>> 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)

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

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

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

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

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge '18, #Know18. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Dave Vellante. We're joined by Walid Saleh. He is the Senior Director, Enterprise Service Management and Automation at CIBC, based in Toronto. Thanks so much for coming on the show, Walid. >> It's great to be here. >> So I wanted to talk about the digital transformation, the enterprise service transformation journey that you are on at CIBC. Can you give our viewers a little bit of a sense of that? >> Yeah, I would say, we're actually focused on three different pillars. Obviously we're a financial institution, so security, and visibility, and compliance, that's paramount. You want to make sure that your financial institution is taking care, and has stable stakes. But we also are focused on user experience. It's very important for us. And we're focused, also, on delivery and agility of the delivery. Enabling our businesses to have their products out for our customers as fast as possible. And in the same time, making sure that our internal employees do have a great experience that can actually mirror the experience they give our customers as well. So those are the three, I would say, pillars that we're focused on. And this is where ServiceNow helps us with the transformation, for sure. >> Can you follow up on that? Elaborate a little bit. >> Yeah, I would say, you know I've been in technology for over 20 years, and I think it's really exciting times, you know? They always talk about the Jevons Paradox, which says, with computers, you get this efficiency, but that efficiency is really eaten up by the rate of consumption. So eventually, you're not getting really, the benefits that everybody talks about, but that we have been predicting for years and years. I actually believe that this is the time where we're going to see some of this efficiency. In the keynotes this morning, they were talking about the automation, were talking about the customer experience, and I think in it was the automation, the artificial intelligent. I think John, was here talking about the artificial intelligence and how it solves problems. I think this is where we're going to start seeing some of those efficiencies really manifest itself. And finally, maybe that paradox will be resolved, right? So that's really, I would say, a very important part of what you do in automation. Making sure we take all of those repetitive tasks that maybe are low value, not only that, but connecting the different areas, these are the ones we need to take out of the system, and focus on the higher function values, I would say. >> So the keynote resonated with you today. You're not running away from automation, you're embracing it. >> Absolutely. And would you say your organization is, as well? >> Yes, for sure. I've been around through multiple transformations, that's how the technology is. And I would say, throughout many of those transformations, we actually see that, our staff, it's about how do you prepare them with the skills that are required for that next wave. And in many cases, we see people, they're moving around to different jobs, doing different things that actually adds more value. Where those pieces that maybe they were complaining about because, it's just repetitive, maybe it's late at night, I don't want to be up, you know? I don't want to be doing the same things over and over. Those are the pieces that really can leave automation. Machine and machine learning actually do, execute and have your staff. So in my mind, absolutely not shying away from it. We're continuously looking at how do we have our staff ready? What's the next skill required for our transformation? And how do we actually have the teams do those higher functions? >> I was just thinking when you were describing how the kind of, grunt work, that employees are happy about, we tend to hear about this great anxiety about automation, and that people are worried that the robots are coming for their jobs, but what you're describing is the opposite, and that employees are actually grateful and really excited to have that stuff done for them. >> I would say as part of that transformation, I think there is no such thing as over-communicating. I think you have to communicate once, and twice, and thrice, and keep communicating, right? Especially in a large, classical organization, where there's a long chain of command. Actually, you have to do a lot of communication. Explain to people what the end view is. And I think what's really important is to focus on the purpose. That's really, really important. It's not the task, it's what the purpose is behind it, right? And how do we actually, maybe, take some of that task that again, are low value, and have a better experience for our employee, and subsequently for our customers as well. >> Could you talk a little bit more about the ServiceNow journey? How did it start? Where is it going? Maybe give us some detail on the timeline. >> I would say it's an interesting subject because I think when we started, it was all about, again, itel, the problem management, incident management, the usual, managing IT, IT managing. Making sure that everything is up and running and recovery is solid. I think we absolutely are seeing now that the platform, and it is really a platform, I think there will be never an argument, now, saying "Well, it is a platform." It has grown from just that area, which is just focused on being really internalized and looking internally into IT to how do we look outward to our clients, and how do we look outward to the business. And I think the business