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

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

>>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 to the cubes coverage of PagerDuty summit 22. I'm Lisa Martin. I'm here with one of our alumni. Jonathan Ren 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. >>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 are 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. Uh, 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 a PagerDuty to new audiences. So we've been a big part of the back office for a long time with SREs and developers and it ops. And we've really come to realize that, you know, the front office is so important. And one of the, the leading departments there that we can make an impact and extend into with our solution is customer service. >>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 patients patients when you're a consumer patients, when you're a business person. And so the, the, the voice of the customer being able to get things escalated quickly and resolve 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 you're 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. >>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 it, it's very, very hard for a lot of organizations and nobody's exempt from it. Um, the connection between the front office and the back office, there is no real gold standard for that. And, and, and so like, is there, 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. Um, there was another statistic that, uh, we, 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. >>What are some of the, well, the, the LA 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 gonna help, not just the front office back office kind of blurred, um, 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, the trick, the, 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, um, CSAT scores, NPS scores, brand reputation, reducing churn, >>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, uh, 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 Jo you know, uh, customer satisfaction areas. You can turn those bad experiences into really good ones. >>Definitely. And I think we all, we all have that expectation that that's gonna happen when things do when outages do happen, cuz to your point that's, those are the things that's not, is it gonna happen? It's when and how quickly can we recover from that? So it's, we minimize the impact on everybody else. Couple 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? >>Yeah, so we have several partners in the front office and one of, one of the biggest, uh, 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, uh, 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, uh, 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 direct, uh, 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. >>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, uh, we've seen situations where the back office team working on an incident, uh, 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 >>Without that visibility so much can suffer. And, and quickly, we also had this expectation. I, I mentioned one of the things that was in short supply in the pandemic as patients and tolerance. But another thing is we expect things in real time, real time, access to data, real time 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, the 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 in 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. Yeah. 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 CSOPs 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. 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, uh, 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, uh, 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 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, um, 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, and do more faster and make such a huge difference there. Talk a little bit about the, the DevOps CS ops relationship. You know, one of the, one of the things that's kind of ironic is here we are in, 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, and a vendor or a solution provider, or it can really facilitate trust. And that was a big theme of, uh, the keynote this morning is that trust. But talk about the trust that is you PagerDuty really things essential between the DevOps folks and the CS ops folks. >>Yeah. It's, it's, it's critical. As I kind of mentioned before, there really isn't a golden path, a golden connection, uh, 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, it's almost like when I was a little kid, I lived nearby a, um, 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. That's essentially customer service sitting there looking at the game happening constantly, like trying to interrupt the teams and saying, Hey, what about us? Like, 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 knothole at the back of the center field. >>Well, you gotta tell, did you ever get tickets? Can you go to pro games now? >>Uh, no. No. Oh, still waiting. >>Oh man. Talk to me last question here. I asked you before we, we started filming if you had a crystal ball or, or a magic eight ball. So next time at least bring me a magic eight ball. What are some of the predictions that you have is as you see where we are in now, half of calendar, 22, almost gone. The announcements coming from PagerDuty today, the synergy is between PagerDuty. It's what 21,000 plus customers, your partners. What are some of the things that you're excited about that are coming? >>So a couple things. One is, I, 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 it ops and the SRE teams in the back office back offices that have to deal with interrupted, um, real time work, but it's other parts of the organization as well, um, that have to get proactive versus reactive. And the first of those that the, 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 like real time 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, uh, 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 that the trust built between an empowered, proactive CS agent and a customer on the other end that there's the sky is the limit on that one? >>Uh, if I'm a platinum customer or I'm a silver customer on 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 right. Proactively and I'm hearing about issues long before I see them. That to me is building trust. >>Absolutely. Jonathan, thank you so much for joining me on the cube 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, to see your predictions come true. <laugh> thanks for your time. >>Likewise, Lisa, thank you very much. >>My pleasure for Jonathan Ren. I'm Lisa Martin covering the cube on the ground at PagerDuty summit 22, stick around of your rack back with my next guest.