 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of PagerDuty Summit 2020. Brought to you by PagerDuty. Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto studios today and we are talking about an upcoming event. It's one of our favorites. This will be the fourth year that we've been doing it and it's PagerDuty Summit and we're excited to have from the PagerDuty team, she's Carolyn Gus, the VP of Corporate Marketing from PagerDuty. Carolyn, great to see you. Hi, Jeff, great to see you again. Absolutely. So, I was thinking before we turned on the cameras, we've been doing PagerDuty for, I think this will be like say our fourth year. That first year was in the Cool Cruise Ship Terminal Pier. I got to ridden out Pier 27, which was nice. And then the last two years, you've been in the historic Western St. Francis in downtown San Francisco, which is a cool old venue. But oh my goodness, you guys were busting at the seams last year. So this year you get to go virtual. There's a whole bunch of new things that you can do in virtual that you couldn't do in physical space, at least when you're busting out the seams. So first off, welcome and talk a little bit about planning for virtual versus planning for a physical event from a head of marketing perspective. Absolutely. I mean, the first thing that's changed for us is the number of people that can come. It's 5x, the number of people that were able to join us the Western last year. So we expect to have 10,000 people registered and attending a duty site. The second thing is the sheer number of sessions that we can put on. Last year, I think we had around 25 sessions. This year we have between 40 and 50. And again, that's because we're not constrained by space and physical meeting rooms. So it's been a really exciting process for us. We've built a fantastic agenda and it's very much personalized. Developers come to our event, they love our event for the opportunity to learn, mix with their peers, get best practices and hands-on experience. So we have many more of those types of sessions than we have done previously. And that's things like labs and bird of feather sessions and AMAs. But we've also built a whole new track of content this year for executives. Page of Duty has many of the Fortune 500 and Fortune 100's customers. We work very closely with CIO CTOs. So we have built sessions that are really designed specifically for that audience. And I think for us, it's really opened up the potential of this event, made it so much broader and more appealing than we were able to do when we were. As you say, you know, somewhat confined by the location in downtown San Francisco. I think it's such an interesting point because before you work in strain, right? If you have X number of rooms over a couple of days, you know, you've got to make hard decisions on breakouts and what can go in and what can't go in. And, you know, will there be enough demand for this session versus another session? Or from the perspective of an attendee, you know, do they have to make hard trade-offs? I can only attend one session at one o'clock on Tuesday and I got to make hard decisions. But this, as you said, really opens up the opportunities. I think you said you doubled your sessions and you got five X number of registrations. So I think, you know, way too many people think about what doesn't happen in digital versus talking about the things that you can do that are impossible and physical. Yeah, I think at the very beginning, well, first of all, we held our NIA summit event in London in July. So that was great because we got to go through this experience once already. And what we learned was the real removal of hurdles in this process. So to your point about missing the session because you were attending another session, we were calling this sort of the Peloton version of events where you have live sessions. It's great to be there live, participate in the live Q&A. But equally, you have an entire on-demand library. So if you weren't able to go because there was something else at the same time, this is available on demand for you. So we are actually repeating live sessions on two consecutive days. So on the Monday, we were on everything. On the Tuesday, our speakers show up again for live Q&As at the end of their sessions. But after that, it's available forever on an on-demand library. So for us, it was really removing hurdles in terms of the amount of content, the scheduling of the content, and also the number of people that are contend and attend no geographical boundaries anymore. It used to be that a customer of ours would think, well, I'll send one or two people to the Page of Duty Summit. They can learn all the great innovation from Page of Duty and they'll bring it back to the team. That's completely changed. We have teams of 20 signing up and all of them are able to get that experience firsthand. That's really interesting. I didn't even think about kind of whole teams being able to attend now instead of just certain individuals because of budget constraints or you can't send your whole team away for a conference in a particular area. But the piece too that you're supporting that we are over and over is that the net new registrants goes up so dramatically in terms of the names and who those individuals are because a lot of people just couldn't attend for various reasons, whether it's cost, whether it's geography, whether it's they just can't take time off from leaving their primary job. So it's a really interesting opportunity to open up the participation to such a much bigger. And like you said, five X, five X increase in the registration, that's a pretty good number. That's right. Yeah, I mean that cost boundaries gone away. This event is free. And what that's actually meant is, as I say, larger teams from the same company are attending. In addition, we have a number of attendees who are not actually paid to duty customers right now. So previously this was very much a community event for our paid to duty users. And now we actually have a large number of, I guess, interested future customers that will be coming to the event. So that's really important for us. And also I think for our sponsor partners as well because it's broadening out the audience for both of us. Right. So let's talk about sponsors for a minute because one of the big things in virtual events that people are talking about quite often is, okay, I can do the keynotes and I can do the sessions. And now I have all these breakout sessions for training and certification and customer stories, et cetera. But when it comes to sponsors, right? Sponsors used to go to events to set up a booth and hand out swag and wand your badge, right? And it really was feeding kind of a top level down funnel that was really important. Well, now those have gone away, physical events. So from the sponsor perspective, what can they expect? What are the sponsor experience at PagerDuty Summit since I don't have it, a little tiny booth at the West and St. Francis given out swag this year? Yeah. So one important thing is the agenda and how we're involving our sponsors in our agenda this time. Something that we learned is we used to have fairly long keynotes. A keynote could be an hour long and involve multiple components and people would stay in that room for an hour. And they'd really stay and watch sessions all day. So we learned in the virtual format that we need to be shorter and more precise in our sessions. And that opened up the opportunity to bring in more of our partners, our sponsorship partners. So Zendesk, Salesforce, Microsoft as some examples. So they actually get to have their piece of both of our keynote sessions and of our technical product sessions and really explain both the partnership with PagerDuty but also their core technology and the value that they provide customers. So I think that the presence of sponsors in content is much higher than it was before. And we are still repeating the expo format. So we actually do have an expo hall that anytime there's break in between sessions you can go over to the expo hall and it actually runs throughout as well. And you can go in and you can talk to the teams, you can see product demos. So it's very much a virtual version of the expo hall where you went and you wandered around and you picked up a bit of swag. So you mentioned keynotes and Jennifer and the team has always had fantastic keynotes. I mean, I just saw Jennifer being interviewed with Frank Slutman and Eric Wan from Zoom by Curry which was pretty amazing. I felt kind of jealous that I didn't get to do that. But tell us a little bit about some of the speakers. I know there'll be some kind of big rally moment speakers as well as some that are more down to technical track or another track. Give us some highlights on some of the people I'll be sharing the stage with Jennifer. Absolutely. I think what's really unique about PageDuty Summit is that we design types of content for different types of attendees. So if you're a developer, you're a practitioner, we have something like Liz von Jones of Honeycomb who's talking about who builds the tools that we all rely on today and how do they collaborate to build them together in this virtual world? Or we have Jay Paul Reed from Netflix talking about how to handle the stress of being involved in incidents. So that's really a sessions for our core audience of developers who are part of our community and PageDuty really helps them day to day with their job. And then we have the more aspirational senior level speakers who you can really learn from as a leader. So Brett Taylor, president and COO of Salesforce will be joining us on the main stage. He'll be talking about innovation and trust in today's world. And then we have Derek Johnson, he is president of NAACP and he'll be talking about community engagements and particularly voter engagement which is such an important topic for us right now. And then we have leaders from within our customers who are really talking about the way they use PageDuty to drive change in their organization. So an example will be Paul Chisbrough. He runs Digital for Fox and he's going to be talking about digital acceleration and how a large organization like Fox can really accelerate for this digital first world that we find ourselves living in right now. Right. Well, you guys have such a developer focus because PageDuty, the product, the solution has to integrate with so many other infrastructure, monitoring and all of those different systems because you guys are basically at the front line sending the signals that go into those systems. So you have such a broad kind of ecosystem of technology partners. I don't know