No one has patience for downtime anymore, meaning problems need to be anticipated and fixed before they happen. This takes constant vigilance — a job that incident-response company PagerDuty takes seriously.

“What many people know PagerDuty for is what we always refer to as people orchestration,” said Jonathan Rende (pictured), senior vice president of product and marketing at PagerDuty Inc. “It is automation, but it’s automating the identification of issues and then engaging responders, these frontline workers on the right issues at the right time to make the right decisions with the right information.”

Rende spoke with Lisa Martin, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during PagerDuty Summit 2020. They discussed announcements and news from the event. (* Disclosure below.)

PagerDuty acquires Rundeck in ‘perfect match’

Automation is key; but automation without the aid of smart technology can only go so far. This is why the focus of PagerDuty Summit 2020 was the application of artificial intelligence to information-technology operations, simply known as AIOps. Other announcements came around collaboration with communication platforms Zoom Inc. and Microsoft Teams, along with a new product aimed at mobilizing rapid response across both operations and customer service — PagerDuty for Customer Service.

By far the biggest news coming out of PagerDuty Summit 2020 was the purchase of Rundeck Inc. Marking the company’s first major acquisition, Rundeck is “an extension to PagerDuty in multiple ways“ Rende said. “It’s an extension of value. There’s no overlap anyway.”

Adding machine automation and scalability to PagerDuty’s people orchestration solution is a move toward complete automation of the incident response lifecycle.

“Take people orchestration and automation, add machine automation, [and] the ability to bring down and bring back up a service as a part of a Rundeck set of steps or jobs. Having that together in one solution really does automate all of the incident response,” Rende explained.

Both PagerDuty and Rundeck are “seeped in DevOps and digital transformation,” according to Martin, and the synchronicity goes beyond supporting and extending each other’s use cases. The companies are also both committed to open source, with thriving communities.

“[Rundeck is] an open-source product with an enterprise product on top,” Rende said. “It’s a open-source community of 60,000 DevOps professionals that we’re bringing together with the PagerDuty community.”

With such synergy between them, it’s not surprising that PagerDuty and Rundeck also mirror each other’s philosophy of empowering self service. “That notion of ubiquitous use, self service, empowerment, that’s very consistent in Rundeck’s culture and their customers as it is with PagerDuty and our customers and our culture,” Rende said.

It seems that everything is aligned to support the acquisition, with positive feedback coming from customers and community on both sides.

“People just see the natural synergy in it,” Rende said. “You don’t have to spend a lot of time explaining why machine automation and runbook automation is such a natural hand-in-glove fit with PagerDuty and what we do today. And I think that’s a huge validation.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of PagerDuty Summit 2020. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for PagerDuty Summit 2020. Neither PagerDuty Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE