>> Illustrator: From around the globe,
it's the cube
with digital coverage of PagerDuty summit 2020.
Brought to you by pagerduty.
>> Welcome to the cubes coverage of PagerDuty Summit 2020,
the virtual edition.
I'm Lisa Martin,
and I'm pleased to welcome
the Senior Vice President of Product for PagerDuty.
Jonathan Rendy.
Jonathan, welcome back to the cube.
Thank you, Lisa.
It's great to be here.
So this is our virtual cube,
virtual summit 2020.
But one of the things
that I know from talking with Jennifer yesterday
6is that this is the opportunity to reach
way more people
because there's, you know,
no travel restrictions
and budget and things like that.
But one of the things that is quite impressive is that
you're going to be in your keynote talking about
a lot of changes and enhancements to the products
the biggest release in pagerduty's History
During COVID-19 really impressive.
Talk to us about why this is such an exciting time.
>> Well, it's it's exciting for a lot of reasons.
And great to be here,
although I'm getting so tired
of working from home these days.
But be that as it may,
yeah, we we do have the biggest
set of releases and investments and innovation
that we're unleashing in the history of the company,
which in these times is is no small feat.
I want to thank all the teams have done a wonderful job.
But we're using our summit event,
as you know, to to talk about that
to bring that out to discuss and
we have some
very high profile speakers coming.
Joining us at the event.
We have Andy Jassy,
we have Eric Diwan,
Stewart Butterfield and more.
So it'll be a fantastic event,
for executives and for practitioners alike.
So sharing what we're doing new with all of this,
these leaders joining us is going to be a great thing.
>> One of the things that's become so critical
in the last six months is digital services.
And I think so many of us don't realize or don't think about
the folks under,
I don't want to say under the hood,
but behind the scenes really,
that are critical for you mentioned,
the CEOs of AWS and zoom,
and Slack,
which are all essential.
I mean, zoom is a household name,
right? My mom even uses zoom,
she's 75 that's pretty cool.
But all of the criticality under the hood
to ensure that these services
continue because we're all now even more dependent on them
than we ever have been before.
>> Yeah, it's really interesting,
I was thinking about this the other day,
there were so many casual services that we all relied on,
you know, pre March pre February,
that now have become just mission critical and,
and to everything that we do professionally and personally.
And to your point,
whether you're working out at home with,
you know, your peloton,
or whether you're in the two dimensional world
with zoom all the time,
we just expect all these services
to be up and running and be available for us.
And behind all those services that we expect to be there
is a an amazing amount of complexity and dependencies.
And behind all those complexity and dependencies
our people and and that's a big part of what
PagerDuty focuses on
which is engaging people
on the right issues at the right time.
And of course,
allowing them not just to be engaged
but complete the work work,
major issues,
unexpected work,
unplanned work,
and complete all that
in when moments and seconds and microseconds matters.
So Pedro duty has a unique place
in that whole ecosystem of what's
considered crucial and critical now.
>> We'll we've been hearing the term
essential workers for since March right and
thinking of them in a traditional sense of doctors
and nurses and firemen and obviously grocery workers and,
and deliver
companies.
But looking at it from pages through your lens,
it's this the whole like digital frontline,
the DevOps folks,
the IT folks,
the customer support folks who are really
on the front lines of helping
that brand be protected.
Now it's, you know,
the fact that everything is real time that now is now
more important than ever is never been more important.
So talk to us about sort of this
switch to this digital default and what that means
for operations.
>> Yeah, as we were just saying, to your point,
it's never been
the services have never been more important
and more essential to everything that we do.
So it just makes perfect sense that
all of the individuals who are responsible for building
and delivering
and supporting those services are essential.
Now also and as a part of that
we talk a lot about going from what everybody knows
as DevOps to digital ops.
And while it may sound like a marketing phrase,
words matter,
and it really means going from being responsive
to being proactive and predictive.
And that's so important for these individuals.
To get ahead of this, we've seen
super interesting data,
when we look at our platform where there 13,000 customers
of how life has changed
for all of those customers
and those half a million users of our platform today,
pre COVID.
And now that we're in the middle of this with, again,
reflecting how important services are
the increased use of those,
and then the rise in issues.
And what's the great news is that
individuals and companies using the platform
are actually getting better
at addressing them than they were pre COVID.
So with the bad news, there's, there's good news, too.
>> I agree, there are always silver linings,
I was looking at my notes here.
And one of the things when
PagerDuty evaluated your platform,
and as we mentioned over 13,000 customers,
during COVID,
seeing an increase in traffic
and demand for digital services,
more than a 38% increase in incidence
compared to the prior period.
But you also talked about how
the big impact that pager duty is helping your customers
make and resolving those incidents faster.
And I guess maybe sorting through the noise,
and a better more automated way.
>> Exactly. And a lot of it has to do
with what we've been doing.
And then another piece is our new releases.
And so again, we've looked at our data to your point.
And we've seen this over a third rise,
in the number of issues,
that organizations are running into across the board.
And with our new releases,
we're able to reduce interruptions by over 65%.
So it's great news that again,
with with the rising use and the rise in interruptions
and people having to context switch
from what they're doing to you know,
firefight and jump in the middle one
and collaborate across organizations that
there's light on the horizon,
the light at the end of the tunnel, I should say,
and then things are going to get better.
And our new releases are going to help in a big way.
>> Okay, I'm assuming you have a crystal ball,
which is great.
So I'm going to be looking for some more predictions,
but talking to your customers.
And you know, I can imagine
now there's more noise.
You mentioned this switch from DevOps
to digital ops
and this now this digital default that I know,
Jennifer has talked about,
and it's this probably going to be
one of the things that that shapes the winners
and the losers of tomorrow in every industry.
But tell me a little bit about how you're helping
how you're using, you know,
the traditional buzzwords,
AI, machine learning,
and putting them really effectively to work
so that it's now not just a buzzword that
companies in any industry should be thinking about,
but it's actually machine learning is
going to be critical to sorting through
this increased volume of data
and helping resolve incidents faster to not just,
you know, prevent customer churn,
but also to make sure that your folks
on the digital front lines aren't burned out.
>> Well, with the transition
that we were talking about before,
you know, everybody realizes
that they have to be all in now,
there's no, we're migrating to the cloud.
And there's reasons for that,
moving from on prem systems to to the public cloud,
in many ways,
we've seen that massively accelerate.
And with that comes and how the systems are,
have to be built and managed and delivered there,
you see this increasing complexity.
And going back to what we were talking before,
individuals are behind all of that complexity.
And so it's so important that in our new releases,
we really up the bar,
we've really raised the game,
so to speak on
what we're doing to take advantage of our data
that we capture.
And also this increase in information that's coming in,
we refer to it a lot of times as telemetry when you,
you know, start to refactor and rebuild your systems
in the public cloud,
and you have all those dependencies
and you have more information,
more data flowing to you,
which can translate to more interruptions.
And very easy, It's very easy for organizations
and teams to get overwhelmed by that.
And so
our new releases,
focus on making sense of that
we talked about the reduction in interruptions
and the reduction in noise.
But we've also focused equally,
on helping folks with context
with information when something goes
south,
when something is different than what a team expected.
How do you fix that once you engage the right people,
they're so big part of our releases
also been about applying machine learning to add context
to speed up fixing
and resolving and finding the root cause of these issues
in a big way.
And we do that through a number of different ways
in our in our products,
in our PagerDuty platform,
event intelligence,
and also our analytics,
again, to draw these relationships
around service dependencies and our analytics,
we've included a recommendation engine.
So now we can show organizations and teams predict.
If you make these changes,
you will see these improvements.
And this will be your returns and
using our data combined with the data that's coming in,
That's a big part of what the PagerDuty platform
is all about.
>> well that analytics piece is,
critical as as the machine learning
because the volumes of data are getting
bigger and bigger and bigger such that
it can't be can't depend on just humans.
There's something that I'm curious about, too,
is with the rise in incidents,
how can PagerDuty help customers kind of sort
through the noise and maybe Park things that
might be able to be resolved on their own
without having to escalate?
>> It's a great question.
And we do it through a couple of ways.
One,
we've applied machine learning
so many times when,
when interruptions when issues alerts come in,
and they can look different,
but they're all related to the same thing.
So we're applying machine learning
to better group and intelligently
organize and group
all of those informations
into the singular incidents
that really matter
that you really need to pull teams together on
which is important.
The next thing we're doing is
we're using machine learning to say, Hmm, okay,
it looks like these, these issues,
these incidents are happening on
different services that teams own.
And what we're also using the machine learning to do now
is to show the dependencies
between those services.
So we often see situations where
you can have a couple of teams in your organization,
working on issues that are delivered to them,
not knowing that they're related.
And in some ways they can be working against each other.
So having information to know that one issue is upstream.
And the other issue is downstream allows
one team to step forward and the other team to step back.
And we're using our machine learning for that,
to give that additional context
and help pinpoint where the issues are.
So it's the most effective use of these teams
when they come in,
Nothing's more frustrating by the way
than being interrupted,
whether it's the middle of the day
or the middle of the night,
only to find out that either you're being unproductive
or you didn't need to be there in the first place.
>> Oh, absolutely, yes.
And I'm seeing some stats that people are
the folks on the digital front lines
are working an average of 10 hours more a week.
And so many more of those interruptions are happening
and when you'd like to be off on the weekends
and the middle of the night.
