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>> Hey, everyone.
Welcome to the CUBE's coverage of PagerDuty Summit '22.
I'm Lisa Martin, and I'm on the ground with Michael Cucchi,
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 attendees can expect from this year's summit.
We 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.
We did just finish a great 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
and automation is definitely one of those pillars
without a doubt.
You know what we've seen,
we've been at this now for over a decade
and we've been investing in automation
in two major areas and I'll explain why.
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.
The great rotation or the great resignation
is definitely hitting every single industry.
And so it results in limited skills
and a lot of strain on the people
that are trying to get their jobs done every day.
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.
They get super unhappy.
And we actually on our platform prove
they quit their jobs more often
when they are interrupted more often.
So 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 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 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 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 delivers
and enables PagerDuty to do for its customers?
>> Yeah, great.
So 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 the ability to execute automation
from wherever you are.
And so I think there's two directions
to talk about automation.
One is 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 provisioning new resources out on the cloud
so that people can scale their applications more rapidly.
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 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, 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 to do diagnostics
and try and solve problems.
So that's right.
Automation actions being delivered both in real time
and to every different type of user
that leverages PagerDuty today.
>> That's really quite transformative, Michael.
It sounds like getting the first line responders.
The corrective information in an automated fashion
because as we know, one of the things that's been
in short supply the last couple of years is patience.
And one of the several of the risks associated with that
are customer churn, poor customer experience,
brand reputation, et cetera.
What are some of the expected outcomes
with automation actions?
And 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. Great question.
There's a lot of different ways you can leverage automation.
You just mentioned a bunch of super high return ones.
When something's broken and your company's actually losing
customer experience or revenue
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 going to see a reduction
in the requirements to escalate,
which means that the first responder
can actually solve the problem themselves.
And they're not going to have to go interrupt
that more higher skilled employee like we talked about.
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.
So using automation actions to both diagnose
what's going wrong, but then actually try and remediate it.
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 super powerful.
And then there's a long tail of other ways
to leverage automation in an environment
from service provisioning and redundant tasks
that are used, that are done for maintenance
across an environment or provisioning services to developers
so that they can get to work faster.
So there's a lot to do there.
And then we're also exploring ways
to automate outside of just technical use cases
which we talked a little bit about
in the product keynote as well.
>> One of the things that you mentioned earlier
is that the data that PagerDuty has that demonstrates
from a resignation perspective,
what happens when developers are really taken away
from their core job.
Is there any data that shows that automation actions,
you mentioned a big reduction,
50% reduction in time to responder,
is there a direct correlation in actually helping the folks
on the front lines stay in the front lines?
>> That's right.
So, and also those that are coding coding.
So 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
or a piece of 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 super taxed.
And we actually release something
called the State of Digital Operations.
And we are updating all that data actually
and announced 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 along with some survey statistics
that are trending all of this information you're mentioning
in terms of people being interrupted
and then churning actually from their job
because they've been interrupted so many times.
And so that's right, this will directly impact that.
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, when we think about churn, it impacts to revenue.
I always think the customer experience
and the employee experience are inextricably linked.
And I think what you're talking about really demonstrates
that you mean 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 hitting on one of my favorite topics.
I think 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 means that the back office is the front office.
They're coming together.
And with the pandemic and the transition
that we all took into dependency on digital services,
it's all starting to look very similar.
And so, because of that, we're able to now expand our impact
at PagerDuty across so much more
of a business out to everything,
including employee experience,
and also accelerating the time
to productivity for your business,
so that you can serve your customer faster.
We acquired a company recently named Catalytic
and their technology helped us accelerate
a couple of pieces to market
that are just the tip of the iceberg
for being able to rapidly automate
and configure workflows for anyone at the enterprise
whether that's for a customer experience
or whether it's to keep your business productive
or efficient for business users.
>> Unpack those incident workflows.
You talked about the Catalytic acquisition
that was just from March.
Talk to me about the incident workflows
and what were customers asking for
that really generated this new capability
that PagerDuty recently announced.
>> So people lean on PagerDuty at all types of times,
but as we've already 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,
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, Catalytic's 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 automate steps of processes very very quickly
that can be carried out company wide.
So this could be something like,
when we see that critical service is impacted,
we want to automatically send out updates across the business.
We want to automatically create an area to go troubleshoot
on a collaborative, CollabOps platform.
We want to 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 pull those coordination steps together,
now we can configure that quickly
and have it happen automatically.
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 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 you talk
to the customers about why automation is going to be,
I wouldn't even say critical for
or business critical table stakes for organizations.
It's no longer okay to just default to depend on humans.
The customers on the other end don't want to,
a couple seconds delay is hugely impactful.
>> Yeah, we call that the abandonment threshold
but that's absolutely right.
So we've already talked a lot about 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 are tens and hundreds of microservices
that are powering these things.
And then there's thousands of different dependencies
between those services.
And so supporting this
and understanding this is difficult.
So being able to interpret,
are they operating correctly?
And if not, what do we do about it?
It's actually a problem that humans can't calculate.
Then you throw into change,
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 use two arms of an area that we call AIOps.
One is using machine learning to interpret
all of those signals and figure out,
what is going on?
Is it happening correctly?
Is something going wrong?
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 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 what we call AIOps.
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 this branch 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 jumps to mind to you
that really articulates the value of AIOps for example
and what it is at PagerDuty is able to allow
its customers to do?
>> Sure.
And now a million users on this platform,
which is just phenomenal.
And so that actually helps us design better machine learning
because we have so many people using this platform.
There's a great example that was just shown in our kickoff.
So if you haven't seen the product keynote,
you really have to see it.
We run what are called "A Day in the Life" demos.
And in this case, this 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
and get back to seeing people face to face.
But what we showed there is very close
to real world example where a ticketing service goes down
for a travel agency and it impacts everything
from directly their end user's customer satisfaction
but also partner engagements and employee behaviors.
And whether they can get the right people book 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 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 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,
what we call the operational maturity model.
And 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.
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 for the year ahead
that you're excited about or that we can expect?
>> Great question.
So you just saw us release automation
in every area for every user.
I think what you're going to 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 SaaS offering for process automation.
And what we're going to 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.
Leveraging a no code rapid interface to build workflows
to solve the highest ROI problem.
But then we're going to take that technology.
We're going to apply it to every downstream
repetitive service in your environment.
So everything from employee onboarding
to critical sales processes or legal contract management.
Anything that is time critical
you're going to be able to build these rapid workflows around
and PagerDuty's going to help you keep your business healthy
and operating around them.
And so that's where we're going to be focused
for the next 12 months, I would say,
and it's going to be an exciting run.
>> It is going to 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 so much for the chat, Lisa.
>> Thank you so much for Michael Cucchi.
I'm Lisa Martin.
You're watching the CUBE's on the ground coverage
of PagerDuty Summit '22.
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