>> 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 Pager Duty.
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 pager duty,
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 pager duty, 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)