 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 the senior vice president of product for PagerDuty, Jonathan Rendee. Jonathan, welcome back to theCUBE. Thank you Lisa, it's great to be here. So this is our virtual CUBE virtual summit 2020, but one of the things that I know from talking with Jennifer yesterday is that this is the opportunity to reach way more people because there's no travel restrictions and budget and things like that. But one of the things that is quite impressive is that you're going to be in your keynote talking about a lot of changes and enhancements to the products. The biggest release in PagerDuty's history during COVID-19, really impressive. Talk to us about why this is such an exciting time. Well, it's exciting for a lot of reasons and great to be here, although I'm getting so tired of working from home these days, but be that as it may. Yeah, we do have the biggest set of releases and investments and innovation that we're unleashing in the history of the company, which in these times is no small feat. I want to thank all the teams, they've done a wonderful job, but we're using our summit event, as you know, to talk about that, to bring that out, to discuss. And we have some very high profile speakers coming joining us at the event. We have Andy Jassy, we have Eric Yuan, Stewart Butterfield, and more. So it'll be a fantastic event for executives and for practitioners alike. So sharing what we're doing new with all of these leaders joining us is going to be a great thing. One of the things that's become so critical in the last six months is digital services. And I think so many of us don't realize or don't think about the folks under, I don't want to say under the hood, but behind the scenes really that are critical for, you mentioned the CEOs of AWS and Zoom and Slack, which are all essential. I mean, Zoom is a household name, right? My mom even uses Zoom, she's 75, that's pretty cool. But all of the criticality under the hood to ensure that these services continue because we're all now even more dependent on them than we ever have been before. Yeah, it's really interesting. I was thinking about this the other day, there were so many casual services that we all relied on, pre-March, pre-February, that now have become just mission critical. And to everything that we do professionally and personally, and to your point, whether you're working out at home with your Peloton or whether you're in the two-dimensional world with Zoom all the time, we just expect all these services to be up and running and be available for us. And behind all those services that we expect to be there is an amazing amount of complexity and dependencies. And behind all those complexity and dependencies are people. And that's a big part of what PagerDuty focuses on, which is engaging people on the right issues at the right time. And of course, allowing them not just to be engaged, but complete the work, work major issues, unexpected work, unplanned work, and complete all that in when moments and seconds and microseconds matter. So PagerDuty has a unique place in that whole ecosystem of what's considered crucial and critical now. Well, we've been hearing the term essential workers for since March, right? And thinking of them in the traditional sense of doctors and nurses and firemen and obviously grocery workers and delivery companies. But looking at it from PagerDuty through your lens, it's the whole digital front line, the DevOps folks, the IT folks, the customer support folks who are really on the front lines of helping that brand be protected. Now it's the fact that everything is real time and now is now more important than ever has never been more important. So talk to us about sort of this switch to this digital default and what that means for operations. Yeah, as we were just saying to your point, it's never been these services have never been more important and more essential to everything that we do. So it just makes perfect sense that all of the individuals who are responsible for building and delivering and supporting those services are essential now also. And as a part of that, we talk a lot about going from what everybody knows as DevOps to digital ops. And while it may sound like a marketing phrase, words matter and it really means going from being responsive to being proactive and predictive. And that's so important for these individuals to get ahead of this. We've seen a super interesting data when we look at our platform where there are 13,000 customers of how life has changed for all of those customers and those half a million users of our platform today pre COVID and now that we're in the middle of this with again, reflecting how important services are the increased use of those and then the rise in issues. And what's the great news is that individuals and companies using the platform are actually getting better at addressing them than they were pre COVID. So with the bad news, there's good news too. I agree, there are always silver linings. I was looking at my notes here and one of the things when PagerDuty evaluated your platform and as we mentioned over 13,000 customers during COVID seeing an increase in traffic and demand for digital services more than a 38% increase in incidents compared to the prior period. But you also talked about how the big impact that PagerDuty is helping your customers make in resolving those incidents faster and I guess maybe sorting through the noise in a better, more automated way. Exactly. And a lot of it has to do with what we've been doing. And then another piece is our new releases. And so again, we've looked at our data to your point and we've seen this over a third rise in the number of issues that organizations are running into across the board. And with our new releases, we're able to reduce interruptions by over 65%. So it's great news that again, with the rise in use and the rise in interruptions and people having to context switch from what they're doing to, you know, firefight and jump in the middle and collaborate across organizations that there's light on the horizon, the light at the end of the tunnel, I should say. And things are going to get better and our new releases are going to help in a big way. Okay, I'm assuming you have a crystal ball, which is great. So I'm going to be looking for some more predictions. But talking to your customers, you know, I can imagine now there's more noise. You mentioned this switch from DevOps to digital ops and this now this digital default that I know Jennifer has talked about. And it's this probably going to be one of the things that shapes the winners and the losers of tomorrow in every industry. But tell me a little bit about how you're helping, how are you using, you know, the traditional buzzwords AI machine learning and putting them really effectively to work so that it's now not just a buzzword that companies and any industry should be thinking about, but it's actually machine learning is going to be critical to sorting through this increased volume and data and helping resolve incidents faster to not just, you know, prevent customer churn, but also to make sure that your folks on the digital front lines aren't burned out. Well, with the transition that we were talking about before, you know, everybody realizes that they have to be all in now. There's no, you know, we're migrating to the cloud and there's reasons for that moving from on-prem systems to the public cloud in many ways. We've seen that massively accelerate and with that comes and how the systems have to be built and managed and delivered there. You see this increase in complexity and going back to what we were talking before, individuals are behind all of that complexity. And so it's so important that in our new releases, we're really up the bar. We've really raised the game, so to speak on what we're doing to take advantage of our data that we capture and also this increase in information that's coming in. We refer to it a lot of times as telemetry when you start to refactor and rebuild your systems in the public cloud and you have all those dependencies, you have more information, more data flowing to you, which can translate to more interruptions. And very easy, it's very easy for organizations and teams to get overwhelmed by that. And so our new releases focus on making sense of that. We talked about the reduction in interruptions and the reduction in noise, but we've also focused equally on helping folks with context, with information. When something goes south, when something is different than what a team expected, how do you fix that once you engage the right people there? So a big part of our releases has also been about applying machine learning to add context to speed up fixing and resolving and finding the root cause of these issues in a big way. And we do that through a number of different ways in our products, in our page of duty platform, event intelligence, and also our analytics. Again, to draw these relationships around service dependencies and our analytics, we've included a recommendation engine. So now we can show organizations and teams predict if you make these changes, you will see these improvements and this will be your returns. And using our data combined with the data that's coming in, that's a big part of what the page of duty platform is all about. Well, that analytics piece is critical as is the machine learning because the volumes of data are getting bigger and bigger and bigger such that it can't depend on just humans. But something that I'm curious about too is with the rise in incidents, how can page of duty help customers kind of sort through the noise and maybe park things that might be able to be resolved on their own without having to escalate? It's a great question and we do it through a couple of ways. One, we've applied machine learning so many times when interruptions, when issues, alerts come in, they can look different but they're all related to the same thing. So we're applying machine learning to better group and intelligently organize and group all of those informations into the singular incidents that really matter, that you really need to pull teams together on, which is important. The next thing we're doing is we're using machine learning to say, hmm, okay, it looks like these issues, these incidents are happening on different services that teams own. What we're also using the machine learning to do now is to show the dependencies between those services. So we often see situations where you can have a couple of teams in your organization working on issues that are delivered to them not knowing that they're related. And in some ways, they can be working against each other. So having information to know that one issue is upstream and the other issue is downstream allows one team to step forward and the other team to step back. And we're using our machine learning for that to give that additional context and help pinpoint where the issues are. So it's the most effective use of these teams when they come in. Nothing's more frustrating by the way than being interrupted, whether it's the middle of the day or the middle of the night, only to find out that either you're being unproductive or you didn't need to be there in the first place. Oh, absolutely, yes. And I was seeing some stats that people or the folks on the digital front lines are working an average of 10 hours more a week and so many more of those interruptions are happening and when you'd like to be off on the weekends and the middle of the night. But one of the things that you talk context absolutely critical, but also collaboration. Different teams that need to be to your point, are we working on the same thing and we don't know? The collaboration