Having recently returned from an action-packed few weeks of meeting with customers, partners, media, executives, and analysts in the Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) region, I wanted to share a little about my learnings and observations. My tour also included participating and presenting at the last stop in our global roadshow series, PagerDuty Connect, in Sydney, Australia.

We landed in the region and opened the doors of our Asia Pacific headquarters in August 2017 (happy first birthday to the PagerDuty Asia Pacific Team!), and it’s amazing to see the progress the team has made in driving digital service reliability and minimizing disruption across varying geographies.

After spending time with our community in Sydney, I learned that the entrepreneurial nature of DevOps and ITOps leaders in the region was alive and well. I could certainly see firsthand why our partners at Atlassian have recently launched a fantastic initiative with the New South Wales Government to establish a new technology innovation hub in the city. The “Silicon Valley South of the Equator” has a nice ring to it.

As the DevOps approach celebrates its 10th birthday this year, the demand to harness the benefits of human intelligence, event intelligence, and analytics to enhance real-time operations and service delivery looks to be accelerating across Australia, New Zealand, Asia, India, and Japan. (You can read the full press release about PagerDuty’s growth in Asia Pacific and Japan since we opened our regional HQ one year ago here.)

The appetite for technological innovation in Asia Pacific is strong. Regardless of industry— whether in transportation, technology, retail, financial services, or telecommunications—there wasn’t a single organization I met that did not accept and recognize that “always-on” connected consumer preferences have changed. And to align with that change, organizations also have had to change their approach to “agile” development and operations, making service delivery the No. 1 priority.

I picked up a couple fun facts during my time in the region:

• Approximately 60 percent of Asia Pacific’s GDP will be derived from digital products or service by 2021.
• The Asia-Pacific region is home to some of the world’s fastest-growing economies, 60 percent of the world’s population, and, by 2019, 50 percent of the global Internet user base. Asia actually leads in digital innovation, ranking ahead of many other regions including Europe and the Americas.
• The AIOps market compound annual growth rate (CAGR) is expected to increase by a staggering 34 percent in Asia Pacific and Japan over the next few years. This increase is expected to be fueled by growing demand for AI-based services in IT Operations, increasing the shift of organizations’ core businesses toward the cloud, and increasing end-to-end business application assurance and uptime.
• Crunchbase reported that, as of Q2 2018, China-based start-ups raised more venture capital investment than the United States in the same period of time.
• Asia Pacific is now home to over two billion Internet users, equating to an Internet penetration rate of 48 percent. At 93 percent each, Japan and South Korea lead the region in terms of overall Internet penetration.
• CIOs in Asia Pacific report higher adoption of disruptive technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), and conversational interfaces than their global peers. Forty-three percent said they have deployed or are in short-term planning for deployment of IoT technologies (compared to 37 percent globally) and 37 percent for AI (compared to 25 percent globally).

Not only is the digital opportunity immense across Asia Pacific, there is also a phenomenal camaraderie in the DevOps and ITOps practitioner community. There is a strong appetite for learning and sharing success stories as businesses continue to transform digitally, driving competitive advantage and delighting their customers.

From world-class digital natives to established organizations, almost every business I spoke with was prioritizing the transformation of its technology stacks to meet customer expectations. Businesses wanted to do this through increasing speed and agility across their developer and engineering teams. This is why PagerDuty launched our PagerDuty Online Community last year—it allows practitioners to engage with ITOps and DevOps experts from our community of 200,0000+ worldwide users to share best practices, insights, challenges, successes, and supporting documentation.

This community extends the partner and solution provider community supporting Asia Pacific and Japan customers. In April 2018, we launched the PagerDuty Global Reseller Program to broaden the reach of our real-time platform for action and expand on our world-class ecosystem of channel partners. The program is open to resale partners and technology partners intent on driving greater use of the platform to a broad set of organizations looking to migrate operations to the cloud, scale DevOps, and optimize their incident resolution lifecycle. Since our program launch, partners such as Avocado Consulting, CPT Global, Data#3, GLiNTECH, JDS Australia, Mantalus Consulting, Service Dynamics (NZ), SoftwareONE, Vibrato, Assurity Consulting (NZ), NaradaCode (Indonesia), QAssure (Singapore), Digital Stacks (Japan), and JIG-SAW (Japan) joined to support our growing Asia Pacific and Japan communities.

We also recently expanded our worldwide collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) through the launch of PagerDuty on the AWS Marketplace. This enables AWS customers to purchase PagerDuty subscriptions more easily and quickly. And last but certainly not least, our engineering teams have been hard at work making it even easier for our customers to rapidly realize the value of PagerDuty’s platform for action, with more than 300 integrations immediately available to customers.

If you missed any of the customer success journeys highlighted at PagerDuty Connect Sydney, including insights and best-practice commentary from Ladbrokes, ING Direct, CabCharge, Xero, REA Group and Avoka, ITWire captured all the action.

As I flew out of the region and overlooked those growing skylines in Sydney (Sydney now boasts more cranes that NYC!), two ideas came to mind:

• Maybe the crane is the new national bird of Australia and
• PagerDuty’s vision to expand our presence in APJ directly was the right move at the right time.

Lastly, I’m looking forward to connecting again with many of our customer, partner and practitioner community from Asia Pacific and Japan in a few short weeks at PagerDuty Summit on 10-12 September 2018 in San Francisco. Interested? It’s not too late to register—you can check out the full agenda here.