 Hey everyone, welcome to theCUBE's coverage of PagerDuty Summit 22. I'm Lisa Martin and I'm on the ground with Michael Cookie, the VP of product and marketing at PagerDuty. Michael, it's great to have you on the program. There is great momentum right now at PagerDuty. The company's fourth quarter fiscal 22 financials showed a revenue rise of 34% year-over-year with figures of 85.4 million for the quarter for the first time ever. Awesome stuff. Let's talk, Michael, about what some of the great things are that attendees can expect from this year's summit. Automation has been always at the forefront of PagerDuty's focus on managing critical work, but it's a big focus for this year's summit. Let's unpack why that is. Sure, absolutely. Thanks so much for having me, Lisa. It's great to be here. We did just finish a great quarter. We're super excited about it. I think Summit's a good example. It kind of is aligned around the areas that we've been seeing a lot of success and momentum with our customer base. And automation is definitely one of those pillars without a doubt. You know, what we've seen, we've been at this now for well over a decade, and we've been investing in automation in kind of two major areas, and I'll explain why. We study our customers and what they need. And I think we can all talk about the limited time that everybody has to get their jobs done today, limited people, right? The great rotation or the great resignation is definitely hitting every single industry. And so it results in limited skills and a lot of strain on the people that are trying to get their jobs done every day. We also saw that the more you interrupt someone, so you have a very skilled worker, let's say it's a developer, for example, and you're constantly interrupting them to try and get them to help you fix something, they get super unhappy. And we actually on our platform prove they quit their jobs more often when they are interrupted more often. So, you know, that is an area where we think automation can have huge impacts and huge returns to take limited resources and really stretch them a lot further by taking care of repeat work, but also taking some of those higher skilled capabilities and handing them to more people across the enterprise. So the work could be shared across the enterprise. That's critical to share that work, but I also find it fascinating that you studied that and actually saw direct correlation of developers actually resigning from their jobs. And as you mentioned, the great resignation is something that many companies in every industry are dealing with. Let's talk a little bit about some of the things that were announced recently. I know you guys are weaving automation actions everywhere to empower more users to be able to take action to resolve issues faster, which is critical for the customer experience, it's critical for revenue. Talk a little bit about automation actions. What are some of the key things that that delivers and enables pager duty to do for its customers? Yeah, great. So, you know, two years ago, we acquired an automation company named Rundec and we got right to work integrating their technology across the pager duty operations cloud and automation actions is the ability to execute automation from wherever you are. And so that is, you know, I think there's two directions to talk about automation. One is kind of what can we automate inside of an incident response? So when something's going wrong, what can we automate? What can we automate inside of our own platform? And then there's what can we automate out in the customer's environment? So whether that's fixing something that's going wrong on a cloud or in a data center or provisioning new resources out on the cloud so that people can scale their applications more rapidly. All of that is done with automation actions which you just mentioned. And so it's not enough to just be able to send work to be done somewhere else. You have to kind of do it everywhere. And so at summit this year, we announced that you'll be able to fire off that automation in real time using event intelligence which is our machine learning product. So as machine learning learns something, it can then run off and try and take action based on it. And then we're delivering it to all of our users. So inside of, you know, for a responder who's responding to a problem, for a customer service representative who might be working with a customer who's having a problem, giving them automation can totally change the customer experience because now the customer service person is actually empowered to do diagnostics and try and solve problems. So that's right, automation actions being delivered both in real time and to every different type of user that leverages pager duty today. That's really quite transformative, Michael. It sounds like getting the first line responders, the corrective information in an automated fashion because as we know, one of the things that's been in short supply the last couple of years as patients and one of the risks, several of the risks associated with that are customer churn, you know, poor customer experience, brand reputation, et cetera. What are some of the expected outcomes with automation actions? Obviously, speeding mean time to repair, lowering interruptions, getting problems fixed faster, but from a customer's perspective, what are some of the outcomes that they can expect? Awesome, great question. There's a lot of different ways you can leverage automation, right? You just mentioned a bunch of super high return ones. When something's broken and your company's actually losing customer experience or revenue or you're unable to deliver a service to your employees or your users, that is obviously a moment of massive return for automation. In those cases, like you said, you're going to see a reduction in the requirements to escalate, which means that the first responder can actually solve the problem themselves and they're not going to have to go interrupt that more higher skilled employee like we talked about. We see that over 50% of the time we're actually reducing escalations by using this technology. That also means the problems are getting solved a lot faster, which you also mentioned. So using automation actions to both diagnose what's going wrong, but then actually try and remediate