. Last question, Rachel, for you, fifth PD summit, first virtual, but the opportunity to engage and interact with a lot more customers since there are no trouble limits. I'm just curious some of the things that are, that you're excited about at this year's event. >> You know, one of the things I'm excited about is I think we're able to give our attendees a lot more choice of what do they attend because it's virtual, so you don't have to have a room, you know, where you can have a certain number of, you know, sessions and only one session at a time. So, I think there's going to be more choice for our customers. We're also going to have a great lineup of speakers. So, I think this also means that not only can we have more attendees show up because it's more convenient, but we can have more really great speakers and industry luminaries because they don't have to also travel to the site, but they can do things from where they are. So, I think those are two of the really great things about, you know, the remote world that we live in. I, of course am disappointed that I'm not going to be able to see more customers, face to face, or at least in the same room and have that interaction, but we'll still have plenty of meetings even though we'll be doing it online. >> Silver linings, well Rachel, it's been great having you on the program. Can't wait to hear about all the great things that come from the summit 20. Appreciate your time. >> Thank you, Lisa. It's great to be here. I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching this CUBE conversation. (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)

>> Presenter: From around the globe, it's the cube, with digital coverage of pager duty summit 2020. Brought to you by pager duty. >> Welcome to this cube conversation. I'm Lisa Martin, today talking with Tammy Bryant is a cube alumna, the principal Site reliability engineer at Gremlin and the co-founder and CTO of the Girl Geek Academy. Tammy, it's great to have you on the program again. >> Hi Lisa, thanks so much for having me again. It's great to be here. >> So one of the things I saw in your background 10 plus years of technical expertise, and SRE, and chaos engineering, and I thought chaos engineering, I feel like I'm living in chaos right now. What is chaos engineering and why do you break things on purpose? >> Yep. So the idea of chaos engineering is that we're, breaking systems but in a thoughtful controlled way, to identify weaknesses in systems. So that's really what it's all about. The idea there is, you know, When you're doing really complicated work with technical systems, so like, for example, distributed systems and say, for example, you're working at a bank, it's tough to be able to pinpoint the exact failure mode that could cause a really large outage for your customers. And that's what chaos engineering is all about. you inject the failure proactively, to identify the issues and then you fix them before they actually cause really big problems for customers and you do it during the middle of the day, you know, when you're feeling great, instead of being paged in the middle of the night for an incident, that's actually like causing your customers pain, and making you lose a lot of money. So that's what chaos engineering really is. >> Are you seeing in the last six months since the world is so different, are you seeing an increase in customers? Now with, the for example, Brick and Mortars shut down and everything having to convert to digital if it wasn't already? Is there an increase in demand for chaos engineering services? >> Yeah, definitely. So a lot of people are asking what is chaos engineering, how can I use ,it will it help me reduce my incidents? and definitely because there are a lot of new services that have been rolled out recently, say, for example, curbside pickup. That's a whole new thing that had to be created really recently to be able to handle a large amount of load. And you know, people show up, they want to get their product really fast, 'cause they want to be able to just get back home quickly. And that's something that we've been working on with our customers is to make sure that curbside pickup experience is really great. The other interesting thing that we've been working on because of the pandemic is making sure that banks are really reliable, and that customers are able to get access to their money when they need it. And able to see that information too. And you can imagine that not as when you're in lockdown, and you only can leave your house for maybe an hour a day, you need to be able to quickly get access to your money to buy food, and we've seen some big incidents recently, where that hasn't been the case. Yeah. >> And I can imagine I mean, just thinking of what happened with, everything six months ago and how people were, we are just, demanding, right, consumers were demanding, we expect to get whatever we want, whether it's something we buy on Amazon, something that we stream on Netflix, or whatnot, we have this expectation that we can almost get it in real time. But there was a there was, you know what, there was a delay a few months ago, and there still is to some degree. But companies like Amazon and Netflix, I can imagine, really must have a big focus on chaos engineering, to test these things regularly. And now have proved, I would imagine to some degree that with chaos engineering that they have built, they're built to withstand that. >> Yes, exactly. So our founders at Gremlin came from Netflix and Amazon, our CEO had worked at both where he