By Jason English
The first time I heard about the emergent PagerDuty a few years ago, I wondered: Is another notification layer between information technology service management or ITSM tickets and IT monitoring alerts even a market? Gartner still doesn’t seem to think so.
But after attending PagerDuty Summit 2019 in San Francisco (below), I admired a crater-sized space in the IT landscape the company is bridging with on-call efficiency. It has dubbed it “digital operations management.”
“It’s hard to replicate what we do,” said PagerDuty Chief Executive Officer Jennifer Tejada (pictured). “We’re neither an IT Ops monitoring solution nor a pure customer experience vendor, so we coined our own term. We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about human behavior, observing how teams learn through incidents and seeking to reduce unplanned work for our customers.”
After an IPO this April, there are newer, shinier technologies going public and capturing stock market attention lately. Never mind that: PagerDuty is still in a growth pattern, announcing a host of new products and features at the summit, adding new enterprise customers to a well-established fanbase of startups and counting more than 700 employees among its ranks.
At the customer appreciation event where it tented off the adjacent Union Square (apparently a thing that can only be done four times a year), one upstanding high-tech industry ops director from Europe told me he had two numbers that could interrupt his phone’s do-not-disturb mode: his wife’s and PagerDuty.
You might think that made PagerDuty an annoyance to him, but quite the contrary. Apparently his on-call interruptions went from several every night to two or three a week, thanks to PagerDuty’s ability to filter and assemble both system and human responses to incoming issues.
This might be the only company whose salesforce can safely ask the question: “What keeps you up at night?”