absolutely sees the value as well, and sees how we can help them automate some, again, of those workflows that enables them to be agile and faster, for sure. >> When did you first install ServiceNow? >> We actually started in 2012. >> Wow, okay. >> So one of the really early in the Canadian space, I would say. >> And what was your first move, beyond IT? >> Yes, I would say roughly, maybe two years later, 2013, 2014, that's when, once we put a catalog of services together, with a portal for people to request what they need, that's when we actually started really realizing that you know what, this is not just technology for technology. There's now all these business people. And we've done the job as technologists trying to do this, and then we realized, you know what, user experience is really, really, really important, right? And it really mirrors what John was saying in the keynotes. Again, that experience, how do you focus on experience, and make it easy for our consumers, which internally, to help our customers. >> So that was, what, '14 time frame? >> Roughly '14. >> Start bringing it to the business, as what, customer service management, or HR, or? >> As a place, a central place, a single portal for them to actually request services from IT. And it has grown to maybe beyond that as well. So over the years, you find other areas to say, "You've got a really good thing going down in here, "and everybody knows it, can you add this? "Can you add that?" >> And have you avoided custom modifications, pretty much or? >> I would say, because we were really early on the platform, I'd be lying if we say we avoid it. But I think after a couple of years, we really, I would say around 2014, this is when we actually realized the rate of innovation and how we need to make sure that the customization aren't a minimum. And it's something that, again, we had to communicate and drive in the organization. Obviously everyone feels that their business is special. But a lot of communication about what is the impact of customization, and how do you, if you customize, you will build it, we call it Tech-Debt, that you'll carry over, year over year. And that's when the business actually really listens around efficiency and the cost of that Tech-Debt. >> And what version are you at now? >> We are on Jakarta. >> You're on Jakarta, okay. So you're pretty current. >> Absolutely. And the custom mods make it a little bit harder for you to keep up, but it sounds like you're working through that. >> Absolutely. Every year, when we upgrade, we actually remove pieces of the customizations. Try to be, as much as possible, out of the box. >> Dave: And single CMDB? >> Absolutely, it's the single CMDB on all our environments, for sure. >> And have you written apps, are you taking advantage of the platform? >> We have, we have. And we found, we started, again, being technology, we started with some of the apps that actually helps technology. Things like our runbook being moved internally into ServiceNow. Moving our disaster recovery tools into ServiceNow. And again, John was talking about this this morning about how Fred said it's one data model. And it is, really. It's the heart and core of ServiceNow. Anything we move in really makes use of that data model. Is the data better together, if you like, right? I mean, it's really, I would say it's interesting because as we move things inside ServiceNow, you start seeing more and more potential. Why can't we do this? Why can't we automate this? Why can't we, just by the virtue of having the data reside together. So we've done a good number of that. What this led to is we also figured out well, we can do some of this to the business as well. So we actually start using ServiceNow for some of our business applications as well, for our back-office. >> Last word on the show, you had 18,000 peers here. How's the show going for you? What are you learning? What are your takeaways? >> It's excellent, I think it's great. I'm really happy to see that we're focused on the end user experience. Again, I keep saying the customer experience will never exceed the employee experience. So it's really important that we get this great experience for our own internal staff. And I'm really happy to see that this is the focus for John, so it's great. >> Rebecca: Great, well Walid, thank you so much for coming on the show. >> Thank you for having me. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vallante, we will have more from Las Vegas at ServiceNow Knowledge '18 just after this.

>> Voiceover: Live from San Francisco, it's The Cube covering DevNet Create 2017, brought to you by Cisco. >> Welcome back everyone. We're live here in San Francisco, The Cube's exclusive coverage of Cisco's inaugural event DevNet Create. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE. My cohost Peter Burris, general manager of wikibon.com research. Next guest is Damon Edwards, co-founder of Rundeck. He's been on the crowd chats and does event DevOps and the enterprise, the content chair, co-founder of Rundeck, welcome to The Cube. >> Thank you. >> Great to meet you. >> First and we've >> Good to be here. been in line chatting away. Quick though from you, Cisco getting into DevOps, the conversation's pretty straight forward. We think it's awesome that they're doing this. >> Damon: Yeah. >> Good direction, right in line with DevOps, things looking good, middle of the fairway. What do you do next? >> Damon: Yeah, I mean ... >> Where does Cisco take the ball from here and take it home? >> You know, I think it's just more of the same. I think that you can't underestimate the split that's happened in the DevOps have and have nots, that sounds kind of odd, but a lot that we talk about are the unicorns, the high flying special built organizations that really grew up with this in the last five to 10 years. I think where Cisco really plays is in the other 99% of commerce of the world, which is the core classic enterprises. DevOps really hasn't made that deep of a dent yet into that, I guess we call it dark IT, right? The rest of the world the people have to deal with 30 years of, in some places, different technology, skills, acquisitions, mismatches, all the legacy, all the bureaucracy of large organizations, and Cisco has a path into that and a voice of authority into that. So happy to see they're putting such emphasis on these DevOps and Agile ideas and help to drive them into that. >> And they got the app dynamics things going down too, that big acquisition. Their slogan is Where Apps Meet Infrastructure. We always just talk about infrastructure as code. They're talking about programmable networking, which is the same thing. We want more programmable. >> Damon: Right. So how do they make that transition to this new operational model? I mean, networks used to be very fragile, set in stone. >> Damon: Yeah. Someone used to joke, "Hey, they're called NoOps," because they would say no to everything from a developer standpoint. >> Damon: Sure. >> How do they transition from NoOps to a new operational model that's agile and adding value? >> The bigger issue here is that Ops is getting squeezed, right, so it's an existential crisis for them. The reason why they were always the no folks is because they're always spending their time protecting that capacity because they're overrun, they're always outnumbered, first of all, then they're being overrun with all these tickets of new stuff coming in plus incidents happening in the middle, the capacity has always been an issue. Now with this new DevOps, and really digital transformation inspired pressure, it's go, go, go faster, open things up. At the same time the same business folks are saying from the other direction lock things down, don't be the next hack. Don't be the next breach. Don't be the next major outage, right? >> John: It's really a lot of pressure It's a pressure cooker. >> Right. >> So they're squeezed. So the biggest with crisis, how do we relieve that, how do we relieve that pressure? And the key technique is to be able to actually allow other people to participate in what traditionally was only operations tasks. If you allow me to go one step ... >> John: Democratization of operations in a way. >> It is, and what they're doing, you see the organizations that really nailed this, they're dividing up the idea of an operations procedure. It used to be everything was in operations. You defined it, you ran it, and you have all security and management audit control over it. In these new ways what they're doing is they're breaking it up into three pieces to say the ability to define these automated procedures, the ability to execute them, and the ability to have that management control and oversight, let's make those in three discrete parts and let's move that to where the labor capacity makes the most sense. By doing that, operations can free up those bottlenecks, start to decouple more, allow the rest of the organization to move a lot quicker and not be in that horrible position of being squeezed to death and having to tell everybody no. >> There's a number of reasons why it's happening. Sorry. One of the key ones is that, and it brings us back to the Cisco conversation we're asking about this, is that is used to be that operations was tied to a particular asset. The server more often than not. And so a single individual could pool all those things together because a single individual, or single group, had control over virtually all the resources >> Damon: Right. >> that were a part of that. Now we're talking about applications that are inherently distributed, and so we can't look at the process of operations in the same way. This comes back to Cisco. Does the world need to think more discreetly about these new highly distributed, deeply distributed, applications differently, and is that going to catalyze the diffusion of more of these high quality DevOps principals? What do you think? >> Yeah, it has to. If you look at the business driver, which is this digital transformation, a lot of people scoff at because it's like wait, is this 1999? You need a website? What are we talking about, right? But you realize what it is is saying all these disparate systems we used to have, right. I could get my cable bill, but it's just online, it's just a PDF of what they send to the printers, right. But now on it, everything I could do when I call up the customer service agent, I want to do it through my phone or I want to do it on my laptop, and that means all those formerly distinct systems that lived in different windows on a customer service agents desktop and after the little things to check the router status blew up, well I'll just talk past it, right. But now it's really going to matter in this digital world. The business is driving that integration, so where things don't live in isolation anymore, and because of that the complexity and this distributed nature of these services is rising. >> John: Yeah. >> And when that that happens, that makes the operations inherently more difficult and just contributes to that squeeze even more and we got to find a way to relieve that. >> Great point and great analysis. That just picked off what we were talking about on our intro package of the redefinition of what a full stacked developer is. >> Damon: Yeah. >> Now full stack implies you're talking about a distributed application model where there's no isolation anymore so you could almost argue that that's going to be obsolete. It's a full horizontal developer. >> Well logic used to be full stack, but how they connect will be different. >> Which just brings up the notion of, okay, things were in isolation >> Right. >> built to the database, now I go down the network, now a whole new developer category potentially is emerging. Do you feel the