done chaos engineering, and that's actually why he decided to create Gremlin. It's the first company in the world to offer chaos engineering as a service. And you know, obviously, when you're working somewhere like Netflix, you know the whole product, you have to be able to get access to that movie, that TV show, right in that moment, and also customers expect to be able to see that on for example. There PlayStation in their living room and it should work and there paying for a subscription, So, to be able to keep them on that subscription, you need to offer a great service. Same thing with Amazon, you know, Amazon.com, they've done a lot of chaos engineering work over many years now to be able to make sure that everything is available. And it's not just that, the entire amazon.com is up and running. It's also for example, that when you go and look at a page that the recommendation service works toO and they're able to show you, hey, here's some other things that you might like to get to buy at this time. And I like as as a consumer, I love that 'cause it helps me save time and effort and even money as well 'cause it's giving you some good advice. So that's the type of statement we do. >> Exactly, So. when you're working with customers, I'd love to understand just a little bit from the, like the conversational standpoint is this now, is chaos engineering now, at kind of the sea level or is it still sort of in within the engineering folks 'cause looking at this as a make or break, knowing that for example, Netflix, there's Hulu, there's Disney Plus, there's Apple TV. Plus, if we don't get something that we're looking for right away, there's prime, we're going to go to another streaming service. So are you starting to see like an increase in demand from companies that no, we have competition right behind us, we've got to be able to set up the infrastructure and ensure that it is reliable. Now more than ever. >> Yeah, exactly. That's really, really important. I'm seeing a lot of executives. I mean, I've seen that since the beginning, really, since I first started working at Gremlin. I would often be invited by executives to come and give talks actually, within their company, to help the teams learn about chaos engineering, and I love doing that, It's really great. So I'd be invited by C levels, or VPs, from different departments. And I often get people adding me on LinkedIn from all over the world who are in leadership roles, because really, like, you know, they're responsible for making sure that their companies can hit those critical metrics and make sure that they're able to achieve their really, you know, demanding business goals, and then they're trying to help their teams be able to achieve that, too. So I've actually been so pleased to see that as well. Like it is really cool to have an executive reach out and say, hey, I'm thinking of helping my team, I'd like to get them introduced to you can you come and just teach them about this topic? And I love being able to do that it's really positive. And it's the right way to improve. >> It is, and I think nowadays, with reliability being more important than ever, you know, we talked to leaders from industry, from every industry. And there are certain things right now that are going to be shaping the winners and the losers of tomorrow. And it sounds to me like chaos engineering is one of those things that's going to be fundamental to any type of business to not just survive these times, but to thrive going forward. >> Yes, I definitely think so. I mean, obviously, people can easily just go to a different URL and try and use a different service. And you know, we're seeing now failure across so many different industries. We didn't see that before. But for example, you know, I'm sure you've seen in the news or heard from friends and family about schools, now being completely online. And then kids can't actually access, their calls their resources, what they need to learn every day. So that really just shows you how much it's impacting us as a society, we really know that the internet is critical. It's amazing that we have the internet, like how lucky we are to have this, but it needs to work for us to actually be able to get value out of it. And that's what chaos engineering is all about. You know, were able to make sure that everything is reliable, so it's up and running. And we do that by looking at things like redundancy. So we'll do failover work where we completely shut down an application or service and make sure it gracefully fails over. We also do a lot of dependency failure work, where you're actually looking to say, this is the critical path of this service. And a lot of people don't think about this, but the critical path really starts at sign in. So you need to make sure that login and sign in works really well. It's not just about like the experience once you've signed in, that has to work well all the way through. So actually if you have a good understanding of user experience, it helps you create a much better pathway and understand those critical pieces that the customer needs to be able to do to have a great experience. And I care a lot about that. Like whenever I go and work somewhere, I always read customer tickets, I always try and understand what are the customer pain points. And I love listening to customers and then just solving their problems. The last thing I want them to do is, you know, be complaining or be really annoyed on Twitter because something just isn't working when they need it to be working. And it is really critical