if people are familiar with all the integrations that you guys have built over the years which is such a key piece of your go-to-market. That's right. I mean, we like to say we're at the center of the digital ecosystem. We have 270 integrations and that's important because we want anyone to be able to use PageDuty no matter what is in their technology stack. Technology stacks today are more complex than they've ever been before, particularly with businesses having to shift to this digital first model since we all began shelter in place. You know, we all are living through digital and working and learning through digital. And so the technology stacks that power that are more complicated than ever before. So by having 370 integrations, we really know that we can serve pretty much any set of services that your business is using. Yeah, we've all seen all the memes, right, about who's pushing your digital transformation. You know, the CEO, the CIO or COVID and we all know the answer to what's accelerated that whole process. So okay, but so before I let you go, I don't even think we've mentioned the date. So it's coming up Monday, September 21st through Thursday, September 24th, not at the West End online. And again, what are you hoping are kind of the key takeaways for the attendees after they come to the summit? Yeah, a couple of things. I mean, first of all, I think would be a sense of belonging. The attendees, the users of PagerDuty, they are really the teams that are at the forefront of keeping our digital services working. And what that means is responding to incidents. We've actually seen a 38% increase in the volume of incidents on our platform since COVID and shelter in place began. Wait, 38% increase in incidents since mid-March? That's correct, since the beginning of mid-March. And bear in mind, incidents prior to that in the six months prior, they were pretty flat. There wasn't instant growth. But what we've also seen is a 20% improvement in the time that it takes to resolve an incident from five minutes down to four minutes. So what that really means is that the PagerDuty community is working really hard. They're improving their practices. Hopefully our platform is a key part of how. But these are some people under pressure. So I hope that people can come and they can experience a sense of belonging. They can learn from each other about experiences. How do you manage the stress of that situation? And what are some of the great innovations that will make your job easier in the year ahead? The second thing that we're doing for that community is that we are offering certification for PDU PagerDuty University for free this year. It's a course with a value of $7,500. Last year you would attend PagerDuty Summit and you would sit through your sessions and you would learn and you would get certified. So this year it's offered for free. You take the course during summit, but you can also carry on if you miss anything for 30 days after. So we're really feeling that, we're giving back there, offering a great program for certification and improved skills completely free to help our community in this time of pressure. Right, right. Well, it is a very passionate community. And we go to so many events and you can really tell it's palatable, kind of where the tight communities are and where people are excited to see each other and where they help each other, not necessarily only at the event, but throughout the year. And I think a huge shout out to Jennifer and the culture that she's built there because it is very warm, it's very inclusive, it's very positive and that energy kind of goes throughout the whole company. And I used to tease her, this is something that's built around a device that most of the kids today don't even know what a pager is and just the whole concept of carrying a pager and being on call and being responsible. It's a very different way to kind of look at the world when you're the one that has that thing on your hip and it's buzzing and someone's expecting a return call and you got to fix something. So, you know, huge shout out to keep a positive and you're smiling nice and big. Culture in a job where you're basically fixing broken things most of the time. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's I think a joke that we make, you know these things only break on Friday night or your wedding anniversary or Thanksgiving. But one of the announcements we're most excited about this year is the level of automation and artificial intelligence that we're building into our platform that is really going to reduce the number of interruptions that developers get when they are on call. Yeah, I look forward to more conversations because we're going to be doing a bunch of CUBE interviews like normal and you know, applied artificial intelligence I think is where all the excitement is. It's not a generic thing. It's where you applied in a specific application to get great business outcomes. So I look forward to that conversation and hopefully we'll be able to talk again and good luck to you and the team in the last few weeks of preparation. Thanks so much, Jeff. I've enjoyed talking to you. Thanks for having me up. All right, you too. And we'll see you later. All right. She is Carolyn. I'm Jeff. You're watching the CUBE. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.