>> Announcer: Live from the Computer History Museum, in Mountain View, California, it's the Cube. Covering DevNet Create 2018, brought to you by Cisco. >> Hey, welcome back everyone, this is the Cube's live coverage here in Mountain View, Califonia, for Cisco's DevNet Create. It's their cloud native developer ecosystem. A new initiative, only a year and a half old, great, cloud native dev ops oriented. I'm John Furrier, your cost with my co-host Lauren Cooney, our next guest is Damon Edwards, Chief Product Officer of Rundeck. Welcome to the Cube, good to see you again. >> Yeah good to see you again as well. >> So, you were just on stage giving a talk. >> I was. >> About ops, dev ops. >> I was bumming people out, that's what I was doing, so all of the Cisco early stuff was about new products, new toys, new awesome stuff, and then my talk was about how silos and tickets ruin everything. Right that, we've got all these great advances on the dev side of the house and delivery side of the house and the new technologies we've got, and everything's high flying and going to be perfect, until it all hits operations and things tend to go wrong. So I walked through a bunch of names we changed to hide the not-so-innocent, we went through some incidents and tales of woe and how the disconnects, and basically the siloed way of working, number one, group like with like in operations, very siloed. But also, number two, that we run our lives through these ticket-driven request queues. Right and request queues or queues in general, if you look on the product side, and then the physics of the queuing, the queuing theory behind it, queues are economically very expensive things. You know, they add a lot of delays, they create a lot of bottlenecks. I ask you to do something, I write it down, you take it off the queue, you know, a week later, the context is all different, right? So you have all kinds of bottlenecks, all kinds of quality problems, all kinds of delays, and it's an expensive way to work. Yet that has become the defacto way that we run our lives. And studies and tickets for what they're good at, which is handling problems, we use tickets as the general work permission system for the entire operations organization, and it's no surprise that silos and ticket-driven request queues, that we get what we get. And so the talk was about how to say, well how can we stop using tickets as the primary way of doing things? How do we look at the organization and remove the need for hand-offs between the silos, and then replace, where we can't get rid of the hand-offs, with self-service, right? Pull-based self-service interfaces where people can get what they need to get done, do those operational tasks themselves, and then move on >> Lauren: Great. >> That's what it's all about. >> Tell us a little bit about what your company does and how you're solving this problem, 'cause it's definitely a problem that's out there right now, and people aren't talking about it a whole lot because it's kind of the ugly underbelly of development ops. You know, they're trying to solve it, but they don't really want to talk about it. >> It's less sexy because you get a promotion for delivering the next big project, right? Saying you fix how operations work, it generally doesn't- you know the board of directors doesn't know your name. So that's kind of problem number one. But how Rundeck factors into this is that we make tools for SREs and systems administrators to, number one, organize all their scripts and tools, connect all their scripts and tools, the platforms they currently have across those silos, create standard operating procedures, and then, probably most importantly use the access control features to start to give access to people who are traditionally outside of the operational boundaries. Let developers participate in operations. Let QA participate in operations. Let business analysts participate in operations. All those requests they normally have of operations, create those services, let them do them. By doing that, you're creating more capacity in operations to focus on issues you really need to be solved, and you're making everyone else happy because you're staying out of their way. They can move faster, have fast feedback, higher quality, all of that stuff. >> You know we've done a lot of crowd chats and we had the questions come up, Is it the culture, or is it the tooling, or is it the people? Thinking all of the above, culture, everyone goes to the (mumbles), yeah the culture's going to be there. You guys are doing tooling. Can you talk about some of the things that you've seen that works. How does someone go, "Hey, first it's self-awareness, "we got to change this." If someone's into that mindset, I want to move to the new model, to be more agile, to actually streamline those silos and that ticket system. What tool do they need to use? What are you guys providing? Where is the steps? What's the sequence of tooling and adoption, and picks and shovels. >> Number one, use what you have, right? So this idea that, okay we're going to solve this problem, we're going to teach everybody to use this one tool, so everyone's going to learn this DSL or this language, it just never works. I mean, you know, three years ago it was one tool, we all know the name. Couple of years ago is was another tool, we all know the name, you know, these configuration management tools. Now we're on to the new container world, I don't know if we need that or not. Everyone wants to do what they need to do, so let them do what they need to do. It's a very lean idea. Focus on how to connect those things. Focus on how to orchestrate and organize what you've got already. And then from there, focus on, you know, how do we two things? Limit those hand-offs, so that kind of is more of an organizational issue. And number two, all those hand-off points, Anything I need something from you John, you know, or you Lauren, I don't want to have to say, "do this for me, and you do this for me." I'm going to wait and you've got five other things you're working on. You should create services that I can pull from. I need something from you, I need something you normally do. Hit an automated service, sort of like, don't do the old Savist managed service way of doing things. Do it the Amazon way, right, which is I can hit an API and get what I want when I want it. And most importantly, it's not just a one way button I can push. But I can actually create those buttons myself. So I can give the thing that I need to do, you can look at it and say, yeah that's going to work, give me back permission to go and run it. Everybody's happy, you guys get more of the scenario, get more capacity and I get what I want without having- >> So is microservices going to impact operations in a way? Cause then what you're getting at is more of a microservices, more of the primitives are going to be in the ops side. So there's a development mindset anyway. Is that standard dev ops now is ops? >> Well you need to handle the operational concerns as early in the life-cycle as possible. Meaning developers have to build from- it's kind of like in the car world, you build a car for manufactureability. You have to build the services for operability, and so that's number one. And with the new microservices decoupled world, you have to move to this model of operations because the old model that did work balances across these silos, it just doesn't work in this decoupled world. It makes everything kind of grind back to a lumpen mass of who-knows-what. So if you want to let the organization decouple, you have to be able to decouple your operations to match. >> So how long is it taking for customers to realize the value of your solutions that you bring to the table? And how much time is it saving them? >> Yeah, I mean, for Rundeck specifically, because it doesn't force you to learn new languages, you can start with what you've got today. So literally it takes days, right? Start plugging in things that you have. You can set up the access control. You can set up the options interface, and next thing you know, I've got this self-service interface and I can turn around and let somebody use it. So, you know, Rundeck doesn't do the culture and the organization change for you. This becomes a tool that greases that, makes it a lot easier to get that. >> What specifically in the tool that works for customers that's resonating in your tool? What's the big impact when people engage with you guys? When do they know when to bring you in for the tool? Let's just say that the gurus can... hey, here's the culture, you know, you do some yoga, whatever you got to do culture-wise, make that happen. You come in, what do you do? >> Sure, so for us, we're kind of more the bottom-up, right? It's usually a team that says, "hey we're getting overrun with these requests." Or it's a team that's saying, we've got to get like- it could be as simple as our restarts are a mess. There's too many ways to do things across all these tools. And then it's, hey, these people keep bugging us to do this. Or, that team keeps bugging us to refresh this environment. Or, this team, we need to give them access to something that goes wrong in production, to run some health checks and see what's happening. Really, those kind of operational, support-type use cases. It's generally at the team-level, be brought in to solve these different problems. And then where, really, the gas gets poured on, is when the upper management is following all the dev ops and SREs conversations and realize that things need to change, then they usually see Rundeck as, ooh, we can use that, right? That's going to help us unlock things, and let's do more of that, and it spreads from team to team. >> So you're really not trying to come in and boil the ocean over. You come in on a very specific entry point, and then get momentum and scales. >> Yeah, we get organizations that aren't touching their culture at all. It's literally just, we're doing things the old, classic, off-shore, application operations call center model, and we're just going to get better at that, and use Rundeck to create more capacity, standardize things, bring some more people into this process, and that's it. And they're very successful as that. And then, the really exciting ones is when the coder gets caught up into larger organizational transformation. >> You mentioned SRE, site reliability engineers. Google uses that term. So I've got to ask you, we talked before we came on camera about "no ops", having a no ops culture because dev ops is more developer. And we were kind of pooh-poohing that, and you were kind of more aggressive. I won't say what you said to me because it's a children's show here. >> Damon: Yes I'm sure a lot of children watch the Cube. (laughs) >> The ops guys, no pun intended. So, Google is really hardcore on this. Do you have an opinion on this? Ops, no ops, dev ops, the role of ops? >> I mean it's ridiculous, ops happens, right? I mean, ops everyday. John Alspot was a formerly dexy, and now he's kind of a researcher, does this thing at conferences where he says, "Everybody raise your hand, if I locked everybody out, "so hands off the keyboard, you can't do anything. "How many of your companies "would still be in business tomorrow? "Or in a week? Or in a month? Or in a year?" And people's hands kind of going... You know, a day and a week, you know? And the reality is operations happens, right? These are complex, moving systems, interacting with complex things in the world, and you have to be able to operate them. So, you know, the original no ops idea was, oh I don't want to have a separate thing called operations, I want to distribute operations where it makes sense, have engineers everywhere. Google has an interesting view, which is, no we have a distinct organization. But they call it SRE and they use more software engineering discipline to do. We have a whole methodology behind it. But they're very much proving you can still have a separate engineering and operations organization and do it right. And then there's folks like Netflix and Amazon who are more like, no no we're going to distribute it within these cross-functional teams and organizations. >> And they're still ops no matter how you slice them. But here's the thing, my observation... People get confused automation and operations. Just because you're automating something doesn't mean it goes away. >> Damon: Right. >> You might automate some tasks and things- >> Damon: Or it could make it worse. >> Yeah so talk about that pull-push, that tug between that. Because it's the tension that's positive, because you want to automate things that you're doing multiple repetitive tasks on. But that eliminates some tasks but you're still operating. Talk about that dynamic. >> Well, there's certain things computers are very good at. Repetitive, no-end tasks, computers are great at. But it takes human creativity, or sort of the super complex connecting-the-dots. Humans are good at that. So how do you automate as much of the things as possible that the computers are good at? And that gives you the time and the cognitive bandwidth to focus on the creative. That's creative in building things, creative in "oh crap, we've got to solve this". Right, and the tool should be there to support that. The idea that you can automate all of that away, it just is not- >> Give me an example, if you look four or five years and think about how we're moving fast with the evolution with the cloud and everything else happening. (mumbles) IOG, AO, all this great stuff's happening. You got blog chain, you got cryptocurrent, a lot of things going on. That is super positive, it also could be detrimental. Where does the human piece come in? Where will always be the pieces where human creativity, human intuition, human judgment... Where is it always going to shine? What specific things do you see never going away? >> It's what you said, the intuition and the judgment, right? In the day-to-day work activities, you need to use that intuition and judgment to get things done, to see the different signals, and understand what they mean, to create new solutions on how to solve these new challenges. You know, that is where the human beings are needed. So, it's both in the delivery time, and in the idea of operations. If you think of an airplane, there's still pilots. You think of a nuclear power plant, there's still operators. Tons of automation, tons of alarms, tons of things to assist them, but it still comes down to the things that human brains are good at. So there's always a role- >> So categorically, how you see security, latency is one, multi-cloud, workload movement, is the areas that you start to see the categorical areas that are never going to go away. >> Yeah, and at a certain point you're going to have things where the platforms get better, and you kind of climb the stack, and more things that only human beings can do in the past you can start to automate things. Like deployment, deployment used to be a human task, now we start to standardize things, have standard parts, have virtualization, now the cloud, now the cloud native technology. That allows you to... Okay, you've standardized things, you've build the right tooling, now you can focus the humans on more important problems, and move at a higher velocity and better quality. >> Lauren: Great. >> Great stuff. Okay, what's going on for you? What are you up to now these days? What events are you going to? What are you working on? what are the cool things you're excited about right now? >> What am I excited about? The dev ops enterprise summit, I've been involved with that for a number of years, that is the best collection of enterprise, big corporation thinking around the whole sphere of transformation. >> John: And it's growing too. >> Yeah, it's growing. There's one now in London, one now going to be in Las Vegas, you know, 1000 to 2000 people. SREcon. SRE is a... It's like a specialized implementation of all the dev ops thinking. I think that's another great place to be. And then devopsdays, Velocity, all the traditional conferences. >> Great community. You've got to say being involved in the dev ops from day one, watching the pioneers, a few with arrows in their back, but now have gone mainstream, super exciting. I think Cooper Netties brings that mainstream, just highlights everything. >> Yeah, that's that platform I was talking about. A lot of the concerns that human beings had to struggle with on a day-to-day basis are now being put into the orchestration and scheduling and the containerization of things. >> Damon, great work. Congratulations on all the work you've done. You've been a real contribution to the industry. >> Thank you. >> Good luck with the business. Thanks for coming on the Cube. >> Yeah, thanks for having me. >> Alright, this Cube live coverage here in Mountain View for Cisco's DEVNET Create. Really the Cisco's foray into cloud native. Really getting at that dev ops culture, solving big problems, programming the networks. Cisco's bringing that together with their communities. Of course, Cube's here covering it. More live coverage after this short break. (electronic music)

>> 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 ...

(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.

>>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.

(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)

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

(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 the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. It's theCUBE covering DevNet Create 2018, brought to you by Cisco. (techy music playing) >> Hey, welcome back, everyone. We're here live at theCUBE here in Mountain View in the heart of California, the Silicon Valley. I'm John Furrier, my cohost Lauren Cooney. Our next guest is Riaz Raihan, who's the global VP and general manager of Cisco, IOT, CUBE alumni, back... Last on at Cisco Live in Barcelona. We got Cisco Live coming up, but we're here at DevNet Create developer... Develop our ecosystem for Cisco and external cloud native developers, great to see you. >> Thank you, John, pleasure to be back. >> What's a Cisco guy like you doing at a hoody show like this, IOT... >> You know, IOT is so topical and there's so much interest around it, so just happy to be here with the developers and just get to meet a few people out here and just be part of this whole event. >> So, IOT, we last time, and all joking aside is really hot because you have now, you know, the cloud is a foundation, on-premise data, hybrid cloud going on, but the Edge of the network's certainly very relevant. So, you've got a lot of new things happening. So, the question for you is what industries are early adopting... What industries do you see that are adopting IOT in the programmable way? I'm not so much as censored networks, they're out there, but as they bring them into, the IOT into the technology, IT world, which industries are the most adoptive for you guys? >> I talk about, you know, a handful of industries that are really leading the charge, right. Number one I'd say is manufacturing. We see a lot of activity out there primarily because for the first time manufacturers have an opportunity to really converge their data and put it on an IP network, which is exciting. The other big one is energy, both oil and gas as well as utility. >> John: Mm-hmm. >> And then we're seeing huge amount of interest in transportation, both in actually the roadways as well as well as the fleet that run on the roadways. In addition to those I'd say retail and general public sector and cities are big adopters of IOT. >> So, on the IOT side with, say... Let's take transportation, so as we know, we know that Uber happened with Uber. They had a death, now the censor, they sort of argued latency matters, right, so you've got to have a network, support it. >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> Is smart cities truly happening in a way that's, in your opinion, moving the ball down the field. Where is the smart cities with IOT respect to cities I mean, is it still early, are they moving the ball down the field, your thoughts? >> You know, I'm asked this question pretty often and I can tell you that moving a city towards a smart city is actually a massive endeavor. What we find is the cities that are doing this successfully, they kind of start small with a few use cases. Let's say parking, maybe lighting, and then they've got to expand out the number of use cases but also geographic spread of where they'll deploy, and specifically, you know, when they work with us one of the big advances we're making is something called the FOG Appliance. Building this easy-to-install appliance that can be used at intersections and at various points to enable cities to go smart. >> So, Lauren, you and I were talking the other day about this, is that, you know, in the cloud, you bring cloud together with the developers. >> Lauren: Yep. >> It's interesting because they have to actually figure out that software going to be powering the Edge-- >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> And you know, Kubernetes is in one example, and then when you start looking at what Kubernetes is doing to the network layer you say, "Okay, I've got to write software." >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> But most of the Edge applications, oil and gas, they're like facilities guys. These guys are hardware people. They're deploying cameras, they're not-- >> Well, there has to be their software that actually runs on that as well to enable things for people, places, and things at the Edge and I think you all have to look at the Edge when you are talking about IOT, especially. >> Software, that's the key, what do you say to all those guys that have to relearn software? (laughing) Come to DevNet Create, I mean, this is a real issue. >> Yeah, you know, if you look at software in general, right, software's playing a bigger and bigger role in these applications, not to diminish the role of hardware or networking or any of the other elements, but what software's certainly playing a bigger role, like let me give you an example. Let's talk about the FOG Appliance. You know, one of the things we've been working on quite diligently is building out a single software framework that can sit on a number of different hardware devices depending on what the use case is, and the use case is defined by the customer, it's defined by the industry. It's also defined by the price point, so what we're seeing more and more, John, is having a single software framework but being able to deploy across different platforms, if you will, and therefore building different appliances to solve different problems. >> Lauren: Great. >> Yeah, and one of the things that I think is huge, and I want to get your thoughts on this, I think we should do a deep dive on it, and that is is that video is becoming much more of a bigger app. We use video a lot, as seen on theCUBE. Thank you for watching, but there's a lot of data in the video apps. It's not just do the video to communicate a message. >> Riaz: Yep. >> There's a digital artifact-- >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> That's beyond what it's for. It's now digitized-- >> Riaz: Yeah. >> So, that's now data, your thoughts? >> You know, when we were talking