these days. It's a the internet is a really serious part of our day to day life. >> Oh, it's a lifeline. I mean, that's, some folks. It's the only way that they're connecting with the outside world, is through the internet. So when things aren't, I had a friend whose son first day of college couple weeks ago, freshman year, first class couldn't get into zoom. And that's a stressful situation. But I imagine too, though, that and I know you're going to be speaking at the pager duty summit that more folks need to understand what this is. And I can tell the you have a real authentic passion for it. Talk to us about what you're going to be talking about at the pager duty summit. >> Sure thing, I'm really excited to be speaking at Pager Duty Summit very soon. My talk is called building, and scaling SRE teams, so site reliability engineering teams. And this is something that I've done previously. I've built out the SRE teams at Dropbox for both databases as well as storage. So block storage, and then I also lead the code workflows team. And that's for, you know, over 500 million users, people accessing the critical data that they store on Dropbox all the time. You know the way that folks use Dropbox is in so many different ways. Maybe it's like really famous music musicians who are trying to create an amazing new album that happens or maybe it's a lawyer preparing for a court case, and they need to be able to access their documents. So those are a lot of customer stories that would come up over time. And prior to that, I worked at the National Australia Bank as well leading teams too and obviously like people care about their money if they can't access their money. If there incorrect transactions, if there are missing transactions, you know, duplicate transactions, maybe people don't mind so much about it you get like a double deposit, but it's still not good from the bank's perspective. So there's all types of different chaos that can happen. And I found it to be really interesting to be able to dive into that and make sure that you can make improvements. And I love that it makes customers happier. And also, it helps you improve your company as a whole. So it's a really good thing to be able to do, And with my talk, I'm going to talk to folks about, you know, not only why it's important to build out a reliability practice at your organization, you know, back in the day, people used to go, why would you need a security team? You know, why would we need that? now everybody has a security team, everyone has a chief security officer as well. But why don't we focus on reliability, like we know that we see incidents out in the news all the time, but for some reason, we don't have the chief reliability officer. I think that's definitely going to be something that will appear in the future just like the chief security officer roll up. But that's what I'm going to talk about there. How you can find site reliability engineers, I'll share a few of my secrets. I won't give any spoilers out. But there's actually quite a few places that you can find amazing people. There's even a school that you can hire them from, which I've done in the past. And then I'll talk to you about how you can interview them to make sure that you get the best people on your team. There are a number of things that I think are very important to interview for. And then once you've got those folks on your team, I'll talk to you about how you can make sure that they're successful. How to set them up for success and make sure that they're aligned to not only your business goals, but also your core values as a company, which is really important too. >> Yeah, that's fantastic. It's very well rounded, I'm curious, what are some of the the characteristics that you think are really critical for someone to become a successful SRE? >> Yeah, so there's a few key things that I look for. One thing is that, somebody who is really good at troubleshooting, so they need to be able to be comfortable with complexity, ambiguity and open ended challenges and problems and also thrive in those types of environments. Because often you're seeing something that you've never seen happen before. And also you're working with really complicated systems. So you just need to be able to feel good in that moment. And you can test for that during an interview question on troubleshooting and debugging. So that's something that I'll go into in more detail. But that's definitely the first characteristic. The other thing, of course, is you want to have someone who is good at being able to build solutions. So they can code, they understand automation, they can figure out how can I take this pain point, this problem? And how can I automate it and then scale this out and make it available for everyone across my organization? So someone who has that mindset of building tools for others, and often they are internal tools, because maybe you're building a tool that helps everybody know, who's on call every single critical service at the company and also non critical service and they can identify that in a minute or less like maybe even just in a few seconds, and then they can quickly get that person involved, if anything need to escalate to them. Via for example, a tool like pager duty, that's really what you want. You want them to be able to think, how can I just make this efficient? How can I make sure that we can get really great results? And yeah, I think they also just need to be really personable too and work well in a really complicated organizational structure. Because usually they have to work with the engineering team, the finance team to understand the revenue impact. They need to be able to work with the PR team and the social media team, if they're incidents, and then they need to provide information about when this incident is going to be resolved, and how they can update VIP customers. They need to talk to the sales team, because what happens if you're giving a demonstration, and then somehow there's an issue, or failure that happens, an incident and then in the middle of your very important sales demo, you're not able to actually deliver it that can happen a lot too. So there are a lot of very important key skills. >> Sounds like it's a really cross functional role, pivotal to an organization, that needs to understand how these different functions not only operate, but also operate together, is that somebody that you think has certain types of previous work experience? Is this something that you talked to the Girl Geek Academy girls about? How did they get into? I'm curious, like what the career path is? >> Yeah, it's interesting, like I find a lot of SRE's often come from either a few different backgrounds. One is they came through the world of Linux and understanding systems, and just being really interested in that. Like deep diving into the kernel, understanding how to improve performance of systems. The other side is maybe they came from coding background where they were actually building applications and features. I started off actually on that side, but I also had a passion for Linux. And then I sort of spread over into the other side and was able to learn both. And then often you know, someone who's comfortable with being on call and handling incidents, but it is a lot of skills, like that's actually something that I often talk to folks about, and they asked me how can I become a great SRE? There's so many things I need to learn. And I just say, you know, take it slow, try and gradually increase your number of skills. People often say that there is like there's some curve for SRE's, where you have the operations side, on one side, and then the coding side on the other. And often like the best person sits right in the middle where they have both ops and engineering skills. But it's really hard to find those people. It's okay if you have someone that's like, really deep, has amazing knowledge of Linux and scaling systems and internet management, and then you can pair them up with a really amazing programmer who's great at software engineering and software architecture, that's okay, too. >> We've been hearing for a long time about this sort of negative unemployment with respect to cyber security professionals. Is that, are you guys falling into that same category as well with SRE? Or is it somehow different or you just know this is exactly what we're looking for? We want to go out there, and even in the Girl, Greek Academy, maybe help girls learn how to be able to find what I imagine are a lot of opportunities. >> Yeah, there are so many opportunities for this. So it's definitely an opportunity because what I see is there's not enough SRE's. So tons of companies all over the world will actually ping me and say, hey, Tommy, how do I hire SRE's, that's why I decided to give this talk because I wanted to package that up and just share that information as to how you can do it. And also, maybe you can't find the SRE's because they don't exist. But you can help retrain your team. So you can have an engineer learn the skills that are required to be an SRE, that's totally possible too, maybe move them over to become an SRE. With girl geek Academy, one of the things that I've done is run hackathons and workshops and just online training sessions to help girls learn these new skills. So that's exactly what our mission is, is to teach 1 million girls technical skills by 2025. And I love to do mentoring at scale, which is why it's been really cool to be able to do it online and through these like workshops and remote hackathons. And I definitely love to do something where else work with some of our customers actually, and run an event. I did one a while back, it was really cool, we were able to have all of the girls come in and be at the customer's office and actually learn skills with the customer, which was really fun. And it helps them actually think, hey, I could work one day that would be really amazing. And I'm going to do that again in November. And it's kind of fun too. We can do things like have like, you know, dad and mom and then daughter day, where you actually bring your daughter to work and help her learn technical skills. That's really fun because they get to see what you do and they understand it more and see how cool chaos engineering really is. Then they think oh, wow, you're so awesome, this is great. >> I love it, that's fantastic. Well it sounds like, like I said before your passion for it is really there. What, I think is really interesting is how you're talking about chaos engineering and just the word in and of itself chaos. But you painted in such a positive lights critical business critical, but also the all the opportunities there that businesses have to learn and fine tune so such an interesting conversation. Yeah, Tammy. We have you back on the program. But I thank you so much for joining me today. And for those folks that lucky enough that are attending the pager duty summit, they're going to get to learn a lot from you. Thank you. >> Thanks so much for having me, Lisa. >> For Tammy Bryant, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching this cube conversation. (upbeat music)