now that work is distributed is even more critical than ever. What are some of the things that you're hearing from customers about what PagerDuty is doing to facilitate that collaboration so that things just run much more smoothly and the demanding consumer on the other end is satisfied. Well, to your point, one of the most critical things since we're talking about, not just a technology issue, we're talking about a people issue, is communication and collaborating and that is so important, not only in general, but in these moments that matter. And so one of the things we've done in the new platform is we're introducing industry firsts, video war rooms with our partners and customers, Zoom, as well as Microsoft Teams. And so we're also updating our Slack integrations as well. But as we live in this two dimensional world, those responders, those teams that have to come together to fix issues with the single click of a button, now they can participate in those issues in a video sense, in a video war room, but not just engage in that way, we've also added the ability to manage the issue through Zoom, through Microsoft Teams, as a part of pager duty. So individuals don't need to context switch from one product to another, they can do everything they need to do from that world. So a big part of that collaboration and communication is all about the, in the moment, teams working together in those forums, but there's another side of communication and collaboration in these major events that's critical as well. And that has to do with what I always think of as the ripple effect. There are the teams working the issues, and then there are all the teams adjacent to that, whether they're business stakeholders, whether they're customer service teams that also need to take action. They may not be fixing the issue, but they have to engage and they have work to do, they have actions they need to take equally that are different. And so for those other organizations, it's we've increased the scalability of our stakeholder notification into the tens of thousands. So those folks can keep in tight alignment to what's happening to an issue being fixed, which again, in today's world, this effect affects everyone in an organization, not just the teams tasked with addressing the problems. Right, and of course the demanding consumer on the other end isn't considering the fact that the customer support person that they're talking to might not have access to everything they need. And it's critical, it's business critical for any type of organization to understand that even their customer support folks, and I shouldn't say even them, those guys and girls are on the digital front lines and brand reputation hangs on the data that they have, the context that they have and their ability to resolve a customer issue because we were more demanding as consumers before COVID and now I think even more than other because we're dependent on it, we're dependent on Zoom, we're dependent on Slack, we're dependent on Amazon and AWS and so many other digital services. And if we don't get what we want as consumers, right, we're gonna go, I'm gonna go find someone else who's gonna be able to respond to this in one second because I'm only gonna give it a half a second. So last question, Jonathan, for you, so much announced this Page of Duty Summit 2020, unique in that way, unique in the virtual aspect, but what are some of the things that you see on the horizon, say the next six months, because I'm pretty sure you have a crystal ball let's open that up. Well, I see a couple of things and while I never say that I'm no Stradamus, I see a couple of things and one is that there is a material seismic shift towards full service ownership. And so teams, this was happening before as a part of DevOps, but when I was talking previously about moving to digital ops, we're seeing larger organizations have major initiatives around this notion of the frontline teams have to be empowered to work directly on these issues. And we always call that this phrase full service ownership, which means you build it, you ship it, you own it. And that's both for development and IT organizations. And I think you brought up a really interesting point before in this trend that I see happening and only accelerating, it's happening because people wanna innovate faster and those individuals, those teams, whether you're again in dev, IT ops or even in customer service, it's important that you're empowered to do this to help in that innovation. So I see that as the first seismic shift and actually as a part of that, the other big part of our announcements is we're at Summit announcing paid your duty for customer service. It's a curated product just for customer service teams because they're part of that big triangle with dev and IT teams that they need to be in the loop. They need to be empowered with the same types of tools. They need to be able to act as a essentially an incident commander. They have cases that come in. They need to be able to engage the right individuals to provide that customer service to what you were saying before. And they need to have a direct link to everything that's happening in dev and IT so they can be proactive and get ahead of customer cases also. So again, to your question of what do I see? I think that shift brought on by people being all in with their cloud migrations and refactoring and then full service ownership being something that empowering individuals on the front lines, democratizing decision-making and empowering those teams. I see that as the biggest shift happening overall. Excellent. Jonathan, thanks for sharing what you are unpacking at Summit 20 and the opportunities ahead. A lot of silver linings. We appreciate your time. Thank you, Lisa. It's been a pleasure being here. For Jonathan Rendey, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE.