Today is a great day for PagerDuty customers, practitioners, partners, and employees as we’ve entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Rundeck, a Californian start-up that’s a leader and  innovator in DevOps automation. 

Before I get into the technicalities of what our solutions can do together, let me first set the scene on why we decided to do this, now.

Digital is the world’s operating system

In the last six months, the whole world has fundamentally shifted to digital as the default operating model. Even before the pandemic, 92% of companies said they needed to transform their business models to digital. Now we live, learn, and work primarily online. In the last three months alone, we’ve seen more e-commerce than we did in the last 10 years with most of our shopping, food delivery and entertainment happening virtually. Our customer and partner Zoom saw more than a 450% user increase this year as the world Zoomed into work and school.

Time is illusive

With the whole world online, all the time, time is incredibly fleeting and valuable. The cost of a minute of imperfection is higher than ever, which means digital services and the teams that run them are essential to business success Ops teams have transitioned from a supporting role to playing a leading role on the digital frontline, and they’re working an extra 10-15 hours a week, making personal sacrifices to make sure everything works. 

This fundamental shift in how we live has brought about a more chaotic and spontaneous way of working – unpredictable, emergent and mission critical. The future of work is real-time and customers expect a perfect experience. If a minute of failure cost you $100,000 last year, this year it will cost you half a million dollars. 

And the degree of difficulty and complexity has taken off too. As the whole world logged on in March, incidents increased nearly 40%.  This is where our acquisition of Rundeck comes in.

Rundeck and PagerDuty break new ground

Rundeck has more than 150 enterprise and mid-market customers worldwide and an active open source community of more than 60,000 users. Like PagerDuty, Rundeck is relied upon by frontline incident response teams, including engineering, IT, customer service and security. It empowers users with a self-service method to run automated machine-centric workflows – or runbooks – that prevent, diagnose, and resolve incidents at the push of a button. No matter their level of expertise, a responder can use Rundeck to resolve incidents fast without having to escalate.

In bringing Rundeck and  PagerDuty together, we’ve created something truly powerful, and industry leading that will make life better for our customers. We can now automate that unpredictable, emergent work for people AND machines, from prevention and diagnosis, through mobilizing and orchestrating teams, to recovery, remediation and learning: the entire incident response lifecycle.

Ultimately, for our customers, this means they can resolve faster, reduce costs and protect customer experience. They get back precious time to focus on innovation.

Thank you

To our 13,300 customers around the world, thank you for trusting us with your most important work. Thank you to your digital frontline teams that put faith in us every moment of the day to help keep services running. We know how difficult times are and we challenge ourselves every day to make sure we are delivering the most robust real-time incident response platform to the market.

This week, in addition to our new partnership with Rundeck, we are unveiling awesome platform updates at our annual conference, Summit20. We’re expecting more than 10,000 attendees across three days, and it’s not too late to register or download our sessions on-demand.

We hope you will join us.

Jennifer Tejada

CEO, PagerDuty