 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 20. I'm Lisa Martin, very pleased to welcome back to theCUBE, one of our distinguished alumna, the CEO of PagerDuty, Jennifer Tejada. Jennifer, it's great to be talking with you today. Thanks, Lisa. It's great to be here with theCUBE again and great to be with you. Yeah, so lots happened in the last six months alone. We've got whiplash and all that, but this is, you've been fifth year of the PagerDuty Summit, the first year virtual. A lot of things have changed. Talk to us about the evolution of PagerDuty over the last few years and particularly the last six months. Well, let's start with the last six months. I mean, I think we have all seen society go through a big transformation with a global pandemic, kind of underpinning a volatile economic environment, a very difficult jobs environment, but in many cases, we've also seen tremendous acceleration. We've seen companies pull forward 10 years of transformation into a matter of months. I mean, we saw that recently in some Kinsey research and this has really been driven by the compulsory need for brands to meet their consumers online, for companies to enable and empower their employees online and for children to be able to learn online. And so as we've moved, made this shift to doing everything in the digital world, it means that all of our customers, the biggest brands in the Fortune 500, the most innovative tech companies that you're aware of, they've all had to really transform quickly to deliver an entire nearly perfect customer experience online and the stakes are higher because they can't depend on their bricks and mortar revenue for business success. And that's meant that IT teams and developer teams have become the frontline of the digital default era because digital really truly is the new operating system. That kind of fits squarely into how paper duty has evolved because we started out as a platform that serve developers and helping them manage on-call notifications and alerting. So engineers who wanted to be alerted when something went wrong and make sure they could address an issue in a service they were responsible for before it had customer impact. Over the last five years, we've really evolved the platform leveraging over a decade of proprietary data about events, about incidents, about people, responder behavior with machine learning to really help our customers in engineering, in IT, in IT ops and security and in customer support, truly manage what is an increasingly complex digital tech ecosystem. And this means that we're using software and automation to detect issues. We're then intelligently routing those issues in that work, that unplanned spontaneous work to the right people in the right moments so that a customer and employee doesn't even feel any pain. There's no issue with availability. They can continue to engage with the brand or service the way they want to. And that's become increasingly important because that's where all the revenue is today. It's essential. It's like, you know, we've been talking for months about essential frontline workers and we think right away of healthcare, fire, police, things like that. But the digital default that you talked about, there's new, the digital frontline. Some of the, I know, Page of Duty has over 13,000 customers and some of the new sort of digital frontline that are enabling people to do everything from work, shop, learn, you know, zoom, Netflix for example, Peloton helping us, you know, keep fit in this time of such isolation are now considered essential and depending on Page of Duty to help them be able to do that to meet those increasing customer demands. Sure, all of these are Page of Duty customers. And the thing about the digital frontline is they can be invisible. You don't necessarily see them because they're behind the scenes trying to manage all the complex technology that makes that on-demand Peloton class efficient and amazing for you. And when that class doesn't work, you're unhappy with Peloton. It really directly impacts the brand. Luckily Peloton is very reliable. I'm a big Peloton fan myself. And you know, I really like to acknowledge and just let the frontline know that we do see them. We know that digital workers have been putting in on average an extra 10 to 15 hours a week during this environment. Many of them are also either living in isolation on their own because of shelter-in-place rules or they're trying to manage their own children's schooling and we all ask ourselves this question, are we working from home or are we living at work? Sometimes those lines are blurred. So anything that we can do as a platform to automate more and more of this work for the digital frontline is really our focus. And this year at Summit, we're going to be talking in particular about freeing our users from complexity, about helping them orchestrate and automate work more effectively and about leveraging machine learning and analytics to improve the cost efficiency, the productivity and the help of their digital teams and their digital operations. So in your keynote, you're going to be talking about digital ops. So let's kind of dig into that because we've shifted from this very structured way of working to sort of this chaotic approach the last six months, digital ops. What does it mean from paid for duties perspective and how is it going to impact every business? Well, I think when we look forward in a couple of years we won't even use the word digital. It'll just be the operations of a company, of a modern organization. How do you bring together all the application technology, the infrastructure technology, the networking, the wifi connectivity, the customer engagement, the data? How do you bring all of that together to deliver these wonderful experiences that we've become reliant on? Yeah, you use the word essential, right? Well, paid your duties essentially become the critical foundation or infrastructure that helps companies manage all this technology. And the problem is with architecture becoming more distributed with powerful tools like the cloud, that's actually proliferated the complexity. It's actually increased the speed of the number of applications and services that an organization has mattered. And so adopting the cloud can be very powerful for a company, it can be very freeing, it can allow you to innovate much faster, but it also is not an easy thing to do. There's a lot of change management associated with it and you have to make sure that your team is ready for it. PagerDuty really facilitates a cultural shift, leveraging DevOps, which really, DevOps culture really in methodology allows companies to empower people closest to the action to make better decisions. If you think about this digital world we're living in, a consumer will wait a nanosecond, a microsecond, maybe a couple of seconds if you don't get that experience to be perfect for them. And yet traditional ways of solving technology problems were ticketing systems and command and control environments that would take hours, maybe days to resolve issues. We don't have that time anymore. And so digital operations is all about instantly detecting an issue, being able to run correlation and consolidate those issues to start to become more proactive, to predict whether or not this small issue could become a major incident and address it, resolve it, leveraging automation before customers feel any pain, before you see any impact to the business, the bottom line, or brand reputation. All of those are absolutely critical for every type of company, every size, every industry, because as you talked about, customers are demanding, we're also ready to, if something doesn't happen right away, we're going to go find the next service that's going to be able to deliver it. And the cost of that to a business is I saw some numbers that you shared that if that cost you 100, a second of, or a minute rather of downtime a year ago cost you $100,000, that's now four to five X. So that cost can actually put a company adding up out of business and we're in this, let's not just survive, but thrive mode and to be able to have that immediate response. And as you say, shift from being reactive to proactive is I think absolutely business critical. Lisa, you should come work for us. You have this down pack and you're exactly right. I mean, I remember back in the day when I used to work in an office and walk out onto the street before I went home, you would see employees standing outside, switching back and forth between their rideshare app, their food delivery app, maybe their dating app or their movie entertainment app. And if one thing's not serving them fast enough, they just switched to the other one and consumers are very fickle. They've become increasingly more demanding, which means there are more demands on our teams and a digital frontline and our technology. And in fact, to your point, because all of that revenue has shifted online over the last six months, we've seen the cost of a minute. And that cost is really calculated based on lost labor productivity, but also lost revenue. We've seen that cost go up from, if you lost $100,000 during disruption last year, you're maybe losing half a million dollars a minute when your app is disrupted. And these apps and websites, they don't really go down very often anymore, but small disruptions when you're trying to close out your shopping cart, when you're trying to select something, when you're trying to do some research, it can be very frustrating when all of those little pieces backed by very complex technology don't come together beautifully. And that's what PagerDuty, that's where PagerDuty brings the power of automation, the power of data and intelligence and increasingly orchestrates all this work. We don't start our day anymore by coming into an office, having a very structured, well laid out, calendared environment. We often are interrupted constantly throughout the day. And PagerDuty was designed and architected to serve unpredictable, spontaneous, but emergent, meaning time critical and mission critical work. And I think that's really important because that digital environment is how companies and brands build trust with their consumers or their employees. And PagerDuty essentially operationalizes that trust. A challenge with trust is it can take years to build trust up and you can destroy it in a matter of seconds. And so that's become really important for our customers. Absolutely. Another thing that obviously has gone on in the last six months is you talked about those digital frontline workers working an extra 10 to 15 hours a week, living at work basically, but also the number of incidents has gone up. But how is PagerDuty helping those folks respond to and reduce the incidents faster? Well, this is something that I'm very proud of and PagerDuty's entire product and engineering team should be extremely proud of. I mean, we're held to a very high standard because we're the platform that is expected to be up when everything else is having a bad day. And in this particular environment, we've seen a number of our customers' experience unprecedented demand and scale like Zoom and Netflix, who you mentioned earlier. And when that happens, that puts a lot of pressure, events, transiting across our platform on PagerDuty. PagerDuty has not only held up extremely well seeing some customers experiencing 50 times the number of incidents and other customers experiencing maybe 12 times the number of incidents they used to. Those customers are actually seeing an improvement in their time to resolve an incident by about 20%. So I love the fact that not only have we scaled almost seamlessly in this environment with the customers of ours that are seeing the most demand and the most change. And at the same time, we've helped all of our customers improve their time to resolve these incidents to improve their overall business outcomes. One of the things I saw, Jennifer, recently, I think it was from McKinsey, was that 92% of businesses surveyed before the pandemic said, yeah, we've got to shift to a digital business. So I'm curious, customers that were on that cussing, we're not there yet, but we need to go, when this happened six months ago, how, when they came to PagerDuty, how did you advise them to be able to do this when time was of the essence? Well, first of all, one of our first company value is champion the customer. So I think our initial response to what we saw happen as COVID started to impact many industries was to listen, was to lean in with empathy and try and understand the position our customers were in. Because just like our employees, every person is affected differently by this environment and every customer has had a different experience. Some industries have done very well and we hear a lot about that on the news, but many industries are really having a very, very difficult time and have had to massively transform their business model just to survive, much less to thrive. And so PagerDuty has really worked with those customers to help them manage the challenge of trying to transform and accelerate their digital offerings and at the same time reduce their overall costs. And we do that very effectively. We did a study with IDC about a year ago and found that most of our enterprise customers experienced a 730% return on investment in four months. And that's because we automate what has traditionally been a lot of manual work. Instead of