>>from >>around the >>globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of pager duty. Summit 2020. Brought to you by pager duty. Hey, welcome back to Brady. Jeffrey here with the Cube in Palo Alto studios today. And we're talking about an upcoming event. It's one of our favorites. This will be the fourth year that we've been doing it. And it's pager duty summit. And we're excited to have from the pager duty team. She's Caroline Gus, the VP of corporate marketing from pager duty. Caroline, Great to see you. >>Hi, Jeff. Great to see you again. >>Absolutely. So, you know, I was thinking before we turn on the cameras we've been doing pager duty for I think this will be like, say, our fourth year that first year was in the cool, um, cruise ship terminal pier. I gotta written appear 27 which was which was nice. And then the last two years, you've been in the, you know, historic Westin ST Francis in downtown San Francisco, which is a cool old venue, but oh, my goodness. You guys were busting at the seams last year. So this year, year to go virtual. There's a whole bunch of new things that that you could do in virtual that you couldn't do in physical space. At least when you're busting out of the seems so First off, Welcome and >>talk a little >>bit about planning for virtual versus planning for a physical event from, you know, head of marketing perspective. >>Absolutely. I mean, the first thing that's changed for us is the number of people that can come. It's five x the number of people that were able to join us, the Western last year. So we have, uh, we we expect to have 10,000 people registered on attending age duty summit. The second thing is thea share number of sessions that we can put on. Last year, I think we had around 25 sessions. This year we have between 40 and 50 on again. That's because we're not constrained by space and physical meeting rooms, so it's being a really exciting process for us. We've built a fantastic agenda on. It's very much personalized, you know, developers come to our event. They love our event for the opportunity to learn mixed with their peers, get best practices and hands on experience. So we have many more of those types of sessions when we have done previously, and that things like labs and Bird of Feather Sessions and Emma's. But we've also built a whole new track of content this year for executives. Page Julie has, um, many of the Fortune 500 on 4100 customers. We work very closely with CEO CTO, so we have built sessions that are really designed specifically for that audience on I think for us it's really opened up. The potential of this event made it so much broader and more appealing than we were able to do when we were, As you say, you know, somewhat confined by the location in downtown San Francisco. >>I think it's such an interesting point. Um, because before you were constrained, right, If you have X number of rooms over a couple of days, you know you've got to make hard decisions on breakouts and what could go in and what can't go in. And, you know, will there be enough demand for these for this session versus another session? Or from the perspective of an attendee, you know, do they have to make hard tradeoffs? I could only attend one session at one oclock on Tuesday and I got to make hard decisions. But this is, you said really opens up the opportunities. I think you said you doubled. You doubled your sessions on and you got five X a number of registrations. So I think, you know, way too many people think about what doesn't happen in digital vs talking about the things that you can do that are impossible in physical. >>Yeah, I think at the very beginning. Well, first of all, we held our Amir summit events in London in July. So that was great because we got Thio go through this experience once already. And what we learned was the rial removal of hurdles in this process. So, to your point about missing the session because you're attending another session, we were calling this sort of the Pelton version of events where you have live sessions. It's great to be there, live participate in the live Q and A, but equally you have an entire on demand library. So if you weren't able to go because there was something else at the same time, this is available on demand for you. So we are actually repeating live sessions on two consecutive day. So on the Monday we're on everything on the Tuesday I ask because show up again for life Q and A at the end of their sessions. But after that it's available forever on an on demand library. So for us, it was really removing hurdles in terms of the amount of content, the scheduling of the content on also the number of people that content in attend, no geographical boundaries anymore. It used to be that a customer of ours would think, Well, I'll send one or two people to the page duty summit. They could learn all the great innovation from page duty, and they'll bring it back to the team that's completely changed. You know, we have tens of 20 signing up on. All of them are able to get that experience firsthand. >>That's really interesting. I didn't didn't even think about, you know, kind of whole teams being able to attend down instead of just certain individuals because of budget constraints, or you can't send your whole team, you know, a way for a conference in a particular area. But the piece to that you're supporting that were over and over is that the net new registrants goes up so dramatically in terms of the names and and and who those individuals are because a lot of