As noted in this blog a couple of weeks ago, IDC interviewed PagerDuty customers to quantify the business value they gain from our platform. It found that, on average, the 14 PagerDuty customers interviewed gained annual benefits of $3.48 million, a three-year ROI of 795%, and a payback period of just over two months.

It was also interesting to hear first-hand what users think of PagerDuty. The customers interviewed are with organizations that have 22,700 employees on average—of whom 1,852 work in IT—and are responsible for over 190 business applications. During these interviews, they revealed the positive impact that PagerDuty has on their business and IT team productivity, their ability to manage incidents, and reducing their operational costs. All customers engaged in this research were interviewed by IDC and were guaranteed anonymity to ensure they would share their unvarnished opinions about their use of PagerDuty.

What did our customers have to say?

“From our perspective, if you have a major incident and you can resolve it in 20 to 30 minutes, or even one hour, you could easily capture the cost of PagerDuty within one incident—from just the opportunity costs alone. If our platform is really busy, and we are out of it for five minutes instead of 30 minutes, that could easily be hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not more.”

“Just a few months ago, I was able to spin up an incident, get everyone on a Zoom call, and start working on the issue with them in about five minutes. We had the issue solved in 20 minutes. That same issue took us at least two hours in the past because of the time it took to determine that we need this person, or we need that person. It was a very slow process.”

“PagerDuty has automated a lot of things for IT teams. Before, when a platform went down, IT used to respond to the call incident and do what was needed to resolve it. Now, when IT gets the incident they have an API with a bunch of rules that can usually self-heal the incident. Then PagerDuty sends them a response in a few minutes and says: ‘Hey, this issue is resolved,’ and it will close the incident automatically.”

“The automation is definitely the biggest benefit. It has cut down a lot of the manual labor significantly, in terms of manual call-outs via phone and page-outs. I think there’s going to be an IT benefit for metrics in terms of capturing user behavior and when they respond to incidents. Things like how fast they respond, if they don’t respond, if they escalate… so just metrics around that will probably lead to new types of reporting for our executive leadership team.”

“The biggest business benefit is customer satisfaction. Before, when something happened, we never knew until the customer said, ‘Hey, why is it that I’m not seeing this data come through? What happened?’ Then we had to look for people to find out what happened, and it used to take a day or so, and when we’d find the issue, we didn’t know which team or who had to resolve that.”

To find out more about the benefits PagerDuty customers realize from their use of PagerDuty for digital operations management, including further first-hand anecdotes of their experiences using our platform, download the IDC Business Value White Paper, sponsored by PagerDuty, PagerDuty Helps Organizations Optimize Their Digital Operations Management, here.