Cloud AWS re:Invent Coverage | Jennifer Tejada, PagerDuty

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Jennifer Tejada

CEO

PagerDuty

AI and DevOps: Transforming incident management in the age of complexity

Incident management is undergoing a transformation as businesses grapple with increasingly complex digital ecosystems. With the rise of hyperscalers, ...

play_circle_outline Maximizing PagerDuty's Performance: Integrating Generative AI and Automation for Enhanced Customer Experience

play_circle_outline PagerDuty's Transformation: Enhancing Reliability and Resilience with Digital Operations Management in Essential Infrastructure

play_circle_outline Enabling remote incident response and automation on mobile devices for improved quality of life.

play_circle_outline Introduction of PagerDuty Advance generative AI assistant for quick and high-fidelity answers.

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Jennifer Tejada, PagerDuty

Jennifer Tejada

CEO PagerDuty

PagerDuty, founded by former Amazon engineers, automates on-call responses in the DevOps era. The company's automated incident response, alongside AI and automation, aids in incident management. Integration with Amazon Q Developer streamlines incident resolution. PagerDuty's reliability and resilience have earned them a loyal customer base. The recent launch of the Operations Cloud reflects their expansion into incident response, AI ops, and automation. PagerDuty Advance offers quick answers and facilitates incident management through chat interfaces. By enab... Read more

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What kind of work does PagerDuty aim to automate and how does it use machine learning and AI to do so effectively? add

What strategies and services does the company offer to meet the high expectations of their Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 customers? add

What impact has the ability to run an entire major incident response on a mobile device had for developers and tech executives? add

What new technology has PagerDuty announced this summer and how is it benefiting developers? add

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>> Okay. Welcome back, everyone, to the theCUBE's coverage here in Las Vegas for AWS re:Invent 2024. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. It's our 12th year covering AWS re:Invent. 2013 was the first year. Watching the progression, watching the companies grow in the ecosystem, watching Amazon grow, it's been fun to watch, and we have a great CEO here. Jennifer Todd is the CEO of PagerDuty, which was a revolution in its time, but in the early days when it solved a big problem, and then back on stage here, it was great to see you on stage in the morning program with Andy Jassy, Matt Garman. Great presentation. Thanks for coming on theCUBE.

>> Well, thank you so much for having me. It was fun today. We sort of feel like we've grown up alongside of AWS and the leadership team here has been so good to us. PagerDuty was built on AWS from the very early days, and in fact, our three co-founders started as Amazon software engineers and that's where they found this big problem of needing to automate on-call and better address incidents and issues when they arrive.

>> I love you got the origination story on the stage, but I have to ask you, when you're up on stage and see how big Amazon has gotten, when you're looking out on the fans out there in the audience, could you see everyone? Was the lights too bright and you're like-

>> The lights are bright, but you can see that there's people there. And so I did sort of walk out and was like, "How are you doing?" Because I hadn't really checked in on them. I'm really inspired by Amazon as a company. There are very few companies on the planet that have excelled in so many different and diverse businesses, and one of the ways they have been successful is by leading with technology. And when we first built our original app, it was built in the Amazon cloud and we leveraged a lot of Amazon's privatus to make it work, and they've continued to be a great technology partner, offering lots of different solutions that have enabled us to scale quickly, but also reliably and securely.

>> Yeah, it was nice to see you guys on stage. And what's notable too is about a decade and a half into the business that was started from Amazon engineers, as you pointed out, PagerDuty has grown and changed. So take us through, I was saying before we came on camera that you go back to 15 years ago, someone who's 25 was in middle school, they didn't know the PagerDuty problem. So while we're here, just lay out the problem statement that made the company become that initial escape velocity that PagerDuty hit because you solved the core problem in one of the most important computing errors of our time, which was the cloud movement with DevOps and cloud scale, the hype, now called hyperscalers. You guys were a key player in that movement.

>> Yeah. I mean, part of the transition to the cloud included the development of a cultural movement called DevOps. And the idea behind DevOps, the central idea is that if you build something and you ship it, then you actually own its quality in production, where historically, developers had passed over that production responsibility to an ops team. And by asking developers to take ownership and be accountable for their code in production, it led to higher quality code, people not shipping things at strange times of day or night on the weekends, not shipping things during major business activities or periods. But it also meant that developers were now put in a position that when something went wrong in a service that they built, they were the first on-call, so to speak. And being on-call is just like you could imagine if you were a physician working with an emergency room. Something bad happens and you get a call and you've got to try and figure out what is the issue, how important is it, how do we address it, what's the root cause, what impact is it having on our customers?

>> And then stopping what you're doing and it could be at a dinner and a kid's soccer game or whatever.

>> It's what we call interrupt work, right?

>> It's like-

>> You could be in flow or getting married or doing something really important, and things generally don't break in convenient moments. And big, major incidents are now on the rise. They're up 43% year over year, and they cost nearly $1 million every time they happen because we all rely on technology for almost everything.

>> Yeah, I'm old enough to say that I had a pager, many pagers, they've gotten better, then phones came out. But again, the pager, incident response, you guys solved that problem. And I think what I liked about the presentation, I'm going to get into some of the news you guys are doing, is that we're now at another inflection point that's even bigger than that one and then maybe other ones combined, but the same kind of thing's happening with the generative AI and now the boom with automating with software. How software is going to be rewritten is going to change. So what DevOps did, as you just pointed out, changed the control point of production and operations versus waterfalling and the QA department, all that. So software changed and then the infrastructure changed. So now we're in a similar position, which it's a whole nother level. It's getting real, let's .

>> I love these technology transformations. I love these disruptions, these kind of breakthroughs. And I've been at this for a long time, but when the smartphone really became smart, it changed a lot of things because suddenly you had a supercomputer in your pocket. And that opened up just a whole new world of possibilities for software engineers to develop applications that could change the way we live, the way we learn, and the way we work. The cloud then accelerated that, right? The cloud made it less costly and much easier to start a startup. We heard Bret Taylor talking about how Amazon makes it much easier to start a startup these days than even 10 years or 20 years ago. And now with the advent of machine learning and artificial intelligence and generative AI, you're not limited by your access to bleeding-edge technology. And I think that's something that Amazon's done well for many years is democratizing new technology and making it not only accessible, but affordable for companies small and really large. You heard from Lori Beer from JPMC talking about their transformation at the bank. But what I love about this era we're in with generative AI is that there's so much untapped power and potential in everything from our data to our creativity. And to your point, solving problems now means you leverage automation. You don't have to solve them yourself. You can solve very, very complex problems at a magnitude faster than you could before, 10 times, 20 times, 100 times faster than we were able to before. You can sift through complexity in a way that we couldn't in the past. And for developers and for our large enterprise customers, that means that you can also ship a lot more code a lot more quickly, and that code is imperfect. Agentic AI or agents will be imperfect. They're going to cause incidents themselves. And so incident response and operations is becoming more important, but we're going to solve more of those problems with machines and agents ourselves, not just software.

>> So your business started with solving that problem but has had that same trajectory of value proposition, but the environment's changed. How are you guys looking at the business today? Obviously, you had some news on stage. There's more incidents coming and they're happening all the time. You're just taking care of them for the customer, is that-

>> Well, we really help automate the kind of work that is unpredictable, unstructured, but mission-critical and incredibly valuable. And sometimes that's a major incident. Sometimes it could be taking advantage of a major opportunity the moment it strikes. And more and more of the work that we see across an enterprise is unstructured, time-sensitive, and mission-critical. So it's giving us an opportunity to leverage all that our platform has learned by collecting that information and having a machine learning background and having AI at the backbone of what we do, to now surface new ways to help people manage those tasks or manage that kind of work. And so for instance, just having PagerDuty recommend the best next step as opposed to trying to figure it out yourself, trying to find the experts who might know, trying to orchestrate, work to the right teams. PagerDuty will do all that for you. So much like generative AI removes a lot of complexity across multiple use cases, we're taking a really complex operating environment, simplifying it, and just driving better outcomes for the end customer experience.

>> It's interesting hearing Andy Jassy come on stage here and hearing you talk. It's like you can see that you have the cadence of your North Star in every cycle. You saw the same... It's a value proposition that made the company a category creator. Amazon's up there and he's saying, "We're going to make things fast. Make choice." So you almost think, "Isn't that the whole flywheel for AWS, making more choices?" And so-

>> But also making it more efficient. I think that's one thing that we've done. As we've scaled, we've maintained high gross margins above 80%, even though we consume significantly more data and information and require more compute. And I think it's important that when you're building something, you think about what is the best way to build this reliably, securely, in a high-fidelity way, but also a way that will scale efficiently? And that's one of the exciting things about one of the announcements we made today where we're integrating into Amazon Q Developer because that means that developers not only have access to the data in our platform across our 15,000 customers, but they also have access to their own data in a safe and reliable environment. So that means everything from diagnostics and triage to choosing the right resolution to preventing a major disruption or outage from happening again. It can happen much faster.

>> So you're extending with Q, you're actually extending, you're bringing development into your category while connecting into the origination of the code.

>> Well, one way to think about it is if you're really focused on delivering more reliable code to start with, hopefully you have less major incidents on the back end. So it is a virtuous cycle and a value chain. It wouldn't have been possible had we not been able to partner with Bedrock and leverage. We leverage Anthropic Claude and have worked, like I said, closely with AWS and Amazon in a lot of different things over the years.

>> I see you guys as a category leader, how you started, and now as you look at this next extension of the category that you're in, how are you thinking about the business? Obviously, the environment's changed, you pointed that out. Are you thinking that your customers will continue to grow, you're growing your customer base, you're getting new customers? Because you have a very loyal customer base. You got tons of great customers.

