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>> Welcome to theCube's coverage of PagerDuty Summit.
I'm your host for the cube Natalie Erlich.
We're joined with a special guest, Sean Mack,
the CIO and CSO of Wiley.
Thank you very much for joining the program.
>> Great to be here, Natalie.
Thanks for having me.
>> Terrific, well tell us about Wiley.
What do you do?
>> Sure, Wiley is really wonderful company.
Wiley drives the world forward with research in education
through publishing and services.
We help researchers, professionals,
students, universities, and corporations
to achieve their goals.
Wiley's primarily known as a publishing company,
but really now more than ever,
we're a tech enabled research and education company,
and we have three major areas of impact,
research, education, and professional learning.
>> Well, obviously the pandemic,
the big topic of the last year
and hopefully new topics as we move forward,
but how has education community
evolved during this pandemic?
And what's the next step for hybrid learning?
>> Yeah, it's been amazing
to be part of education and research
during this pandemic,
during a time when these things
have never really been more important.
Wiley is a company that's transforming at every level
and to many extensive pandemic accelerated those changes
and this is nowhere more evident
than in the education space.
For a long time we'd been building
these online and computer-based education platforms
and really trying to get folks to move there.
And that's been a long, long process
and it's been wonderful 'cause we've seen
the pandemic has really accelerated that.
And we've seen huge increases in usage
on our online education platforms,
which we've been pushing towards for years.
So in many ways it's really enabled us
to move forward in a way that that nothing else could have.
>> Yeah, I mean, that's really incredible,
you mentioned incredible silver lining with the pandemic
accelerating digital transformation,
especially in education.
What do you see as the next phase
now that this has really developed over the last year?
>> So as I mentioned, we're transforming at every level
and at a business level,
we just talked a little bit about that.
Education is moving more and more
to on online and hybrid models.
Research, we're moving more and more to open access models
where everybody has access to research.
Again with the pandemic this has been critical
to make sure that we're getting out good medical research
and that it's available as widely as possible.
But we're also transforming internally.
I've been with Wiley about a year and a half now.
And when I started,
so this is actually prior to COVID,
our CEO Brian Napack, said that we're not in a single market
that's not going through major disruption, and he's right.
And it's so exciting to be part of this company.
And on the internally,
we have to make sure we're going through a transformation
so that we can deliver the products and services
that the world's demanding
at the speed at which they're demanding them.
And so we're also going through transformations
from Agile to cloud to DevOps,
and it makes it a really exciting place
to be as a technologist
and also someone who is passionate about
education and research.
>> Yeah, well terrific.
Why did you choose PagerDuty?
>> I think there are a few key elements
that PagerDuty really enables for us.
So as I mentioned,
we're going through this DevOps transformation
and some of the core competencies,
the core principles of DevOps
are ones that are enabled by PagerDuty.
I think a couple of key ones
that I love about it are the ability to empower the users
rather than having a centralized service desk
that is looking up things and paging out
and needs to manage a registry of all the technology people.
We can put that power, that control in the hands of
what we at Wiley call the functional delivery teams.
These teams that are fully responsible for their staff,
fully responsible for their research
and education solutions that they're delivering.
And we using PagerDuty can put that responsibility
and empower those teams
to take full ownership of their on call schedules,
their team management,
without having to go through several hops to get there.
And I think this also drives another key element,
which is that accountability.
Look, we're asking these functional delivery teams
to take responsibility for their applications and services.
We don't work in an environment where we say,
"Oh, that's a operations team's responsibility,"
we're working in a DevOps model.
And we can't rightfully ask teams to take responsibility
if we don't provide them the tools
to be in control of their own fate.
And I really think that PagerDuty
is a key element of that tool chain,
which enables them to manage their full stack
and thereby drives that accountability and ownership.
>> Yeah, well, I'd love it if you could tell us
some of the challenges you were trying to solve
by implementing PagerDuty.
>> There were several,
I think it speaks to
some of the underlying principles of DevOps and Agile
that we were trying to enable.
More than anything it's really about driving better,
meantime to resolution when incidents do arrive
through faster escalation directly to the right person.
And breaking out of this tiered service model
where it has to go through
a tier one, a tier two, tier three,
before the technical issue gets to the right person.
Now with PagerDuty,
the issue goes directly to the person who can solve it
and they're there, they're able to solve it.
And we have made huge strides
in reducing our meantime to resolution.
I have never seen improvements
like I've seen in the past year and a half
in Wiley using PagerDuty
as a part of our overall tool chain.
>> Yeah, I mean, if you have a concrete example
that something really stood out, we'd love to hear that.
>> So I'm not going to go bring up
the charts and data to show you,
but I'll tell ya the concrete data is there.
We track how long it takes us
obviously to resolve problems when they occur,
and I was blown away by what this team has achieved.
And I don't want to take away credit
from all the work they've done either.
Tools alone doesn't solve any problem,
we have amazing technology team,
an amazing team willing to take that responsibility.
But if you look at the numbers
over the past year and a half,
in terms of the reduction in time to resolve
across every team, it's truly impressive.
>> And what are you looking forward to at the summit?
>> Well, I'm always excited to hear about
what's going on at PagerDuty.
I think there are a couple key items or key sessions
that I'm excited to see.
I'm really looking forward to hearing
more about the future of work,
the views from the C-suite.
I think PagerDuty always has
a really unique and fresh perspective,
and so I think that's going to be very pertinent and timely
as we look to what's coming next in hybrid world.
I'm also excited about
the what's next in DevOps presentation.
Some great folks speaking there.
And I think DevOps is maturing and we can...
(laughing) for a longest time we were asking,
What is DevOps?
Can we define it?
Can we define it in a consistent way?
And I think we're at a point now where we can,
and we know the components.
So it's a really good time to ask what's next in DevOps.
And finally, I'm just excited to hear
what's next for PagerDuty.
It's been a great tool for us
and I'm excited to see where the company is going next.
>> Yeah, terrific.
Well, let's shift gears a bit.
Staying on point with digital transformation.
How is that in line
with some of the broader organizational goals
that Wiley has,
such as bridging the higher education gap?
>> Yeah, I think that as I mentioned,
all our businesses are changing dramatically
and we're not going to be able
to meet the rapidly changing technology demands,
unless we have technologies and teams
that can rapidly change with those demands
and rapidly expand with those demands.
So whether that's auto scaling,
whether that's more resilient systems,
we need to be there.
And I'll also mention the key element
that security plays here,
because the other change we're seeing
is a huge increase in the threat landscape
and the depth of some of the attacks we're seeing.
And so this focus on security
is another important part of the transformation
and the transformation from just security to DevSecOps
is something that's key for Wiley.
It's critical because security for Wiley
is security for our customers.
And one of the things that we offer
is the promise of reliable and secure services.
>> And what are some of the innovative ways
that Wiley is now delivering content solutions?
>> So we're always trying to push the envelope
of education in many different ways.
I think that there's huge possibilities
with AI, machine learning, adaptive learning
to really push that envelope to really...
I mean, one of the things that I love
about being at Wiley is that I get to be involved
with education and research.
Like my job gets to be helping people learn better,
helping people learn quicker.
If we can, through technology, make learning easier,
let's make it quicker to learn
and also look at reducing the cost and availability
of that education,
we can make an impact around the world,
and that's an exciting thing to be part of.
>> So in terms of digital transformation,
obviously that's a priority for you, security,
tell us more about specifically the main points
that you're going to be focusing on in this next year in 2021.
>> There's a few key key elements
that we're focusing on as we go into...
It's actually coincidentally the start of our fiscal year,
We have a bit of an interesting fiscal year.
But that kicks off or just kicked off last month.
So we've spent the last four months
doing a lot of planning for this year.
For me, I think some of the keys
are going to be driving agility through simplicity.
And one of the places that comes into play
is through our tool chain.
Making sure we don't have every tool,
but we've got the right tools to connect our users,
and that, that tool chain is very much interconnected
so that we can hit on another key concept for me,
which is the enablement of our business.
We enable our developers, we enable content editors,
we enabled all of Wiley
to do the best job they can through technology.
We want technology to be seamless for our users.
And these three concepts,
seamless, enablement and simplicity,
agility through simplicity,
really work hand in hand
to enable our users, our community, to develop,
to build at the speed that business demands.
>> And obviously, security a really key feature of your role.
We don't often think about
security going hand in hand with education,
but for some of our viewers
that are not directly involved in education,
why is that so critical?
>> Well, I think anyone who's involved with technology today
can grasp the criticality of security.
Not many days go by that we don't hear of new threats,
new ransomware attacks.
And Wiley is now more than ever
a technology enabled and driven business.
When we talk about education,
we're talking about technology.
When we talk about research,
we talk about technology
and the underpinning systems
and the threats that are out there,
impact education and research technology
just as they do any other research in education
or any other line of business.
We have amazing security team at Wiley.
I am really blown away by the work this team does every day,
and I'm excited about where it's going to.
It's so critical for us because we need to provide...
If we talk about enabling education for more people
in a more effective way around the world,
part of that is making sure that all of our users are secure
and safe and confident.
So we are investing heavily in security
and going beyond just spending more money,
but really taking a innovative DevSecOps approach,
focusing on application security,
focusing on making security, not just a team,
but part of what everybody in Wiley does
because technology can't just be a set of tools
and it can't be one team
that sits in a dark corner of the environment
and tells people what they can't do.
Security has to be core to everything we do.
And so when we're talking about
people building new products and services,
we have to make sure
that they're part of the security solution.
When we talk about our finance users,
they need to be part of our security solution.
Only by making sure that security
is integral to everything we do,
are we truly going to be able to make sure
we have a secure set of products and services for our users.
>> Terrific.
Well, thank you so much for your insights
and thoughts on PagerDuty Summit
as well as digital transformation at Wiley.
Really appreciate it,
Sean Mack, the CIO and CSO at Wiley.
Thank you for joining the program.
>> Great, thank you.
Thank you so much for having me here.
>> And that's all for this session of PagerDuty Summit
coverage by "theCube."
I'm your host Natalie Elrich.
Thanks for watching.
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