before you mentioned video is a data asset, completely agree. What we're finding is video is now transitioning from just being something that we thought about for safety and security to becoming more of an intelligent asset. Video's also now getting integrated more with the business process. So, let me give you an example. We're working with the manufacturer of nylon, and this is a process industry that works 24/7, and they're using video to actually monitor the output as it comes out of the machines. Because when the temperature rises above a certain limit, and this is obviously a manufacturing defect, it tends to blob up the nylon, which then reduces the value of the nylon from something that's high grade and high margin to low grade and low margin. >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> And video's helping solve the problem. So, the video creates an alert that's part now of the manufacturing process and manufacturing control, allowing management to intervene quickly to kind of at least cut their losses. So, that's an example of how video's now becoming very much a part of the business process. Not just safety and security but well beyond that. >> Well beyond surveillance. >> Riaz: Yeah. >> Lauren: Yeah. >> This is more than just normal use cases. So, new value activities are going on with video. >> Absolutely, the other big one is traffic, and I'm talking about road traffic. Whether you look at tunnels or you look at parkways and so on, we're now seeing video being used to monitor the flow patterns of cars-- >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> On highways and on parkways-- >> Lauren: Yeah. >> And then not just using that to predict traffic jams, but in some cases predict accidents. >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> Because once you take these data labels and data assets through video and compute them, it's a stream of information that can be analyzed mathematically using an algorithm, and then fortunately we are able to now use that-- >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> To prevent accidents potentially, right? >> Lauren: Yeah. >> So, that's the kind of thing we see video in. >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> And this is just the cusp. You'll see a lot more of use cases where video and IOT get very integrated and again, very happy that Cisco's leading the charge on that. >> Mm-hmm. >> So, Lauren, I want to ask you a question because I know you and I have been talking about this, and that is is that the developer role around this is not obvious... I mean, it's obvious, "Oh, got to write software." >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> But now you've got to create ecosystems. So, let's just say businesses want to integrate video, they have a buy/build decision to make. >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> Do they build it from scratch or they integrate it in. So, if you take Riaz's next level of conversation is video is a service, it's a microservice. >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> If it's a data asset, if you believe that it's a microservice. >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> So, it's not trivial now, you've got to figure out how to codify it. What do you guys think about that? You guys are the experts in the software, what's your thoughts? >> So, you know, I can jump in. I think this is an important trend. You know, especially if you look at three industries that I personally work with: manufacturing, you look at energy, and then you look at retail. These are three industries that I think are leading the charge on how they're using video, you know, in this context, and how the video's actually provided I think is less important. What's more important, as you said, is the microservice that has video as a component, and then consuming that and integrating it with a whole value stream within that industry. The other important element, I believe, is the use of video in conjunction with other types of sensors. So, let me give you an example. We're working with a large telco and you know, they have these cell towers placed all across the country and they actually video, they have video to monitor the cell towers and that's great, but the problem is it gives them a lot of false positives. So, they solved the problem by using human form recognition, still-- >> Like what's a false positive, give me an example. >> A false positive is, you know, a leaf, branch blowing. >> John: Oh, okay. >> And that gives you a positive reading, right. Now, they've kind of used, they've used some technology and they've reduced that down, but they still have too many false positives. So, they decided to combine the video feed with some of the sensors that they have. For example, when someone tries to pull a copper plate from the cell phone tower there's a sensor that tracks that. So, now combining the video input and the sensor input they get, you know, much fewer false positives. >> John: Yeah. >> And are able to take action much more expeditiously. >> The co-occurring incidents are a huge, huge opportunity for the IP. So, the thing I want to ask you, because I think this is much more business oriented, so want to get your thoughts on it... Okay, video's a data asset, people say it. I believe that, now I want to operationalize that in my company. Talk about a new process improvement, that's hard to do because they've never done it before. How are you guys engaging customers and what are some best practices to get them to operationalize a new, not just new technology or service, but actually integrate it into a preexisting or changing value chain? >> One of the things we do, John, is we'll engage with customers to do what we call a value management analysis. So, we actually sit down with them, work out, you know, what their existing process looks like, what an improved process might look like, and importantly, what kind of cost they can take out of the process, out of the system, or what kind of new value they can drive for their customers. So, it's either an increase in revenue, it's a decrease in cost, or an improvement in process efficiencies. Once we've done that it really allows us to then pair up that new process with our technology, and then actually track how much of the value they've received. We've found this approach kind of grounds everything in a very strong ROI, so instead of guessing as to what the output will be and does it actually move the needle on a value basis. We're actually able to document that up front and then actually track the results against what we thought would be. The other advantage of this process is it allows us to improve incrementally. So, the first version of a video enabled business process might give us a certain amount of value, but as we improve on that you could see incremental values and other processes being added on. Very similar to starting small and then adding on incrementally-- >> John: Yeah. >> Kind of a designed way. >> But you got to be open minded. Just let me throw a wrench into the equation here, which is okay, new data source... >> Riaz: Yeah. >> You mentioned the co-occurring identity on the cell tower, for example. There could be, like, multiple data inputs that are new. How does a customer figure that out? >> Different customers are different, and again, as I mentioned-- >> John: Or in generally speaking, because you've got to be prepared for the unknown. >> Yeah, some industries I think are more open to this because they have seen... They have felt this problem before. Going back to manufacturing as an example, monitoring, visually monitoring the output of a manufacturing process is a very labor intensive, you know, proposition. Manufacturers have struggled doing that for a long time. >> John: Yeah. >> Now having used video and getting just a very high level of efficiency-- >> John: Yeah. >> And combining different types of inputs is something they're very open to. >> John: Yeah. >> So, we see them very open to it. Other industries, I think, are coming along, but it all goes back to how important a problem are you solving and what's the payoff of solving the problem? >> John: Yeah. >> The bigger the problem, the more the willingness. >> Great conversation-- >> Lauren: Yeah. >> We had the devops guy on early. Damian, who's with Rundeck and he's saying, you know, bringing down silos and tickets is killing operations. >> Lauren: Yep. >> It's an old paradigm. >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> You guys are going down a new road, and we talked about this at Cisco Live in Barcelona. You got tail wind for you guys as this, but you got a clean sheet of paper but you got some preexisting stuff, but it's not like baggage. It's just opportunity, in my opinion. So, I got to ask you how is the business going, what are you guys doing? What are some of the recent successes you've had? Share some insight into the-- >> Yeah, and I think just to add to that, I think what are the revenue opportunities that you see that, you know, you're providing these services to these customers. They must see new revenue opportunities as well. Wondering what those are. >> Absolutely. So, I'll kind of cover both, both sides of my business. I'll start with Jasper, Cisco Jasper. Our Cisco Jasper business is doing fabulously well. We added almost 10,000 devices last month alone, or last quarter, and we are on track to keep adding devices at a very fast pace, so very excited about that. We've just crossed 75 million. So, 75 million devices on Jasper. The last time we spoke, John, the number was 60 million. In addition, we've also seen many more enterprises adopting Jasper. >> John: Yeah. >> The last time we spoke it was 14,000, now it's over 16,400. (laughing) So, that number keeps growing. >> You'll see next month it'll be 20,000. (laughing) >> So, that number just keeps growing-- >> John: Yes. >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> And that allows us to broaden our reach-- >> John: Yeah. >> Get into different use cases and drive incremental value for our customers. On the Kinetic side, as I mentioned we're seeing a lot of traction in the verticals that I laid out earlier, but specifically what we're finding now is customers are getting serious-- >> Take a minute to explain Kinetic for a second. >> Riaz: Sure. >> Just one minute and then get into it. >> Sure, so Kinetic our data fabric. It's our platform that allows us to extract data from all kinds of IT devices that are sitting on a corporate or a private network. It allows us to process that data at the Edge and then it allows us to transport the data to wherever the customer wants it to be. So, it's really our IOT platform, our data fabric at the core. The Kinetic business is doing great. We've had lots of update, there's actually a booth out here where they're demoing Kinetic. >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> I see a lot of people coming in and trying to understand it and we see people deploying Kinetic in more and more unique ways. We're working, for example, with a German manufacturer, a very prestigious German manufacturer that's now launching a pretty large project with Kinetic where they're using Kinetic to monitor the health of not just all their new machines, but also all the Braunfeld machines that they have installed over the past decade, right. So, we're very excited about that and very excited about the future. >> Well, great job, congratulations. Always great to talk with you. I think it's one of the exciting bright spots within Cisco with the IOT, certainly the DevNet developer program has been a huge success and that's only going to help you guys, and obviously the DevNet, create. You want some more software developers, you know, working on Kinetic and also Meraki and all these cool tools. So, congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> More live coverage here, DevNet Creates, theCUBE in Silicon Valley in Mountain View, California. We'll be right back after this short break. (techy music playing)