just alerting someone that there's a problem, we orchestrate that problem across cross functional teams who otherwise might not be able to find each other and are now distributed. So there's even more complicated. You can't just sit in a room and solve these problems together anymore. We actually capture all of the data that is created in the process of resolving an incident. And now we're using machine learning and AI to make recommendations, to suggest ways to resolve an incident, to leverage past incident experiences and experts within the platform to do that. And that means that we're continually consolidating the time that it takes to resolve an incident from detection all the way through to being back to recovery, but also reducing the amount of manual work that people have to do, which also reduces their stress when they're under fire and under time constraints because they know these types of incidents can have a public and a financial impact on their companies. We also help them learn from every incident that runs on the platform. And we're really bringing more power to the table on that front with some of the new releases I'll be talking about later on this morning with analytics and our analytics lab. As we look at the future, the future of life is online. The future of work is online, but also distributed teams because we know that sometimes you're gonna come back to normal, but a lot isn't. So being able to empower organizations to make that pivot so quickly, you've heard of a great point about it's not just the end user customer who can churn and then go blast about it to social media and cause even more churn, but it's also the digital frontline worker who well-being needs to be cared for because if burnout happens, that's a big issue that every company has to deal with. How has Pedro duty kind of really focused on you mentioned culture on helping that digital frontline worker not feel a burnout or those teams collaborate better? Well, we look at operations through the lens of sort of humanity and we think about what's the impact of the operational environment today on what we call team health. And in our analytics solution, we can heat map your team for you and help you understand who in your team is experiencing the most incident response stress they're having to take on work during dinnertime, after hours, on weekends in the middle of the night because these big incidents for some reason don't seem to happen at one on a Tuesday. They tend to happen at four a.m. on a Saturday. And oftentimes what happens is what I call the hero syndrome. You have a particularly great developer who becomes the subject matter expert who gets pulled into every major difficult puzzle or incident to solve. And the next thing you know, that person's spending 50% of their time on unplanned, unpredictable, high stress work. And we can see that before it becomes that challenging and alert leaders that they potentially have a problem. We also, in our analytics product, can help managers benchmark their teams in terms of their overall productivity, how much their services are costing them to run and manage and also looking after the health of those folks. And we've often said, paid your duty is for people. We really build everything from design to architecture in service of helping our users be more efficient, helping our users get to the work that matters the most to them and helping our users learn, like I said, with every incident or problem or challenge that runs on the platform. Likewise, I believe culture is a business imperative. Likewise is diversity and equality. And paid your duty is a platform from a technology perspective that doesn't discriminate. And we're also a company that is really focused on balance, on belonging, on inclusion, diversity and equality in everything that we do. And I'm really excited that at Summit we have Derek Johnson, who is the president of the NAACP speaking with us, to talk about how we get out the vote, how we support individuals in having a say, in leveraging their voices at a time when I think it's more important than ever. And that was one of the things that really struck me, Jennifer, when I was looking at, hey, what's going on with PagerDuty Summit 20 and just even scanning the website with the photographs of the speakers from keynotes and general session to breakouts and influencers, the amount of representation of women and people of color and diversity really struck me because we just don't see that enough. And I just wanted to say congratulations as someone, a woman has been in tech for 15 years. That is so important, but it's not easy to achieve. Well, thank you for saying that. I mean, honestly, I think that when you look on that Summit website and at those speakers, it really is a great picture or snapshot of the richly diverse community that PagerDuty serves and engages and partners in. Sometimes you just have to be more intentional about identifying some of those phenomenal speakers who are maybe not the obvious person to have on a topic because we become accustomed and used to having the same types of speakers over and over again. So this started with intent, but to be honest, like these people are out there. And I think we have to give them a stage. We have to give them a spotlight. And it's not about whether you're a man or a woman on our stage, it's making sure that the entire Summit environment really brings a diverse and I think rich collection of expertise of experience to the table so that we all benefit. And I'm really excited. There are just so many fantastic folks joining us from Brett Taylor, who is the president and CEO of Salesforce and was the founding CTO of Facebook to Andy Jassy, who is leading Amazon web services right now. There's Ebony Beckwith who is going to speak about some of the great things that we're doing with PagerDuty.org and the list goes on and on. I could spend all morning talking about the people I'm excited to hear from and learn from. But I would encourage everybody who is putting an event together to have a strategy and be intentional and be insistent about making sure that your content and the people providing that content, the experts that you're bringing to bear really do reflect the community that we're all trying to serve. That is outstanding. And congratulations on PagerDuty Summit 5, the first virtual, but you're going to have the opportunity to influence and educate so many more people. Jennifer, it's been such a pleasure talking to you and having you back on theCUBE. I look forward to seeing you again soon. Thank you so much, Lisa. It's been great to be with you. All right, for Jennifer Tejada, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching this CUBE conversation.