it. And as I mentioned earlier, we can do that before you even have to get a human being at all. We can do that with machine learning in real time, which is super powerful. And then there's a long tail of other ways to leverage automation in an environment from service provisioning and redundant tasks that are used, that are done for maintenance across an environment or provisioning services to developers so that they can get to work faster. So there's a lot to do there. And then we're also exploring ways to automate outside of just technical use cases, which we talked a little bit about in the product keynote as well. One of the things that you mentioned earlier is that the data that PagerDuty has that demonstrates from a resignation perspective what happens when developers are really taken away from their core job. Is there any data that shows that automation actions you mentioned, a big reduction, 50% reduction in time to respond there? Is there a direct correlation in actually helping the folks on the front lines stay in the front lines? That's right. And also those that are coding, coding, right? So that 50% reduction means 50% time given back for them to do their primary function, which in this case is building amazing new digital services whether that's a new customer experience or a piece of digital service to drive the business and business efficiency. And so driving this automation acts as kind of a shock absorber for your business and for the people in your business that are super taxed. And we actually released something called the State of Digital Operations and we are updating all that data actually and announced today that that is now available on our website as well. So you can hop on there and actually see live statistics off of our platform that we culminate along with some survey statistics that are trending all of this information you're mentioning in terms of people being interrupted and then churning actually from their job because they've been interrupted so many times. And so that's right, this will directly impact that. And as we bring automation out from just developers we hope to have an impact across the rest of the business in a very similar way. Absolutely transformative. I mean, when we think about churning impacts to revenue I always think the customer experience and the employee experience are inextricably linked. And I think what you're talking about really demonstrates that you need to be able to empower the right employees to resolve incidents to absorb that shock as you talked about. And that's really something that for any organization in any industry globally is no longer a nice to have. It's really something that I think sounds like a competitive differentiator that paid your duty can help organizations really uncover and bring to the surface. Yeah, you're hitting on one of my favorite topics. I think in the service of the customer in service of like customer delight and customer obsession all of the business is now centered on the customer which means that the back office is the front office. They're coming together. And with the pandemic and kind of the transition that we all took into dependency on digital services it's all starting to look very similar. And so because of that, we're able to now expand our impact at paid your duty across so much more of a business out to everything including employee experience and also accelerating the time to productivity for your business so that you can serve your customer faster. We acquired a company recently named Catalytic and their technology helped us kind of accelerate a couple of pieces to market that are just the tip of the iceberg for kind of being able to rapidly automate and configure workflows for anyone at the enterprise whether that's for a customer experience or whether it's to keep your business productive or efficient for business users. So unpack those incident workflows. You talked about the catalytic acquisition that was just from March. Talk to me about the incident workflows and what were customers asking for that really kind of generated this new capability that page and duty recently announced. So, you know, people lean on page or duty at all types of times but as we've already kind of talked about the most critical time is when something is broken for the business that is vital to their business. And so when those moments happen, you know, we call those major incidents and when you're responding to a major incident across the business, you really have to do everything you can because every second really matters. And so we, you know, catalytics technology enables flexible automated workflows of behavior when certain conditions exist. And so the first thing you're seeing from that technology is called incident workflows which when something's going wrong enables you to kind of automate steps of processes very, very quickly that can be carried out company-wide. So this could be something like when we see that critical service is impacted, we want to automatically send out updates across the business. We want to automatically create an area to go troubleshoot on a collaborative, you know, collab ops platform. We want to automatically invite the right people into that room and automatically deliver diagnostics to them and automation to them so they can troubleshoot faster. Instead of a human having to take those steps in terms of firefighting and trying to pull those coordination steps together, now we can configure that quickly and have it happen automatically and it can actually happen without a human having to trigger it. So again, this is about something's broken. We're responding, we need to be as fast as possible. You can't rely on a human anymore. You really need, you know, the earlier automation we talked about was automating off our platform. Incident workflows is automating on the operations cloud. So taking steps to solve the problem when it goes wrong without needing a human being to take those steps. When you're in customer conversations, Michael, and you talk about these capabilities, what are some of the things that you talk to the customers about about why automation is going to be, I wouldn't even say critical for, I mean business critical table stakes for organizations. It's no longer okay to just default to depend on humans. You know, the customers on the other end don't want to, you know, a couple seconds. Delay is hugely impactful. Yeah, we call that the abandonment threshold but that's absolutely right. So we've already talked a lot about why our businesses and our employees depend on digital. I think we've covered that. What's important to understand is what is digital? So contemporary applications and digital services, there are tens and hundreds of microservices that are powering these things. And then there's thousands of different dependencies between those services. And so supporting these and understanding these is difficult. So being able to interpret, are they operating correctly? And if not, what do we do about it? It's actually a problem that humans can't calculate. Then you throw into change, right? So everybody's now competing with the digital service. So they want to innovate as fast as possible, get new capabilities out, keep that customer excited and happy with your offering. And so we need to push change on that complex environment very often. It's a pretty hairy mess to try and solve and to do that in real time. So we use two arms of an area that we call AIOps. One is using machine learning to interpret all of those signals and figure out is, what is going on? Is it happening correctly? Is something going wrong? Is something looking like it's going wrong? And also to determine how to fix it if it is going wrong. Do we need a person to do this or not? And then that other side is what we've talked about today which is you can't bring a human in to do all the work. So you have to know how to solve the problem. So the combination of is what we call AIOps. It's event intelligence, which is machine learning to understand the situation. And then it's automation to actually go out and react to it and solve the problem. That's this branch of our platform. Got it. And you guys have, PagerDuty has 19,000 customers, including 60% of the Fortune 100. Is there a customer example that jumps to mind to you that really articulates the value of AIOps, for example, and what it is that PagerDuty is able to allow its customers to do? Sure. And now a million users on this platform, which is just phenomenal. And that actually helps us design better machine learning because we have so many people using this platform. There's a great example that was just shown in our kickoff. So if you haven't seen the product keynote, you really have to see it. We run what are called day in the life demos. And in this case, this kind of hit close to home for us because a lot of us have been sitting in delays in airports around the globe as we get back to our travel and get back to seeing people face to face. But what we showed there is very close to real world example where a ticketing service goes down for a travel agency and it impacts everything from directly their end users, customer satisfaction, but also partner engagements and employee behaviors and whether they can get the right people book to staff that flight, et cetera. It really throws logistical chaos on the entire business. And it's all based on digital systems. And in that you can see our platform helps them react and manage customers at the customer service layer. It gets the developers and the infrastructure and IT teams reacting to solve the problem instantly. They use automation to solve the problem and they actually learn some new things in that situation and they bring that back to flexible workflows. So it's basically what I call a virtuous loop as they solve a problem and they realize they could do it faster, better, quicker or automate more of it, you're now able to bake that back into the platform so that you're basically getting better and better and better every single time you are called to solve a problem. And so over time, we like to bring our customers up what we call the operational maturity model. And at the end of that journey, you should really be focused on critical work for you and for your business and the rest of it should really be handled by our platform. An operational flywheel that is constantly learning is impactful as you described in that example across an entire enterprise, so many different facets there. Last question, Michael, as we're running out of time here, as I mentioned in the very beginning, Pay2Duty is coming off amazing momentum from FY22. What are some of the things that you're seeing for the year ahead that you're excited about or that we can expect? Great question. So you just saw us release automation in every area for every user. I think what you're gonna see us do across automation is bring faster and more powerful value out of the box with our automation capability. Some of that will be, for example, finding homogeneous what we call runbooks or automation calls that you can make shared across all platforms. One of our recent announcements was the ability to host process automation either in the Pay2Duty operations cloud or behind your own firewall. We also have a hosted SaaS offering for process automation and what we're gonna do is enable the very common a set of automation capabilities across all of those. So it's a homogeneous environment no matter how you are hosting or scaling your automation. So that's one. And I think number two is this workflow stuff we touched on very, very much just the tip of the iceberg, leveraging kind of a no code rapid interface to build workflows to solve the highest ROI problem. But then we're gonna take that technology we're gonna apply it to every downstream repetitive service in your environment. So everything from employee onboarding to critical sales processes or legal contract management, you know, anything that is time critical you're gonna be able to build these rapid workflows around and Pay2Duty is gonna help you keep your business, you know, healthy and operating around them. And so that's where we're gonna be focused is for the next 12 months I would say and it's gonna be an exciting run. It is gonna be exciting run. I better let you get back to work as VP of product and marketing. You got a lot to do, Michael. That's right. Well, I'll get back to it. I appreciate the time though. Thanks for not so much for the chat Lisa. Thank you so much for Michael Cookie. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes on the ground coverage of Pay2Duty Summit 22.