 from Union Square in downtown San Francisco. It's theCUBE, covering PagerDuty Summit 18. Now, here's Jeff Frick. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at PagerDuty Summit 2018 at the West in St. Francis in Union Square, San Francisco. Great event, 900 people. We're excited to be here. It's our second year and now we get to talk to some customers which we were always excited to do. And our next guest is Alan Alderson. He is the director of IT Ops for William Hill. Great to see you. Good afternoon, it's great to be here. Absolutely. So for people that aren't familiar with William Hill, what are you guys all about? So William Hill offer customers opportunities to play us bets on sporting events, presidential elections, snow at Christmas, you name it. We present about a million opportunities every week for customers to have a bet on. A million opportunities a week. Yeah, so pick on football matches. You know, the game of the Ramble. So we have opportunities to people to bet playing up to the game. And then once the game kicks off, we transition into what's called in play. So people can then place a bet on who's gonna score the next goal and about another 120 markets within that one game whilst the game's in play. Wow. So what's the average duration of the window to put a bet down? So generally leading up to the match, it's as much time as you want. As soon as the markets are out there, we can place the bet before the game kicks off. But once the game kicks off, you can write up until about, towards the last few minutes of the game, there'll be markets available to have a bet on. Okay. And then what percentage is kind of things that I would guess easily, like sporting events or those types of things versus whether it's gonna snow or not? Well, we provide the opportunities on the website so you can have a look and it's snow on web. Snow on Christmas Day is a popular bet and people, they do their research and they like to have a bet on there. There was a lot of novelty bets. There used to be someone's life being found on Mars, Elvis being found, et cetera. Yeah, so there's a lot of... Still taking action on Elvis? I don't think so. No, I thought we'd find him. So we're here at Page of Duty Summit. What are you doing here at Page of Duty Summit? So I've just come back from a stint in Australia working for the wheeling mill business over there. So we introduced Page of Duty over there to help out with just getting the right message out to the right support teams quickly. So we deployed it out there and we just brought it into the infrastructure to start with, but once we deployed it, it's a bit of a ripple effect. So it was like dropping a pebble into a pool, the ripple effect and everybody, oh, they seem to be doing all right over there. What are the users now for the support models sort of those sort of questions? And it was very quick how the other teams decided to latch on to Page of Duty as well. So I since moved back to the UK. So I moved back in January, took on this role back in the lead's office in the north of England. And one of the first things I said is guys start having to look at Page of Duty. We've deployed it successfully in Australia. So let's have a look at what it can do for us. Incident management works at William Hill. So I'm not trying to fix anything that's broken. So it works. But what we can do is increase its speed of how we deal with things. So there's a lot of manual tasks in there that Page of Duty will come in and automate. It will take the pressure off the incident analysts because if there's an incident at two o'clock in the morning, we are 24 by seven business. So if there's an incident overnight, we've got to get on it and start fixing, resolving the incident. And if there's one guy who's trying to call out a number of responders, calling out a duty manager, trying to get comms out, it's a lot of pressure on one person to do that. And when is pressure, mistakes happen. And I want Page of Duty to take away then the possibility of their mistakes, take the pressure off the incident analysts so they can focus on resolving the incident and getting service back to our customers as quickly as possible. I'm curious when you said that other people in other groups saw Page of Duty in action, what were some of the other tasks that were not the primary tasks that you brought it in, but where people saw value and are implementing it for some other types of activities? So initially when we put it in, we put it in purely for servers. So for looking at the CPU disk and memory alerts, and we were getting our acknowledgements down for minutes to seconds in Australia. So the other teams are watching in and within their applications, there was a lot of alerts just landing as an email and not getting actioned upon very quickly. So we brought Page of Duty in, they say, can this help out in this space? And then they started integrating it into their application. So through hooking it into their applications, they could get the alerts directly from Page of Duty rather than it going through NOx and service desks, et cetera. So just a quicker response and getting onto the issue quicker. And then you have it integrated in with some of your other development tools. So it's just kind of part of that whole process or is it more kind of a standalone notification system? It was integrated straight into ServiceNow and Page of Duty. So coming to Page of Duty, Page of Duty would integrate with ServiceNow, raise the ticket, and then the thing started moving. But the big win was getting the guys the calls straight away as that alert happened. Otherwise you're relying on people watching screens, watching cues, waiting for that to happen. And then make the call. So if the call's gone straight to the engineer, he's on it immediately. Right, right, right. So what are some of your impressions here? Seeing kind of the ecosystem, what's behind Page of Duty, some great keynotes earlier today, really in terms of, you know, again, the mission that sounds like it's very much in line with what you're trying to do, which is to help teams be more effective. Yeah, and what I like about Page of Duty is their passion. You just get a sense of urgency about this place and you get a sense of passion and commitment and they want to help people out. And that's what's drawn me to Page of Duty. It's, you know, the guys that I've worked with in Australia, the guys that I've worked with in the UK, they just can't do enough for you and they want to help you succeed. It's not, you know, you do deal with some companies that I just want to sell you something and move on. These guys are, you know, they'll look after you. They work with you and they make sure that you're getting the value out of the product. It's a pretty interesting culture because when I talked to Jennifer Dada a couple of years ago, I used to tease her. I'm like, nobody here knows what a pager is, right? Nobody was born when pagers were courageous. You had one, yeah, I had one. Shell Oil upside down. I think it says hello. I can't remember, I have to check that. But, you know, it's an interesting, you just kind of culture around what a pager represents and the word that they have duty in there as well, which is a very different kind of level of responsibility when you are the person with the pager on and that seems to have really carried forward in the way that they deliver the services. Yeah, yeah. I mean, on call has people running, doesn't it? When people, you know, when they join a job and go, you might be expected to be on call, they run a mile. I think that's not for me. But as we go down more of a DevOps transformation and we get a lot more down the we code it, we own it model, I think it'll change people's perceptions of being on call and just doing the right thing for the business rather than, you know, delivering something and expecting the ops team to fix it all the time and call out the developers at a third line. We should be, we are heading towards being a team when the alerts go to the right people at the right time and we get issues as old as soon as possible. Right. I just love to get your take on, you know, a lot of talk about digital transformation and the modernization of IT and, you know, kind of expected behavior on apps with a lot of stuff going on. You're right in the middle of it. Massively in the middle of it. Massively in the middle of it, right? I'm sure what percentage of your bets come in via mobile versus. On a digital platform over 56%. A lot, right? And we've got, just said in that last session we had is, we, you know, we've got competition. So if our app isn't performing and it isn't quick or it's down, people will go elsewhere. They've got options, they've got choices and they'll just go elsewhere and the challenge is getting those customers back. We want to have a stack that just is available and it's performing so we don't drive customers away or we make sure that things are available at peak times. So when they are wanting a bet on, you know, Super Bowl, Grand National, the three o'clock kickoffs on a Saturday afternoon in the UK, we can, it's available for them and I can, people can get the bet on as quickly as possible. Right, so do you have all your own infrastructure? Do you leverage public cloud? I'm just thinking as you're talking about Super Bowl and some of these other big events, you must have just crazy, crazy big spikes. I was, you know, we've, in the UK, it's all on premise. So we've got to build an infrastructure to cope with that one day of the year, which is Grand National. In the US, we've just opened up in New Jersey. The front end of that stack is in AWS, so we can scale. So when Super Bowl does turn around next January, February, we should be able to scale with the load. Right, all right, last question if I let you go, kind of what are your priorities next? What are some of the things that you're working on with your team, you know, to kind of stay, stay at the leading edge of this very competitive space? We're going, we're heading into AWS. So we're looking to move into Amazon next year, start migrating some applications in there. And we're looking to get some applications in at the back end of this year, but migrate the existing apps from the start of next year. We're going through DevOps transformation. We're, you know, we've been doing a Nigel transformation as well over the last 12 to 18 months. So there's a huge amount of digital transformation going on at William Hill at the moment. It's a very, very exciting place to be. The US expansion, the place has just gone mad. You know, there's a lot going on and it's just a great place to be. Yeah, I mean, significant change is obviously in the US attitude. I think you guys are a little more progressive on that side of the Atlantic, but big changes, big changes happening here. Yeah, 14th of May was a big day. You know, a passport being repealed has opened up the better opportunities in any state that wants to regulate. So we are leading the way in that charge at the moment. So it's very exciting. All right, well, I'm going to let you go so you can get some sleep because I'm sure you're a very busy man. Yeah. All right, Alan. Thanks for stopping by. Thank you very much. All right, he's Alan. I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're at PagerDuty Summit 2018. Thanks for watching.