 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of PagerDuty Summit 2020. Brought to you by PagerDuty. Welcome to theCUBE'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 Reimbe, the Senior Vice President of Product at PagerDuty. 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. A lot 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 AI ops, integration with Microsoft Teams, customer service solution, and we heard a lot about automation in the keynotes and of course, with respect to the acquisition of Runduck. 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 kind of the category of AI ops. 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've already talked about is in the last six months, this explosion and the 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 frontline who have to be empowered with the information to 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 are 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 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 and our webhook 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 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 PagerDuty because it's one thing to engage individuals, but then if they still have to undergo manual toil, manual work in 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 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 PagerDuty, we're super excited about it. 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 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 us, working more closely with Rundeck now is really about their culture. Their culture is very similar to PagerDuty and more importantly, 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 IT ops area and while we have customers in IT ops as well as in development, they all refer to themselves, those customers of Rundeck today as DevOps. And so they're very much along the same philosophy as empowering self-service, being able to take action as somebody 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 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? Oh, 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 process and ETL process to provisioning systems for internal development teams. But the 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, it's 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 resolution, that 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, and digital services are the new norm. So is Rundeck sort of the 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 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 and 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 an open source community of 60,000 DevOps professionals that we're bringing together with the PagerDuty community. So very excited about that, 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 please you? Yeah, a couple of 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 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 run book 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 we're exciting to hear is some of our existing customers today who attended Summit who obviously had no background as to the announcement we were gonna make 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 a better validation and 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 probably objective validation that any brand could get. So what would be the next steps for example? 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 of 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, 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 via Rundeck automation and going back to some of the comments you questioned you asked me earlier about where are 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, everybody be able to run those in a standard way and then from a compliance standpoint get the recording on that but 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 run books have been largely a manual activity for them, manual steps that they do. If I had to guess, the majority of our 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 all the major incident and 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 just 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 customers have experienced up to 50% reduction in incident response time using Rundeck's automated run books. So from a team productivity perspective, that's huge. Especially when 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 our personal lives. So given that, given what's writing on these services and how PagerDuty has always been about, behind all of those services are people and those people have to respond in the most effective, efficient way in those really critical, important moments. That type of savings, 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 stress, 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 so 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 pour 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, as you say, this is our fifth PagerDuty summit and the other four have all been live but they've all been in person. Nothing does substitute for the interaction, the live interaction you get, whether it's delivering something and 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 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 interaction isn't quite what you would expect in a three-dimensional versus the two-dimensional world, 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 via Zoom than I have in the past when they were recorded but 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 a positive. Absolutely, I couldn't agree more. Well, congratulations on a very successful event. I imagine you must need a good weekend's 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 theCUBE.