>> We do. Thank you for saying that. We do have tons and we learn a lot from our customers. I always say your best customer is the customer who holds you to the highest standard, and we serve nearly 70% of the Fortune 100 and half of the Fortune 500. And these are big businesses, some of which were on stage today too, big businesses that have very high expectations and keep pushing you to do better and build great things. And we started by creating the on-call category, by automating it. We moved into incident response. We then built what we call digital operations, really thinking about how do you manage all your digital operations more effectively in production? And with the launch of the Operations Cloud, we look at everything from incident response to AI ops, as well as automation and customer service apps, making sure that your customer service teams and agents and bots are all in the loop when something big is going down. And you should expect us to continue to explore more use cases across the organization, whether that's security or managing incidents caused by agents themselves, right?

>> Yeah.

>> And that's fun because it is mission-critical for our customers.

>> You've been in the business of making people's lives easier and better. I've been hearing on theCUBE this year a couple keywords: productivity; obviously, the killer app, we see that; search as one of the benefits of this new era; and the other one is my life, like making my life easier. And so you're seeing a quality of life because people are shedding the mundane tasks. But again, this is all pointing to just insights. So insights and life. So you have search, high-quality life, and insights and productivity, and you guys have a lot of data. How do you think about that as you look at the future of your company? Because as you get more data, you are a platform, you're probably going to grow faster now with more data coming in, but the insights, you could be a cybersecurity, you're-

>> Totally....

>> you're operationally running incidents. They're everywhere.

>> Yeah. Well, we've become essential infrastructure for most of our customers. We literally, I think we have a lot of customers who say, "We really couldn't operate without PagerDuty," and that's why we take reliability and resilience so seriously. I mentioned on stage that we've never had a maintenance window in 15 years of existence, and that's because there isn't a two-hour time that we could choose that would be convenient for one of our customers somewhere to not have coverage. And I think that that is really important. I'd also say that we've been laser-focused on trying to improve the quality of life for developers and tech executives and everybody in the middle for a very long time. If you think about it, even five years ago, pre-COVID lockdown, a lot of our customers had huge network operations centers with swivel chairs and terminals and big screens on the wall, et cetera. And we learned through lockdown that that could be done remotely and by distributed teams. The problem was most operations platforms and work automation platforms didn't allow you to do that kind of critical work on a laptop, much less a phone. You can run an entire major incident response on a mobile device with PagerDuty, and that unleashes our users.

>> Yeah, it changes the game.

>> It means you don't have to carry your laptop into the movie theater. You don't have to have your backpack at a wedding. You actually can just have your phone in your pocket like everybody else.

>> And that agent potential. You got an agent and you put your phone on snooze, like, "Agent, take over and notify me."

>> I love you mentioning that because we announced this summer PagerDuty Advance, which is our generative AI assistant, and it's starting to take some of the toil out of the hands of our developers by being able to tell you what customers are impacted, what's changed in the complexity of many deployments that happen over short periods of time. Who is the right team to contact to manage this issue? What's the best next step? All those very quick, but high-fidelity answers are now available really easily and deeply integrated into chat experiences that our customers love, like Slack and Teams.

>> Jennifer, great to have you come by and come off stage and visit theCUBE. I was talking to Deepak Singh, who runs Q Developer, in Seattle two weeks ago prior to the re:Invent. And I said, "I was talking to a friend and I asked him about Q, and I said, 'What's the bottom line?' He goes, 'I get more beer time.'"

>> That's right.

>> And what he meant by that was, "I get more time with my friends," and he responded to that. He's like, "Yeah, that's the goal." And then I talked with Naveen Rao from Databricks earlier today, and he said, "Yeah, but it's opening up coding for..." Well, he didn't say, "Normal people," but non-coders can now code, but coders are going down to the kernel level. So you're starting to see the shift of coding going to where the value extraction is, so you're democratizing coding, which then creates the user experiences. And then the coders, the human in the loop, are getting deeper into the tech to squeeze real-time value out of the data.

>> And there's a lot of value to be had. I mean, honestly, when I joined the business nine, eight, nine years ago, one of the things that appealed to me was the ability to give time back to people because time is the most valuable currency in our society, and once it's spent, you can't-

>> Get it back....

>> get it back. And so freeing people up to build and to spend time with people that they care about and to do the things that fulfill them and that they're passionate about is something that's really important to us and a big part of our mission.

>> Well, thank you for taking time out of your day to come by theCUBE and share with the audience.

>> Well, it's nice to see you again.

>> Thank you.

>> Thanks for having me.

>> Thanks for coming on. Jennifer Todd is in theCUBE, getting all the action on the main stage, showing the examples of where gen AI is going to take the ecosystem, but more importantly, the value proposition, which is time, productivity, and just making things better, and this is what we hope will continue to happen. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching.