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PagerDuty sees a tailwind as businesses race to go digital

The digital operations management company is rolling out new AIOps products aimed at the many organizations now trying to lower IT costs while speeding up their digital transformations.
Written by Stephanie Condon, Senior Writer

As the COVID-19 pandemic keeps people at home -- away from their offices, as well as the storefronts they'd typically visit -- organizations are racing to stand up their digital operations. They're building digital infrastructure and applications faster than ever before -- and often with newly-limited budgets and resources. 

This environment has created a tailwind for PagerDuty, a  digital operations management company that helps businesses across just about every sector keep their infrastructure and applications running smoothly. 

"Where we see a lot of growth is the opportunity for PagerDuty to become the ubiquitous digital operations platform for any work that is mission critical, time sensitive and that can be automated in service of people trying to do higher-order work," CEO Jennifer Tejada said to ZDNet.  

While PagerDuty customers still typically come to the company in service of DevOps, more customers are using the platform to maintain the stable performance of their customer-facing apps, she said. To put it another way, digital operations management is crucial for the bottom line in a way it just wasn't before.

"Increasingly, because of the environment we're in, incident response has become a CEO problem," she said. "If your online cash register is not working, you're losing revenue every second." 

With that in mind, the company is rolling out a series of new capabilities largely designed to make incident management more automated and efficient. PagerDuty is also focused on enabling remote work and giving C-suite executives and others within an organization more visibility into to the status of IT incidents. 

The general release of PagerDuty's Intelligent Triage tool brings its capabilities to mobile devices. The company says the tool can dramatically reduce incident response times by aggregating signals from more than 375 tools -- such as tools for monitoring, observability and ticketing -- and elevating those with the most impact. Organizations can group related alerts, and they can use it to evaluate incidents in the context of past incidents. 

"We're automating more and more of the triage and resolution process, which means it's getting shorter and shorter," Tejada said. 

PagerDuty's new dynamic Service Directory is similarly designed as a time-saver. It gives developer teams access to a central knowledge base with information about who's responsible for different microservice environments. It promises always up-to-date information about the owners and experts of each service and their associated run books. This helps speed up workflows by giving teams the ability to quickly bring together the right people to resolve an issue. 

Meanwhile, PagerDuty's new Business Response mobile dashboard allows teams to collaborate when incidents arise. It's also designed to give executives real-time insight into the progress teams are making. It offers out-of-the-box integration with Slack and Microsoft Teams, to enable better communication and collaboration. 

PagerDuty sees its mobile offerings as a key differentiator. 

"Most incident response platforms that exist today, a responder is literally chained to their machine," Tejada said. "PagerDuty is the first solution that enables you to detect and run an incident from start to finish on a mobile device. If you are on call... you can go to the movies, you can take a walk with your kid in the park... You couldn't do that before without a laptop in your backpack."

PagerDuty currently has more than 12,000 customers and boasts a churn rate of less than 5 percent on an annualized basis. Its customers include startups, SMBs and major enterprises across industries, including nine of the Fortune 10. 

"Most well known brands in just about every category are leveraging PagerDuty, which in some ways put us in a stronger position than some other software companies in that we don't have significant concentration in a single industry," Tejada said. 

Now, she continued, "more and more of our growth is coming from large enterprise, where trust and reliability, scalability and security are more important."

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