The last thing most businesses today need is another disruption. Yet, a recent study has found that information technology outages, downtime and unplanned work are continuing to cost enterprises time and money.

A study of more than 500 IT professionals conducted by Dimensional Research reported that over 81% of respondents attributed urgent and unplanned tasks to keeping their companies from meeting business objectives, while 62% of IT professionals in North America were spending more than 100 hours per year fixing unanticipated issues.

Numbers such as these are one of the reasons why the cloud-based IT monitoring service PagerDuty Inc. has ridden a wave of enterprise interest in using new technologies for keeping system downtime as low as possible, as the company brings its growing ecosystem of customers and partners together September 21 through 24 for the PagerDuty Summit virtual event.

“We like to say we’re at the center of the digital ecosystem,” said Carolyn Guss, vice president of corporate marketing at PagerDuty, who recently spoke with Jeff Frick, host of TheCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media livestreaming studio. “We have 370 integrations, and that’s important because we want anyone to be able to use PagerDuty no matter what is in their technology stack.”

TheCUBE will be broadcasting interviews with PagerDuty executives and key industry leaders during the PagerDuty Summit event. Discussion topics include recent product announcements, PagerDuty’s growing points of integration across major cloud platforms and services, how the firm is expanding its developer ecosystem to support accelerated digital transformation and the role of artificial intelligence and machine learning as part of automated solutions to minimize IT alerts. (* Disclosure below.) 

Here’s the complete video interview with Carolyn Guss:

Leading the way for AIOps

PagerDuty has been at the forefront of what has become known as the artificial intelligence for IT operations, or AIOps market, a multilayer approach that uses analytics and machine learning to analyze big data gathered from network operations tools and devices. The global AIOps market is expected to reach $237 billion by 2025.

In May, PagerDuty announced new intelligence and automation capabilities for its Dynamic Service Directory, Business Response and Intelligent Triage solutions to help prevent outages and improve remote collaboration between teams.

“The level of automation and AI that we’re building into our platform is really going to reduce the number of interruptions that developers get when they are on call,” Guss said. “Technology stacks today are more complex than they’ve ever been before, particularly with businesses having to shift to this digital-first model since we all began shelter in place.”

The global pandemic has placed a more intense spotlight on remote work solutions and the ability to monitor IT operations outside of the data center. This sudden shift in the IT dynamic, precipitated by the sudden closure of many previously staffed business facilities, might be expected to generate an increase in time to resolve issues.

However, Guss offered a couple of interesting data points that captured the current environment from PagerDuty’s perspective.

“We’ve seen a 38% increase in the volume of incidents on our platform since COVID and shelter-in-place began,” Guss noted. “What we’ve also seen is a 20% improvement in the time it takes to resolve an incident, from five minutes down to four. What that means is the PagerDuty community is working really hard.”

Expanding partner ecosystem

PagerDuty recently launched an expanded partner program for system integrators, consultancies and managed service providers as part of the company’s initiative to serve complex needs across a wide number of disciplines. In addition to AIOps, the IT profession has grown to encompass DevOps, CloudOps, industrial ops, customer service and security.

That’s a sizable number of stakeholders, and PagerDuty’s upcoming all-virtual summit offers new opportunities for participants from many disciplines to connect with partners and customers in the expanding PagerDuty ecosystem.

“We learned in the virtual format that we need to be shorter and more precise in our sessions,” Guss said. “That opened up the opportunity to bring in more of our sponsorship partners, and Zendesk, Salesforce and Microsoft are some of the examples. They get to have a piece of both our keynote sessions and our technical product sessions and really explain their partnership with PagerDuty — and also their core technology and the value they provide customers.”

As many companies are discovering, the transition from a live in-person conference to a virtual online event has often resulted in a dramatic increase of interest. When Hewlett Packard Enterprise decided to go online for its annual event, the company hoped for a modest rise in participation from the 10,000 customers and partners who attended last year. HPE’s keynote presentation alone drew 900,000 views.

There are hints that this year’s free PagerDuty Summit may experience the same move forward in global interest.

“We have teams of 20 signing up, and all of them are able to get that experience firsthand,” Guss said. “It’s removing hurdles in terms of the amount and scheduling of the content and the number of people who could attend. There are no geographical boundaries anymore.”

Livestream of PagerDuty Summit 2020

PagerDuty 2020 is a livestream event with additional interviews to be broadcast on theCUBE. You can register for free here to access the live coverage. You can also watch it on demand on theCUBE’s dedicated page and YouTube channel.

How to watch theCUBE interviews

We offer you various ways to watch the live coverage of PagerDuty Summit 2020 digital event, including theCUBE’s dedicated website and YouTube channel. You can also get all the coverage from this year’s events on SiliconANGLE.

TheCUBE Insights podcast

SiliconANGLE also has podcasts available of archived interview sessions, available on iTunes, Stitcher and Spotify, which you can enjoy while on the go.

Guests who will be interviewed on theCUBE during the PagerDuty Summit 2020 digital event

Guests who will be interviewed on theCUBE during the PagerDuty Summit 2020 digital event include Jennifer Tejada, PagerDuty chief executive officer, and Rachel Obstler, vice president of product.

Stay tuned for the complete PagerDuty Summit 2020 digital event guest list.

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the PagerDuty Summit 2020 digital event. Neither PagerDuty, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: PagerDuty Inc.