In an always-on world, organizations must deliver a perfect digital experience to their customers or risk losing business. To boost digital operations and manage customer experiences, many companies rely on incident-response software provided by vendors like digital ops and incident management provider PagerDuty Inc.

PagerDuty made some early bets on cloud, DevOps and automation after its entrance into the market in 2009. “Right place, right time … some experiential stuff and just some raw luck,” Alex Solomon (pictured), co-founder and chief technology officer of PagerDuty Inc., said about the company’s initial market strategies.

Ten years later, the company went public, and it now works with businesses to provide the perfect digital experience.

Solomon spoke with Jeff Frick, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the recent PagerDuty Summit in San Francisco. They discussed an upgrade to the evolving digital experience market, the company’s upgraded Event Intelligence software, and PagerDuty’s upcoming priorities (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.) Answers have been condensed for clarity.

Q: It used to be, everybody wanted to be the system of record. They wanted to be the single pane of glass. But it turns out, that’s not really the answer. There’s different places for different solutions to add value within the journey, within those other applications.

A: Absolutely. I think the single pane of glass vision is something that a lot of companies have been chasing, but it’s really hard to do. I don’t know where the world’s going to take us … is there going to be one single monitoring tool, or are you going to use four or five different tools? My best guess is we’re going to live in a world where you’re still going to use multiple tools. They’re each going to do something really well. But it’s about the integrations — about really bringing all that data together.

Q: Tell me about the product announcements happening [at the event this week]. What are some things you’re excited to finally get to showcase to the world?

A: One of the big ones is related to our Event Intelligence release. We launched the product last year … and this year, we’re making a big upgrade … where we have related incidents. So, if you’re debugging a problem, and you have an incident that you’re looking at, the question you’re going to ask is, is it just my service or is there a bigger widespread problem happening at the same time? So we’ll show you that very quickly. We’ll show you are there other teams impacted by the same issue? And we actually leverage machine learning to draw those relationships between ongoing incidents.

We’re really strong in terms of integrating with monitoring tools. So any sort of tool that’s monitoring something and will emit an alert when something goes down, or an event when something’s changed, we integrate it. And we have a very wide set of coverage with all of those tools.

Q: As you look forward now from your CTO role, what are some of your priorities over the next year or so that you want to drive this ship?

A: Focusing on making the system smarter … so you can get to that predictive Holy Grail where we can know that you’re going to have a big incident before it impacts your customers. So you can actually prevent it and get ahead of it based on the leading indicators. That’s one area of investment for us.

And the other is more on the real-time work outside of managing software systems. So security, customer support, there’s all of these other use cases where people need to know.… Signals are being generated by machines, people need to know what’s going on with those signals, and you want to be proactive and preventative around it. Think of a factory with lots and lots of sensors; you don’t want to be surprised by something breaking. You want to get proactive about the maintenance of the systems.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the PagerDuty Summit. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the PagerDuty Summit. Neither PagerDuty Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE