Why I Joined PagerDuty
I recently joined the PagerDuty sales team as the Director of Strategic Accounts. You have to admit the name “PagerDuty” is quite unique as it paints a picture of how quickly technology has evolved over the last two decades. We’ve gone from on-call engineers carrying blocks of plastic to know when to resolve issues, to using advanced event correlation to know there might be downtime before it even occurs. Building upon its history in event orchestration and moving into event intelligence, you get the sense of, “Hey! This company might be onto something big!,” and I believe it is with our strong leadership, killer product and growing market opportunity.
Before joining PagerDuty, I had the fortune of working for a company called Splunk, another funny name. My decade long position there allowed me to have thousands of interactions with amazing people at some of the largest and most innovative companies and partners around the world. Splunk created a disruptive technology that gave operations and engineering teams better visibility into their environments and then morphed into, “The Enterprise Platform for Operational Intelligence.” Based on my experience there, I’ve seen what innovation and disruption feel like. PagerDuty has that feeling too as I interact with our customers, who believe in our product and find it critical to their success when it comes to delivering and maintaining critical digital services for their customers. This leads me to the market opportunity and why we’ll see success in 2017 and beyond.
Today, the new corporate focus is on digital transformation by way of what Gartner calls bimodal IT or others might call two-speed IT. What does this mean? Revenue streams are increasingly dependent on the underlying technologies to work seamlessly, so customers receive the best possible experience while interacting with a product or service. This new digital transformation movement requires teams within companies to maintain or exceed KPI targets as they collapse the traditional operations process into engineering and development at speed to meet customer demand and expectations. This movement provides the right elements to create a perfect digital storm for security breaches and elongated outages due to lack of visibility and reporting.
These days there’s just too much data across services and the underlying infrastructure. Without the full-stack visibility required to mobilize, coordinate, and orchestrate both technical and business response to service disruptions, customers are ultimately let down, which results in churn, lost revenue, and compromised brand equity. In fact, IDC expects the percentage of enterprises moving through advanced digital transformation to double by 2020, and PagerDuty is a key technology for this process; hence my excitement about the product.
With this growing complexity and pressure to compete in the digital economy, I’m excited to work for a company that is investing in the teams and product innovations that support high value partnerships and customer success. Through this value, we are growing fast and strong while having a ton of fun. This is apparent in the industry, having won several awards, including Tech in Motion’s Timmy Award for Best Start in San Francisco, as well as the Forbes Cloud 100 and the 2016 Deloitte Technology Fast 500. Most recently we won TechTarget’s 2017 Modern Infrastructure Award for best DevOps tool by popular vote.
It was such a thrill and honor to work alongside the world class engineering and executive teams at Splunk and then repeat that success at PagerDuty. With over 8,000 customers and 260 employees, I look forward to the opportunity that lies ahead for us in 2017. And the good news is that we are hiring. Come join us; we’ve got a tremendous opportunity to help shape the way people run digital businesses.