same way? >> Damon: Yeah. >> I mean, we're speculating. We don't actually know. >> Sure. I mean, if you are Netflix, who prides itself on it's ability to go out, pay top of market, which means they are the top of market, and attract the best talent, only one can win that game. For everybody else in the world, this idea of we're going to have these polyglot, super human, I-know-everything engineers, it's never going to happen. We have to find a way to use our systems and our processes to allow that kind of integration to happen, and allow those people to define the control procedures and policies for the things that they know about, and then allow that all to integrate to where then we can have other folks operate it and run it. Again, that idea of moving those part around to where we can best take advantage of the labor, otherwise you're just ... You're never going to find it. Go to any conference, NASA DevOps Conference, and ask people how many LinkedIn spam messages do you get a day because the word DevOps is in your profile? >> Yeah. >> Everybody just laughs because it's dozens. You're never going to have that idea so you have to build the systems to recreate that full stack capability. >> And have people that have access to be one, rather than super human that becomes democratized at that level. >> Damon: Yeah. >> It's interesting. One of the things that you guys did at the DevOps Enterprise Summit, I know you were in the content chair. >> Damon: Sure. >> I made a note here for my ... Make sure I get this question to you, was I like this thing you guys touched upon. Is DevOps best left to grow organically or is there a growing need slash desire for an agile manifesto? (laughs) The top down, do the manifesto, or organic ... Thoughts? >> Yeah, I'd say no, because what DevOps is is a series of problem state- It's an umbrella over a bunch of problem statements and a bunch of solutions that keeps evolving. This is why the Devs conferences are so interesting because it's practitioners talking about what's worked for them. I feel like at the highest level, if you really need to have a definition, go ahead and read the Phoenix project or the DevOps handbook. They've done a great job of collating all of that, but at the end of the day it's not one thing. It's not a single practice. There's no single thing you can do to say I'm going to transform a major global financial services company into a fast, nimble operation. There is no one thing. It's a series of things that you have to try over and over again. Look at DevOps as a movement where you can learn from practitioners, apply it to your own organization, see what happens, report back, try some new stuff, and so on and so forth. >> So you could basically have a manifesto, but it's really just more of marching orders. Organically, it has to form on its own. That's basically the same. >> I think there already is. >> You could say hey we have a manifesto, but it's not like this is the playbook. You can get >> Damon: There is >> the handbook to learn. >> no playbook. >> Exactly. Okay, cool. Well, appreciate the insight. Let's talk about your business. What do you guys do? >> Damon: Sure. >> What are some of the things that Rundeck's doing that you're the co-founder of? Share a little bit about the company. >> Yeah, Rundeck is at the what is it, it's an orchestration and scheduling platform and it's used by operations organizations. Generally from large startups, but also large DevBox unicorns, but also a lot of large enterprises. What they're using it for is for defining and improving their operations procedures. What happens after deployment? Where do we define all the procedures to manage all these disparate systems, all these islands of automation. Chef and Puppet was the hottest thing around three years ago and now it's Docker and Kubernetes and everything else, and now we still have our old power shelf stuff, our late logic over there, some OpSquare stuff over there, so what are we going to do? We need a way to define the procedures, expand all those and allow people to participate in that operations world so they can relieve that crunch. We see a lot for automating the creative standard operating procedures like classic Runbook automation, with a next generation twist, we'll say, but we also see a lot of self service operations, meaning that let's let other people participate. Let's let developers define these procedures as Rundeck jobs, and then let operations vet them ... >> That's where you're talking about the operational being relieved a bit. >> Yeah, you have to. You can't just say there's one little group here that's going to deploy and run all of these things in this world. We have to let other people participate in that. Not just for deployment, which is big in the DevOps world, but for what happens after deployment that nobody wants to talk about. All the escalations, all the interruptions, all those problems, Rundeck really plays in that area help people to get that under control. >> Damon, thanks so much for sharing your insight. Congratulations on your startup and great to meet you in person. >> Yeah. >> We've had great chats in our crowd chat. You guys have been awesome with Gene Kim and the community that you're involved with with DevOps for the Enterprise Summit, practitioners sharing. That's a great ethos >> Damon: It's a pretty >> That really aligns >> awesome bet, yeah. >> with what's going on in the industry. Congratulations. More Cube coverage here exclusive of Cisco's inaugural event called DevNet Create, an extension of their DevNet core classic network and developer systems at Cisco. This is an open source one. This is out in the community. Not all Cisco, all part of the community. And of course we're bringing it to you with live coverage. I'm John for Peter Burris. Stay with us. (upbeat music) >> Hi. I'm April Mitchell, and I'm the senior director ...