Sydney set the stage for a spectacular event, PagerDuty On Tour 2025.
On 2 April, technology leaders, customers, and partners from Australia and New Zealand came together for a day filled with insight, real-world learning, vibrant energy, and plenty of memorable moments.

With over 300 participants throughout the day, the atmosphere at the venue reflected what modern operations demand: speed, resilience, and human connection.

PagerDuty — trusted by 31,000+ free and paid customers globally, including nearly half of the Fortune 500 — is proud to be helping enterprises transform how they operate, lead, and innovate.

The morning: Hands-on learning and strategic dialogues

The day kicked off with action from the start.

Hands-on workshops:
Two deep-dive labs — Security & ITOps and SRE/DevOps/DevSecOps — brought packed rooms and high energy as participants rolled up their sleeves to tackle real-world operational challenges. Over 180 attendees squeezed into the SRE track alone, a testament to the demand for hands-on, practical learning. These workshops weren’t about theory — they were about building tangible skills in automation, runbook orchestration, event-driven workflows, and noise reduction, all powered by PagerDuty Operations Cloud.

Executive Roundtable Brunch and Partner Breakfast: Real conversations on resilience

While the workshops were in full swing, a select group of executives gathered for an exclusive, closed-door Executive Roundtable, while partners joined a separate Partner Breakfast.

The Executive Roundtable discussion began by touching on key topics from the “Ahead of the Curve” white paper, which PagerDuty co-sponsored with the AFR.
But very quickly, the conversation became fluid, passionate, and honest, moving beyond frameworks into the practical realities leaders are grappling with today.

While we will not reveal specific topics out of respect for the room, some strong themes stood out:

• Resilience has now firmly taken its place in the boardroom. What was once viewed as an IT issue is now recognised as a critical leadership and reputational priority, with directors and executives directly accountable, particularly under new regulations such as APRA’s CPS230 in Financial Services.
• Leaders agreed that real-world impact matters more than rigid severity labels; prioritisation must be driven by business context, not technical definitions.
• Credibility, once lost, is hard to rebuild, and reducing noise and false alarms through smarter alerting is now essential for maintaining trust within teams.
• Customer stories, not technical metrics, are proving to be the most powerful tools for building internal urgency and securing investment.
• Automation was a significant focus: manual recovery is simply too slow in today’s environment. Communication is also becoming a differentiator, with the growing need for clear, audience-specific summaries tailored to executives, engineers, and frontline teams.
• Resilience culture itself is evolving, with scenario testing and simulations expanding beyond IT into the wider business.
• And looking ahead, there was intense excitement around how AI and agentic tooling could be practically co-designed to assist teams during and after incidents, not as futuristic concepts, but as real, operational supports.

It was one of the most energetic and honest conversations of the day — a clear reminder that resilience today is about leadership, trust, and readiness, not just systems and processes.

Due to the overwhelmingly positive feedback, we will be hosting a follow-up Executive Roundtable later this year to revisit the key themes from this discussion — to see what’s changed, what progress has been made, explore new challenges that have emerged, and continue growing as a connected leadership group focused on resilience and operational excellence.

In parallel with the Executive Roundtable, we hosted a Partner Breakfast to connect with a few of our key regional partners. It provided a valuable opportunity for more personal conversations on go-to-market alignment, regional trends, and how we can continue to strengthen collaboration in the ANZ region.

The main event: Vision, execution, and customer excellence

A fireside chat with PEXA and Car Group: Building operational resilience from the top

PagerDuty CMO Katherine Calvert opened the main event with an extraordinary fireside conversation, bringing together two of Australia’s leading technology executives:

• Eglantine Etiemble, Group CTO at PEXA,

• Jason Blackman, CIO at Car Group​.

Together, they unpacked what operational resilience truly entails at the boardroom table — and why it has become a strategic priority, not just an IT goal.

PEXA, responsible for over 90% of Australia’s property transactions, shared how maintaining nearly 100% platform availability is critical not only to their customers but to national financial stability.
With PagerDuty AIOps, PEXA has dramatically reduced Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR) from 36 to 13 minutes, cut incident noise by 45%, and improved team health by eliminating overnight disruptions — all while saving the ecosystem over $290 million AUD in annual productivity gains.

Meanwhile, Car Group, which operates marketplaces and SaaS platforms across ANZ and the Americas, shared how it re-architected its operations to avoid single points of failure globally, prioritising localised deployments to safeguard user experience, and driving a cultural transformation where developers and product owners fully own operational resilience.
Jason Blackman also spoke to how customer-centric incident prioritisation — focusing on peak user impact, not just technical severity — is critical to building trust at scale.

Throughout the session, a core theme emerged:
Operational resilience today is boardroom business — an enabler of growth, trust, and brand strength.

This was not a technical session — it was a masterclass in what it takes to lead operational excellence in 2025 and beyond.

Product keynote:
Chief Product Development Officer Jeff Hausman and SVP Product Development David Williams outlined how PagerDuty is redefining the future​:

• Agentic AI vision: Empowering autonomous AI agents to resolve multi-step, cross-tool incidents.

• Embedded Incident Management: Now fully integrated into Microsoft Teams and Slack.

• Security innovation: New automation workflows and expanded observability partnerships with leaders like Arize.

The future isn’t incremental change — it’s a complete operational transformation.

Customer stories: Transformation in action

Throughout the afternoon, leaders from across industries shared their hard-earned lessons from the frontlines of operational resilience:

• Elzanne van der Westhuizen from Coles revealed how they reduced false-positive incident noise by 85%, freeing their engineering teams to focus on innovation.

• Niall McCarthy from Block (Afterpay, Cash App) discussed scaling global incident management frameworks to support seamless customer experiences and the power of a common language in communicating between technical and business stakeholders. Accenture’s Francesco Sbaraglia outlined how modern SRE practices and chaos engineering principles are changing resilience strategies for global enterprises​.

• One NZ’s Chris Gadd shared how automation is transforming service operations, reducing toil, and increasing operational agility. A standout example was their ability to reduce the time to detect and block spam SMS from 30 minutes to under one minute — a significant operational impact, as millions of spam messages could otherwise be sent within that timeframe.​

These weren’t high-level case studies — these were real playbooks, forged through experience and designed for action.

Beyond the sessions: Building resilient communities

At PagerDuty, operational excellence should be taken seriously, but the experience should be joyful.

Across the venue, attendees enjoyed:

• A vibrant Activation Zone, complete with a donut wall, fresh popcorn, a yoghurt bar, tech booths, and even a claw machine packed with prizes

• The Incident Commander game, where attendees tested their ability to lead through simulated chaos

• PagerDuty University signups, extending learning, and getting certified beyond the event

Fun prizes and challenges kept the energy high all day.

Celebrity host: Mentalist Phoenix

Guiding the day’s pace and energy, we were thrilled to have Mentalist Phoenix as our celebrity host.

Phoenix brought magic — literally — with mentalist sessions during networking breaks and between talks, keeping the audience buzzing with energy and amazement.

A closing reminder of grit: Ariarne Titmus

As a final moment of inspiration, Olympic champion Ariarne Titmus took the stage​.
Her story — of perseverance, strategic focus, and overcoming unseen challenges — reflected exactly what operational excellence demands:
Resilience isn’t reactive. It’s built through years of unseen work.

Exclusive evening: Executive dinner at Theatre Royale, Hubert’s

The day culminated in a private Executive Dinner at the stunning Theatre Royale at Hubert’s, an exclusive evening designed to deepen connections in a relaxed, vibrant setting.

The highlight of the evening was Australian Olympic gold medallist Steven Bradbury, who shared stories of resilience, luck, and preparation meeting opportunities — a fitting mirror to the day’s core theme.

Guests enjoyed spirited discussions, card games, and plenty of laughter throughout the night.

At the end of the evening, winnings from the games — a total of $2,000 — were donated to Mission Australia, a reminder that leadership isn’t just about performance, it’s also about community, impact, and giving back.

It wasn’t simply a dinner.
It was a celebration of community, resilience, and giving back.

PagerDuty On Tour Sydney 2025: Building Resilient Leaders for Tomorrow

Attendees left not just with new knowledge, but a renewed drive to transform.

They walked away:

• Knowing: PagerDuty is the trusted partner for building modern, AI-powered operations.

• Feeling: Empowered, connected, and inspired.

• Ready to: Lead change, build resilience, and seize new opportunities in their organisations.

Thank You, Sydney

To everyone who made PagerDuty On Tour Sydney 2025 a success, thank you.
Your passion, energy, and ambition fuel what’s next.

Together, we’re not just managing incidents. We’re building the future of operational resilience.

We’re already looking ahead to next year, with plans for even more advanced workshops, an even stronger speaker lineup, and new ways to push the boundaries of what’s possible.
Keep an eye out for our Expression of Interest emails — we’d love to see even more of our community involved in shaping what comes next.

The journey is just beginning — and we’re excited to keep building it together.