people just couldn't attend for for various reasons, whether it's cost, whether it's, uh, geography, whether it's they just can't take time off from from from leaving their primary job. So it's a really interesting opportunity to open up, um, the participation to such a much bigger like you said five x five X, and increase in the registration. That's pretty good number. >>That's right. Yeah. I mean, that crossed boundaries gone away. This event is free on DWhite. That's actually meant is, as I say, you know, larger teams from the same company are attending. Uh, In addition, we have a number of attendees who are not actually paid to duty customers right now to previously. This was very much a community event for, you know, our page duty users on now we actually have a large number of I asked, interested future customers that will be coming to the event. So that's really important for us. And also, I think, for our sponsor partners as well, because it's bordering out the audience for both of us. So let's >>talk about sponsors for a minute, because, um, one of the big things in virtual events that people are talking about quite often is. Okay, I can do the keynotes, and I could do the sessions. And now I have all these breakout sessions for, um, you know, training and certification and customer stories, etcetera. But when it comes to sponsors, right sponsors used, you know, go to events to set up a booth and hand out swag and wander badge. Right? And it really was feeding kind of a top level down funnel. That was really important. Well, now those have gone away. Physical events. So from the sponsor perspective, you know, what can they expect? What? What do you know the sponsor experience at pager duty Summit. Since I don't have a little tiny booth at the Westin ST Francis given out swag this year. >>Yeah. So one important thing is the agenda and how we're involving our sponsors in our agenda this time, something that we learned is we used to have very long keynotes. You know, the keynote could be an hour long on involved multiple components and people would stay in that room for a now er on did really stay and watch sessions all day. So we learned in the virtual format that we need to be shorter and more precise in our sessions on that opened up the opportunity to bring in more of our partners, our sponsorship partners. So zendesk Salesforce, Microsoft some examples. So they actually get to have their piece of both of our keynote sessions and of our technical product sessions. I'm really explain both the partnership with pager duty, but also they're called technology and the value that they provide customers. So I think that the presence of sponsors in content is much higher than it was before on we are still repeating the Expo format, so we actually do have on Expo Hall that any time there's breaking between sessions, you could go over to the Expo ball, and it actually runs throughout as well, and you can go in and you can talk to the teams. You can see product demos, so it's very much a virtual version of the Expo Hall where you went and you want around and you picked up a bit of swag, >>so you mentioned keynotes and and Jennifer and and the team has always had a fantastic keynotes. I mean, I just saw Jennifer being interviewed with Frank's Luqman and and Eric Juan from Zoom By by Curry, which was pretty amazing. I felt kind of jealous that I didn't get to do that. But, um, talk tell us a little bit about some of the speakers I know there'll be some some, you know, kind of big rally moment speakers as well as some that are more down to technical track or another track. Give us some highlights on on some of the people. I will be sharing the stage with Jennifer. >>Absolutely, I said. I think what's really unique about Page duty Summit is that we designed types of content for different types of attendees. So if you're a developer, your practitioner, we have something like this from Jones of Honeycombs, who's talking about who builds the tools that we all rely on today, and how do they collaborate to build them together in this virtual world? Or we have J. Paul Reed from Netflix talking about how to handle the stress of being involved in incidents, So that's really sessions for our core audience of developers who are part of our community and pager duty really helps them day to day with with that job. And then we have the more aspirational senior level speakers who could really learn from a ZA leader. So Bret Taylor, president and CEO of Salesforce, will be joining us on the main stage. You'll be talking about innovation and trust in today's world on. Then we have Derrick Johnson. He is president of N A A. C P, and he'll be talking about community engagement and particularly voter engagement, which is such an important topic for us right now. Aan den. We have leaders from within our customers who are really talking about the way they use pager duty thio drive change in their organization. So an example would be porches, bro. He runs digital for Fox on, and he's gonna be talking about digital acceleration. How large organization like Fox can really accelerate for this digital first world that we find ourselves living in right now, >>right? Well, you guys have such a developer focus because pager duty, the product of solution, has to integrate with so many other, um, infrastructure, you know, monitoring and, uh, and all of all those different systems because you guys were basically at the front line, you know, sending them the signals that go into those systems. So you have such a broad, you know, kind of