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>> Voice over: From around the globe, it's theCUBE,
with digital coverage of PagerDuty Summit 2020.
Brought to you by PagerDuty.
>> Hey, welcome back everybody,
Jeffrey Frick with theCUBE.
We're in our Palo Alto Studios today,
and we are talking about an upcoming event.
It's one of our favorites.
This will be the fourth year that we've been doing it
and it's PagerDuty Summit.
And we're excited to have, from the PagerDuty team,
she's Carolyn Guss,
the VP of corporate marketing from PagerDuty.
Carolyn, great to see you.
>> Hi, Jeff, great to see you again.
>> Absolutely, so, I was thinking
before we turned on the cameras,
we've been doing PagerDuty for,
I think this will be at, like say our fourth year.
That first year was in the cool, cruise ship, terminal pier.
I got it written up pier 27, which was nice.
And then the last two years,
you've been in the historic Westin St.Francis
in downtown San Francisco,
which is a cool old venue.
But oh, my goodness,
you guys were busting at the seams last year.
So this year you had to go virtual,
there's a whole bunch of new things
that you can do in virtual,
that you couldn't do in physical space,
at least when you're busting out of the seams.
So first off, welcome and talk a little bit
about planning for virtual
versus planning for a physical event
from a head of marketing perspective.
>> Absolutely, I mean, the first thing that's changed for us
is the number of people that can come.
It's five X, the number of people
that were able to join us at the Westin last year.
So we would expect to have 10,000 people registered
and attending PagerDuty site.
The second thing is the sheer number of sessions
that we can put on.
Last year, I think we had around 25 sessions,
this year, we have between 40 and 50.
And again, that's because we're not constrained by space
and physical meeting rooms.
So it's been a really exciting process for us.
We've built a fantastic agenda
and it's very much personalized.
Developers come to our event.
They love our event for the opportunity to learn,
mix with their peers,
get best practices and hands on experience.
So we have many more of those types of sessions
than we have done previously.
And that's things like labs
and bird of feather sessions and MAs.
But we've also built
a whole new track of content this year for executives.
PagerDuty has, many of the fortune 500
and fortune 100 customers.
We work very closely with CIO CTO.
So we have built sessions
that are really designed specifically for that audience.
And I think for us,
it's really opened up the potential of this event,
and made it so much broader and more appealing
than we were able to do when we were,
as you say, somewhat confined
by the location in downtown San Francisco.
>> I think it's such an interesting point
because before, you work in strain, right?
If you have X number of rooms over a couple of days,
you've got to make hard decisions on breakouts
and what can go in and what can't go in
and will there be enough demand
for this session versus another session
or from the perspective of an attendee,
do they have to make hard trade offs?
I can only attend one session at one o'clock on Tuesday
and I got to make hard decisions.
But this, as you said, really opens up the opportunities.
I think you said you doubled,
you doubled your sessions,
and you got five X the number of registrations.
So I think, way too many people
think about what doesn't happen in digital
versus talking about the things that you can do
that are impossible in physical.
>> Yeah, I think at the very beginning,
well, first of all,
we held our summit event in London, in July.
So that was great
because we got to go through this experience once already.
And what we learned
was the real removal of hurdles in this process.
So to your point about missing the session,
because you were attending another session,
we were calling this sort of a Peloton version of events
where you have live sessions.
It's great to be there live,
participate in the live Q and A,
but equally you have an entire on demand library.
So if you weren't able to go
because there was something else at the same time,
this is available on demand for you.
So we are actually repeating live sessions
on two consecutive days.
So on the Monday, we run everything.
On the Tuesday, ask because show up again
for live Q and A's at the end of their sessions.
But after that, it's available forever
on an on demand library.
So for us, it was really removing hurdles
in terms of the amount of content,
the scheduling of the content,
and also the number of people that are content and attend,
no geographical boundaries anymore.
It used to be the customer of ours would think,
"Well, I'll send one or two people to the PagerDuty summit.
"They can learn all the great innovation from PagerDuty
and they'll bring it back to the team."
That's completely changed.
We have teams of 20 signing up
and all of them were able to get that experience firsthand.
>> That's really interesting.
I didn't even think about,
kind of whole teams being able to attend now
instead of just certain individuals
because of budget constraints
or you can't send your whole team
away for a conference in a particular area.
But the piece to that,
that you're supporting that we are over and over
is that the net new registrants goes up so dramatically
in terms of the names and who those individuals are,
because a lot of people just couldn't attend
for various reasons, whether it's cost,
whether it's geography,
whether it's, they just can't take time off
from leaving their primary job.
So it's a really interesting opportunity to open up,
the participation to such a much bigger.
And like you said, five X,
five X increase in the registration,
that's a pretty good number.
>> That's right, I mean that cost boundary has gone away.
This event is free.
And what that's actually meant is as I say,
larger teams from the same company are attending.
In addition, we have a number of attendees
who are not actually PagerDuty customers right now.
So previously, this was very much a community event
for our PagerDuty users.
And now, we actually have a large number of,
I guess, interested future customers
that will be coming to the event.
So that's really important for us
and also I think, for our sponsor partners as well,
because it's broadening out the audience for both of us.
>> Right, so let's talk about sponsors for a minute
because one of the big things in virtual events
that people are talking about quite often is,
"Okay, I can do the keynotes or I can do the sessions.
"Now I have all these breakout sessions
"for training and certification
and customer stories, et cetera,"
But when it comes to sponsors,
sponsors go to events to set up a booth
and hand out swag and wand your badge, right?
And it really was feeding kind of a top level
down a funnel that was really important.
Well, now those have gone away, physical events.
So from the sponsor perspective,
what can they expect?
What are the sponsor experience at PagerDuty Summit,
since I don't have a little tiny booth
at the Westin st. Francis given out swag this year?
>> Yeah, so one important thing is the agenda
and how we're involving our sponsors
in our agenda this time.
Something that we learned is,
we used to have fairly long keynotes.
The keynote could be an hour long
and involve multiple components
and people would stay in that room for an hour.
And they'd really stay and watch sessions all day.
So we learned in the virtual format
that we need to be shorter and more precise in our sessions.
And that opened up the opportunity
to bring in more of our partners, our sponsorship partners.
So Zendesk, Salesforce, Microsoft, are some examples.
So they actually get to have
that piece of both of our keynote sessions
and about technical product sessions,
and really explain both the partnership with PagerDuty,
but also that core technology
and the value that they provide customers.
So I think that the presence of sponsors in content
is much higher than it was before.
And we are still repeating the expo format.
So we actually do have an expo hall
that any time this break in between sessions,
you can go over to the expo hall
and it actually runs throughout as well.
And you can go in and you can talk to the teams,
you can see product demos.
So it's very much a virtual version
of the expo hall where you went
and you wandered around and you picked up a bit of swag.
(Jeff laughing)
>> So you mentioned keynotes, and Jennifer and the team
has always had a fantastic keynotes.
I mean, I just saw Jennifer
being interviewed with Frank Slootman
and Eric Yuan from Zoom by Curry, which was pretty amazing.
I felt kind of jealous that I didn't get to do that,
but tell us a little bit about some of the speakers.
I know there'll be some kind of big rally moments speakers
as well as some that are more down a technical track
or another track.
Give us some highlights on some of the people
that'll be sharing the stage with Jennifer.
>> Absolutely, I think what's really unique
about PagerDuty summit
is that we design types of content
for different types of attendees.
So if you're a developer, you're a practitioner,
we have somebody like Liz Fong-Jones of Honeycomb,
who's talking about, who builds the tools
that we all rely on today
and how do they collaborate
to build them together in this virtual world?
Well, we have J.Paul Reed from Netflix,
talking about how to handle the stress
of being involved in instance.
So that's really sessions
for our core audience of developers,
who are part of our community.
And PagerDuty really helps them day to day with their job.
And then we have the more aspirational,
senior level speakers
who you can really learn from as a leader.
So Bret Taylor, president and COO of Salesforce
will be joining us on the main stage.
He'll be talking about innovation and trust
in today's world.
And then we have Doug Johnson.
He is president of NAACP,
and he'll be talking about community engagement
and particularly voter engagement,
which is such an important topic for us right now.
And then we have leaders from within our customers
who are really talking about the way they use PagerDuty
to drive change in their organizations.
So an example will be Paul Cheesbrough.
He runs Digital for Fox.
And he's going to be talking about digital acceleration
and how a large organization like Fox
can really accelerate for this digital First World
that we find ourselves living in right now.
>> Right, well, and you guys have such a developer focus
because PagerDuty, the product, the solution
has to integrate
with so many other infrastructure, monitoring
and all those different systems,
'cause you guys are basically at the frontline,
sending them the signals that go into those systems.
So you have such a broad,
kind of ecosystem of technology partners.
I don't know if people are familiar
with all the integrations
that you guys have built over the years,
which is such a key piece of your go to market.
>> That's right, I mean, we like to say
we're at the center of the digital ecosystem.
We have 370 integrations.
And that's important because we want anyone
to be able to use PagerDuty
no matter what is in their technology stack,
and technology stacks today are more complex
than they've ever been before.
Particularly with businesses
having to shift to this digital first model,
since we all began shelter-in-place.
We all are living through digital on working
and learning through digital.
And so the technology stacks that power that
are more complicated than ever before.
So by having 370 integrations,
we really know that we can serve pretty much
any set of services that your business is using.
>> Yeah, we've all seen all the means,
about who's pushing your digital transformation,
the CEO, the CIO, or COVID,
and we all know the answer (laughs)
to what's accelerated that whole process.
>> Okay, so before I let you go,
I don't even think we've mentioned the date.
So it's coming up Monday, September,
or September 21st, through Thursday, September 24th.
Not at the Westin, online.
And again, what are you hoping
are kind of the key takeaways for the attendees
after they come to the summit?
>> Yeah, a couple of things.
First of all, I think, will be a sense of belonging.
The attendees, the users of PagerDuty,
they are really the teams that are at the forefront
of keeping our digital services working.
And what that means is responding to incidents.
We've actually seen a 38% increase
in the volume of incidents on our platform
since COVID and shelter-in-place began,
>> Wait. >> And very-
>> 38% increase in incidents since mid-March?
>> That's correct.
>> Wow >> Since the beginning of...
And bear in mind incidents prior to that,
in the six months prior, they were pretty flat.
There wasn't instant growth.
But what we've also seen,
is a 20% improvement in the time that it takes
to resolve an incident from five minutes
down to four minutes.
So what that really means is that the PagerDuty community
is working really hard.
They're improving their practices.
Hopefully, our platform is the key part of how.
But there's some people under pressure.
So I hope that people can come
and they can experience a sense of belonging.
They can learn from each other about experiences.
How do you manage the stress of that situation?
And what are some of the great innovations
that'll make your job easier in the year ahead?
The second thing that we're doing for that community
is that we are offering certification,
for PDU, PagerDuty University for free this year.
It's a course with a value of $7,500.
Last year, you would attend PagerDuty Summit
and you would sit through your sessions
and you would learn and you would get certified.
So this year it's offered for free.
You take the course during summit,
but you can also carry on if you miss anything
for 30 days after.
So we're already feeling that we're giving back,
the offering a great program for certification
and improved skills completely free
to help our community in this time of pressure.
>> Right, well, it is a very passionate community
and we go to so many events
and you can really tell it's palatable,
kind of where the tight communities are
and where people are excited to see each other
and where they help each other,
not necessarily only at the event,
but throughout the year.
And I think, a huge shout out to Jennifer
and the culture that she's built there,
because it is very warm, it's very inclusive,
it's very positive.
And that energy kind of goes throughout the whole company.
And I used to tease her,
this is something that's built around
a device that most of the kids today
don't even know what a pager is.
And just the whole concept of carrying a pager
and being on call, and being responsible.
It's a very different way
to kind of look at the world
when you're the one that has that thing on your hip
and it's buzzing and someone's expecting a return call
and you've got to fix something.
So huge shout out to keep a positive
in your smile and nice and big culture
in a job where you're basically fixing broken things
most of the time.
>> Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, there's, I think a joke that we make,
things only break on Friday night
or your wedding anniversary or Thanksgiving.
But one of the announcements
we're most excited about this year
is the level of automation and artificial intelligence
that we're building into our platform
that is really going to reduce the number of interruptions
that developers get when they are on call.
>> Yeah, I look forward to more conversations
'cause we're going to be doing
a bunch of CUBE interviews like normal,
and applied artificial intelligence, I think,
is where all the excitement is.
It's not a generic thing.
It's where you apply it in a specific application
to get great business outcomes.
So, I look forward to that conversation
and hopefully, we'll be able to talk again.
And good luck to you and the team
in the last few weeks of preparation.
>> Thanks so much, Jeff.
I've enjoyed talking to you.
Thanks for having me on
>> All right, you too.
And we'll see you later.
>> All right, she is Carolyn, I'm Jeff.
You're watching theCUBE.
Thanks for watching.
I'll see you next time.
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