>> Hey, welcome back, everybody.
Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at PagerDuty Summit.
It's our first time at PagerDuty Summit and Pier 27,
our first time to this cool venue.
It's right on the water between the Bay Bridge
and Pier 39, beautiful view outside.
Unfortunately, the fire smoke's a little over-the-top.
But we're excited to have one of
our favorite guests, Jennifer Tejada.
She's the CEO at PagerDuty. Jennifer, great to see you.
>> Thank you. It's so great to be back, Jeff.
>> Absolutely. So this is,
what, your second PagerDuty Summit?
>> This is our second PagerDuty Summit.
>> 500-some-odd people?
>> I think we've had 700 through the door already.
We've got a few hundred streaming online.
Almost twice what we did last year. So we're really excited.
We're still in the infancy stages of sponsoring
an industry event, and we've been really focused
on trying to make it a little different to insure
that people walk away with actionable insights,
and best practices and learnings they can take immediately
back to their teams, and to their companies.
So we've had just some awesome guest speakers
and panelists here today, and it's been a lot of fun.
The PagerDuty band played live at lunch.
>> That's right, I saw them at lunchtime.
>> Yeah, which was great. So we're having a good time.
>> What are they called? The On-Calls.
>> The On-Calls. I let them name themselves.
>> And so, you've been here a year now.
So, how are things moving, how are you moving
the company along since you got here?
What are some of the strategic things that you've been able
to execute, and now you're looking forward?
>> So, it's just been an incredible year, honestly.
You always hope for a number of things
when you come into a new role.
You hope that the team rallies around the business.
You hope that the opportunity is
as significant as you thought it would.
You hope that there aren't more bad surprises
than you think there are going to be.
PagerDuty's been so unique, in that there have been
more good surprises than bad surprises.
There's so much potential to unlock in the business.
But probably the thing that's most amazing about it
is the people, the community, and the culture
around PagerDuty, and just the sense of alliance
towards making the engineering world work better
to insure that customer experience
and employee experience is better.
There's just a real sense of duty there, and there's a sense
that the community is there with you trying
to make it happen, as opposed to working against you.
So a lot of our innovation this year, and I mean,
we've released tons of new technology product,
including machine learning and analytics,
and going from reactive and responsive to proactive.
There's a lot of stuff happening.
So much of that has come from input
from our practitioner community and our customer base.
You just don't always have that kind
of vocal engagement, that proactive, constructive engagement
from your customer base, so that's just been amazing.
And the team's awesome.
We've expanded into the UK and
western Europe over this summer.
We opened an office in Sydney recently.
We've shifted from being a single-product
company to a platform company.
We've more than doubled in size,
150 people to over 350 people.
We're in 130 countries now, in terms
of where our customer base lives,
and just around 10 thousand customers,
so really, really amazing progress.
Sometimes I feel like we're a little bit
of a teenage prodigy, you know?
We're growing super fast, other kids are starting
to learn how to play the piano.
It's a little awkward, but we're
still really good at what we do.
I think the thing that keeps us out in front
is our commitment, and all of our efforts being in service
to making both the lives better of the practitioners
in our community, and creating
quantifiable value for our enterprise customers.
>> It's interesting to focus on the duty, because
that kind of came with the old days of when
you were the person that had to wear the pager, right?
Whether you're a doctor on call, or you were the IT person.
So it's an interesting metaphor, even though probably most
of the kids here have never seen a pager.
>> No, I remember as a kid, my dad was in healthcare,
and he had a pager, and you knew that
when the pager went off, it was time.
You were on-duty, you were out.
And there's an honor in duty, and
it is a service to the organization.
Adrian Cockcroft was here this morning,
VP of architecture from AWS, and known
for cloud architecture that he built out at Netflix.
And he said something really interesting,
which is, he believes all people should be on-call,
because you need the pain to go where it's most useful.
And if everybody's on-call, it also
creates this kind of self-fulfilling cycle.
If you know you're going to be on-call, you build better code.
If you know you're going to be on-call on the weekend,
you don't ship something stupid on Friday night.
If you know you're going to be on-call
and you're a non-technical person,
you align yourselves with people who are technical
that can help you when that happens.
So there's something sort of magical that happens
when you do have that culture of being available
on the spot when things don't go as planned.
>> And now you've got a whole new rash of technology
that you can apply to this, in the area
of artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Wonder if you could share a little bit,
where is that now taking you for the next step?
>> I think the biggest opportunity with machine learning
for us is that, over the last eight years,
we've been collecting a tremendous amount of data.
And AI and machine learning are only as good
as the data they sit on top of.
So we have three really interesting data sets.
We have the events and the signals that come
from all of the machine instrumentation, the applications,
the monitoring environment, the ticketing platforms
that we integrate directly to.
We have information around the workflow, what works best
for most of our customers, what doesn't work.
What's the best agile-centric DevOps related workflow
that enables ultimate response
and ultimate availability and resilience for customers.
And then finally, what's going on with the people?
Who are the people that work the hardest for you?
Who are the people that have the subject matter expertise
to be the most useful when things
aren't working the way they should?