ecosystem of technology partners. I don't know if people are familiar with all the integrations that you guys have built over the years, which is such a key piece of your go to market. >>That's right. I mean, we we like to say we're at the center of the digital ecosystem. We have 203 170 integrations on. That's important because we want anyone to be able to use page duty no matter what is in their technology stack technology stacks today are more complex than they've ever been before, particularly with businesses having to shift to this digital first model since we all began shelter in place, you know, we all are living through digital on working and learning through digital on DSO. The technology stacks that power that are more complicated than ever before. So by having 370 integrations, we really know that we conserve pretty much any set of services that your business. It's using. >>Yeah, we've all seen all the means right about who's who's pushing your digital transformation. You know, the CEO, the CEO or or covert. And we all know the answer to toe what's accelerated that whole process. So okay, but so before I let you go, I don't even think we've mentioned the date. So it's coming up Monday, September, September 21st through Thursday, September 24th not at the West End Online and again. What air? What are you hoping? You're kind of the key takeaways for the attendees after they come to the summit? >>Yeah, a couple of things. I mean, first of all, I think will be a sense of belonging. Three attendees, the uses, a pager duty. They are really the teams that are at the forefront of keeping our digital services working on. But what that means is responding to incidents we've actually seen. Ah, 38% increase in the volume of incidents on our platform since covert and shelter in place began. Wait 30 >>38% increase in incidents since mid March. >>That's correct. Since the beginning of on bear in mind incidents. Prior to that in the six months prior, they were pretty flat. There wasn't instant growth. But what we've also seen is a 20% improvement in the time that it takes to resolve an incident from five minutes down to four minutes. So what that really means is that the pager duty community is working really hard. They're improving their practices. Hopefully our platform, our platform is a key part of how, but these are some people under pressure, so I hope that people can come and they can experience a sense of belonging. They can learn from each other about experiences. How do you manage the stress of that situation on what are some of the great innovations that make your job easier in the year ahead? The second thing that we don't for that community is that we are offering certification for P. D. You page due to university for free this year. It's of course, with a value of $7500. Last year, you would attend page duty summit on you would sit through your sessions and you would learn and you would get certified. So this year it's offered for free. You take the course during summit. But you can also carry on if you miss anything for 30 days after. So we're really feeling that, you know, we're giving back there, offering a great program for certification and improved skills completely free to help our community in this in this time of pressure, >>right? Right. Well, it is a very passionate community, and, you know, we go to so many events and you can you can really tell it's palatable, you know, kind of what the where the tight communities are and where people are excited to see each other and where they help each other, not necessarily only at the event, but you know, throughout the year. And I think you know a huge shout out to Jennifer on the culture that she's built there because it is very warm. It's very inclusive, is very positive. And and that energy, you know, kind of goes throughout the whole company and ice the teaser. You know this in something that's built around a device that most of the kids today don't even know what a pager is, and just the whole concept of carrying a pager and being on call right and being responsible. It's a very different way to kind of look at the world when you're the one that has that thing on your hip and it's buzzing and someone's expecting, Ah, return call and you gotta fix something So you know, a huge shout out to keep a positive and you're smiling nice and big culture in a job where you're basically fixing broken things most of the time. >>Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's, I think, a joke that we make you know these things only break on Friday night or your wedding anniversary or Thanksgiving. But one of the announcements we're most excited about this year is the level of automation on artificial intelligence that we're building into our platform that is really going to reduce the number of interruptions that developers get when they are uncle. >>Yeah, I look forward to more conversations because we're gonna be doing a bunch of Cube interviews like Normal and, uh, you know, applied artificial intelligence, I think, is where all the excitement is. It's not a generic thing. It's where you applied in a specific application to get great business outcomes. So I look forward to that conversation and hopefully we'll be able to talk again and good luck to you and the team in the last few weeks of preparation. >>Thanks so much, Jeff. I've enjoyed talking to you. Thanks for having me. >>Alright. You too. And we'll see you later. Alright. She is Caroline. I'm Jeff. You're watching the Cube. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.