But one of the things that that you took context,
absolutely critical,
but also collaboration,
different teams that need to be to your point,
are we working on the same thing, and we don't know,
the collaboration now that work is distributed
is even
more critical than ever?
What are some of the things
that you're hearing from customers
about what PagerDuty is doing
to facilitate that collaboration so that things
just run much more smoothly,
and the demanding consumer on the other end
is satisfied?
>> Well, to your point,
one of the most critical things, since we're talking about
not just a technology issue,
we're talking about a people issue is communication,
and collaborating.
And that is so important,
not only in general,
but in these moments that matter.
And so one of the things we've done in the new platform
is we're introducing industry firsts,
video war rooms,
with our partners and customers zoom,
as well as Microsoft Teams.
And so we're also updating our slack integrations as well.
But as we live in this two dimensional world,
those responders,
those teams that have to come together to fix issues
with the single click of a button,
now they can participate in those issues,
in a video sense,
in a video war room,
but not just engage in that way.
We've also added the ability
to manage the issue
through zoom
through Microsoft Teams as a part of PagerDuty.
So individual don't need to context switch
from one product to another,
they can do everything they need to do from from that world.
So a big part of that collaboration
and communication is all about the in the moment,
you know, teams working together in those forums.
But there's another side of communication collaboration
in these major events.
That's critical as well.
And that has to do with
what I always think of as the ripple effect.
There's there are the teams working the issues.
And then there are all the teams adjacent to that,
whether they're business stakeholders,
whether they're customer service teams,
that also need to take action.
They may not be fixing the issue,
but they have to engage and they have worked to do
they have actions they need to take equally,
that are different.
And so for those other organizations,
it's we've increased the scalability
of our stakeholder notification into the 10s of thousands.
So those folks can keep in touch in tight alignment
to what's happening to an issue being fixed,
which, again, in today's world,
this effect, affects everyone in an organization,
not just the teams tasked with addressing the problems.
>> Right. And of course,
the demanding consumer on the other end
isn't considering the fact that
the customer support person
that they're talking to
might not have access to everything they need.
And it's critical.
It's business critical for any type of organization
to understand that, even their customer support folks,
and I shouldn't say even those guys and girls
are on the digital front lines.
And brand reputation hangs on the data
that they have the context that they have,
and their ability to resolve
a customer issue because we were more demanding
as consumers before COVID.
And now I think even more than other because
we're dependent on it.
We're dependent on zoom,
or dependent on Slack,
we're dependent on Amazon and AWS,
and so many other digital services.
And we don't get what we want as consumers,
right, we're going to go I'm going to go find someone else
who's going to be able to respond to this in in one second,
because I'm only going to give it a half a second.
So last question, Jonathan for you so much announced
this PagerDuty Summit 2020,
unique in that way unique in the virtual asset.
But what are some of the things that you see on the horizon,
say, the next six months,
because I'm pretty sure you have a crystal ball,
let's open that up.
>> Well, I see a couple of things.
And while I never said that I'm Nostradamus,
I see a couple of things.
And one is that there is a material,
seismic shift
towards full service ownership.
and so teams,
and this was happening before as a part of DevOps.
But when I was talking previously
about moving to digital Ops,
we're seeing large organizations
have major initiatives
around this notion of
the frontline teams have to be empowered to work directly
on these issues.
And we always call that this phrase,
full service ownership,
which means you build it,
you ship it,
you own it.
And that's both for development and IT organizations.
And I think you brought up
a really interesting point before,
in this trend that I see happening and only accelerating,
it's happening because people want to innovate faster.
And those individuals, those teams,
whether you're, again, in Dev,
it Ops,
or even in customer service,
it's important that you're empowered to do this
to help in that innovation.
So I see that as the first seismic shift.
And actually, as a part of that.
The other big part of our announcements is where
we're at summit,
announcing PagerDuty for customer service.
It's a curated product,
just for customer service teams,
because they're part of that big triangle
with Dev and IT teams that they need to be in the loop,
they need to be empowered with the same types of tools,
they need to be able to act as a,
essentially an incident commander,
they have cases that come in,
and they need to be able to engage the right individuals
to provide that customer service to
what you were saying before.
And
they need to have a direct link
to everything that's happening in Dev and it
so they can be proactive and get ahead of
customer cases also.
So again, to your question of, like, what do I see?
I think that shift is brought on by people being all in,
you know, with with their,
their cloud migrations and refactoring.
And then full service ownership
being something that empowering individuals
on the front lines,
democratizing,
you know,
decision making and empowering those teams.
I see that as the biggest shift happening overall.
>> Excellent, Jonathan,
thanks for sharing what you are unpacking at summit 20
and the opportunities that had a lot of silver linings.
We appreciate your time.
>> Thank you, Lisa.
It's been a pleasure being here.
>> For Jonathan Randy.
I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube
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