You bring all of that together,
and you build a model that starts to learn,
which immediately means you can
automate a lot of manual process.
You can improve the quality of decisions,
because you're making those decisions in context.
An example would be, if an incident pops up,
we see it in the form of a signal or a set of events.
And our machine learning will recognize
that we've actually seen those events before.
And the last time this happened,
here's what the outcome was, here's what went well
and not so well, here's how you fixed it,
and here's the person who was on top of it,
here's the expert you need to call.
So I've immediately shortened the
distance between signal and action.
I've gotten the people, now, that are going to come in
to that process to respond to either a problem
or an opportunity, are already much more prepared
to be successful quickly, efficiently, and effectively.
>> So you've shortened it and you've increased
the probability of success dramatically.
>> Exactly. And maybe you don't even need a person.
That person can go off and do other
more important proactive work.
>> But you're all about people.
And we first met when you were at Keynote
and we brought you out for a Women in Tech interview.
So you had a thing on Tuesday night
that I want for you to share.
What did you do Tuesday night?
>> I was just super moved and inspired and excited.
I've had the opportunity to attend lots of diversity events,
lots of inclusion events, a lot of support groups,
I'm asked to speak a lot on behalf of women
and under-represented minorities, and I appreciate that,
and I see that as my own civic duty to help lead the way
and set an example, and reach back for other people
and help develop younger women and minorities coming up.
But I've found that a lot of these events,
it's a bunch of women sitting in a room talking
about all the challenges that we're facing.
And I don't need to spend more time identifying the problem.
I understand the problem.
What I really wanted to do was bring together a group
of experts who have seen success,
who have a demonstrable track record for overcoming some
of these barriers and challenges,
and have taken that success and applied it
into their own organizations, and sort of
beating the averages in terms of building
inclusive, diverse teams and companies.
So Tuesday was all about one, creating a fun environment,
we had cocktails, we had entertainment,
it was in a great venue at Dirty Habit,
where we could have a proactive, constructive,
action-oriented conversation about things that are working.
Things that you can hear from a female leader
who's a public company executive,
and take that directly back to your teams.
Expert career advice, how some of these
women have achieved what they have.
And we just had a phenomenal lineup.
Yvonne Wassenaar, who's the CEO of Airware,
and Andreessen Horowitz come, theCUBE alumni,
previously CIO at New Relic.
We had Merline Saintil, who's the head of operations
for all of product and technology for Intuit.
Sheila Jordan, the CIO of Symantec.
We had Alvina Antar, who's the CIO at Zuora.
And, I'm missing one ...
Oh, Rathi Murthy, the CTO at the Gap.
And so, just quite an incredible lineup
of executives in their own right.
The fact that they happen to be a diverse group of women
was just all the more interesting.
And then we surprised the organization.
After about 45 minutes of this discussion,
sharing key learning, sharing best practices,
we brought in the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus,
who are just embarking, in the next 10 days,
on a trip called the Lavender Pen Tour,
where they're looking to spread love, hope, and
social justice, and proof that diversity delivers results,
in the southern states, where equality
equals gender equality, and I think challenges
for equal opportunity for the LGBTQ
community are really significant.
And Mikkel Svane, who's the CEO of Zendesk,
introduced me to Chris, the director there, about a week
before, and I was so inspired by what they're doing.
This is a group of 450 volunteers, who have day jobs,
who perform stunning shows, beautiful music together,
that are going to go on four buses for 11 days
around the Deep South, and I think, make a big difference.
And they're taking the
Oakland Interfaith Gospel Choir with them.
So just really cool.
So they came, and I mean, when's the last time you went
to a diversity event and people
were singing, and dancing, and toasting?
It was just really different, and
everybody walked away learning something new,
including the number of male executives,
champions that I asked to come as my special guest,
to support people in building sponsorship,
to support these women and these
under-represented minorities in finding connections that can
help them build their own careers,
they learned a lot at the event.
It was incredible.
I'm really proud of it, and it's
the start of something special.
>> I love it.
I mean, you bring such good energy,
both at your day job, and also in this very,
very important role that you play, and it's great
that you've embraced that, and not only
take it seriously, but also have some fun.
>> What's the point if you're not going to have fun?
You apply the growth mindset to one of the biggest problems
in the industry, and you hack it the same way you would
a deeply technical problem, or a huge business problem.
And when we get constructive and focused
like that, amazing things happen.
And so I now have people begging to be on the next panel,
and we're trying to find the next venue,
and got to come up with a name for it, but this is a thing.
>> And oh, by the way,
there's better business outcomes as well.
>> I mean, I did a ton of business that night.
Half that panel were customers that are continuing
to invest and partner with PagerDuty,
and we're excited about the future.
And some of those women happen to be
machine learning experts, for instance.
So, great opportunity for me to partner and get advice
on some of the new innovation that we've undertaken.
>> Well, Jennifer, thanks for inviting us to be here.
We love to keep up with you and everything
that you're doing, both before and in your current journey.
And congrats on a great event.
>> My pleasure. Absolutely. Thanks for having me.
>> She's Jennifer Tejada, I'm Jeff Frick.
You're watching theCUBE from PagerDuty Summit.
Thanks for watching.
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