Welcome, let’s start with a quick introduction of who you are and what your role is at PagerDuty.
My name is Alex, I’m PagerDuty’s CEO and co-founder.

And what beer will you be drinking tonight?
Guinness! It’s the office favorite.

What problems does your solution or service solve for customers?
PagerDuty provides centralized, highly-targeted alerting, escalation, and incident management.  We integrate with the monitoring systems you have in place to provide a single place to manage all of your alerting.  When things go down, we wake you up.

What types of technology trends are you seeing within your customer base?
We have a great mix of customers, from large enterprises (we have 15 of the Fortune 100 as customers), to mid-size companies like Splunk, Citrix, and Box, to two-person startups, which gives us an interesting perspective.  The most obvious trend that we’re seeing is companies looking to automate the notification piece of ‘monitoring and alerting’ right off the bat.  With IaaS providers like Rackspace and AWS, the need to do a costly NOC build-out has been almost entirely eliminated.  Folks who do have a NOC in place are looking to automate what they can, while allowing on-site engineers to tackle the problems they’re best equipped to solve.

What application performance pain and challenges do you typically see within customer accounts?
All our customers have mission-critical infrastructure in place, and for many of them, slow applications directly equate to lost revenue.  When company performance depends on applications being available and responsive, having an APM solution deployed isn’t a luxury, it’s a necessity.

Why does partnering with AppDynamics make good sense?
AppDynamics is the enterprise APM solution, and PagerDuty is the enterprise alerting solution.  There couldn’t be a more natural fit – when AppDynamics detects an issue, PagerDuty wakes you up.

What’s your favorite thing about AppDynamics?
The ROI! We’re big believers in actively monitoring revenue-critical production applications. Anything you can deploy and see a 2x, 4x, 10x return, quickly, that’s pretty great in my book.

How can someone find out more about PagerDuty?
Just signup for a free trial at pagerduty.com.  Or just shoot us an email at sales@pagerduty.com and a member of our sales staff will reach out to setup a demo.

Which software companies inspire you?
B2B companies that make something people want and that solves a clear need.  We like companies that can tackle hair on fire problems.  AppDynamics, obviously, and Splunk come to mind.

Who is your favorite super hero and why?
Spiderman.  He’s powerful yet flawed – a real human super hero.

Alert Storming, Alerts, App Man, application monitoring, Application Performance, Application Performance Management, Application Performance Monitoring, Appman, Appman Beers, Beers, Guinness, incident management, pagerduty, startups, technology trends

Welcome Mike, let’s start with a quick introduction of who you are and what your role is at Apica?
I’m Mike Howse, VP International Business at Apica and I’m responsible for the Apica/AppDynamics relationship.

And what beer will you be drinking tonight?
Guinness. It reaches the parts I care about.

What problems does your solution or service solve for customers?
Apica helps customers optimize performance and identify bottlenecks by providing a whole range of testing and performance solutions and services. We offer scalability testing, stability testing, and spike load testing as well as regular performance testing and synthetic monitoring. We also provide performance consulting specifically around moving applications to the cloud.

What types of technology trends are you seeing within your customer base?
We’ve noticed a lot of increased complexity in our customers’ applications. There has been a lot of adoption of more complex and modern application architectures – SOA, virtualization, cloud, all of that. There are still customers that make do with older architectures but they know they need to be migrating. And the result of this is that operations staffs are overwhelmed with problems, and there’s a perceived lack of affordable tools available to solve them.

So there’s a lot of change and added complexity but there’s also a lot of anxiety about that change. People moving to the cloud are worried about scalability and 24×7 performance. A lot of people think they can solve these problems by focusing on the network instead of what they should be focusing on, which is the business transaction.

What application performance pain and challenges do you typically see within customer accounts?
Well, a lot of ops teams are under a lot of pressure to launch apps quickly, which sometimes leads to cutting corners in testing. A lot of organizations only test once – if functional testing has been done in development, chances are that no scalability or stability testing has been done in production, which isn’t good.

We also hear more and more about the impact of poor performance. Today when a website is down the news spreads like wildfire, and that tarnishes your brand. Within your organization you get dev and ops playing the blame game instead of collaborating to solve the problem. It’s not a very effective way to handle performance.

Also we hear a lot of people talking about creep within application specifications without any understanding of performance implications. Creep always happens, but adding requirements without any context for how they will affect performance can be dangerous.

Why does partnering with AppDynamics make good sense for Apica?
AppDynamics’ integration with Apica LoadTest and Apica WebPerformance enables a complete view from the end user perspective as well as from the ‘inside’ – right down to code level. This dramatically speeds up the process of isolating the root cause of problems both in production and in development. With AppDynamics, the Apica WebExcellence suite of services is now a complete application performance management package, with performance testing – scalability/stability/spike – synthetic monitoring 24×7, real-user monitoring, inside monitoring for vital signs analysis and deep-dive code level analysis from AppDynamics.

What’s your favorite thing about AppDynamics?
I’d say it’s just the simplicity. AppDynamics makes it easy to find answers to complex problems.

How can someone find out more about Apica?
You can learn more about Apica’s products on our website. If you want to know more about Apica’s partnership and integration with AppDynamics, check out our partners page.

Which software companies inspire you?
I know everyone says it, but I’ll have to go with Apple.

Who is your favorite super hero and why?
Superman, of course. It’s in the name

Apica, Appman, Appman Beers

Hey Santa Claus, what’s happening man?

Well, it’s that time of year again where unfortunately I have to work. Gift orders are up 50% and my elves are working their socks off right now stocking my warehouses for the big day. I honestly don’t know how I would have coped without my new ElfOps team–they’ve been elastic and fantastic thanks to our new AWS hosted applications. The bad news is that my applications have processed record orders in 2011 so I’ll have to work harder. Frankly, this sucks.

Come again? Santa is using the cloud?

Isn’t everyone these days? I mean what else can I possibly do when my orders and subscriptions double each year? If Santa can’t scale, I spend my vacation reading angry letters from parents about how I made their kids cry and upset on Christmas Day. Forget that. I’d rather sit on a beach in Hawaii drinking Mojito’s catching a nice tan. In fact, I should be able to upgrade myself to the Four Seasons in Hawaii in 2012 due to the money I’ve saved by migrating to the cloud. You simply wouldn’t believe how much my own data center was costing me, not to mention those expensive IT Elf consultants I had to bring in. I’m now a lean mean parcel delivering machine and it’s all thanks to the cloud.

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Amazon EC2, apm, App Man, appdynamics, Application Performance, Big Data, CA Wily, cloud, Hadoop, Order Fallout, Santa

Welcome Cassandra, let’s start with a quick introduction of who you are and what you can do.
I am a high-performance distributed scalable database.  I am really good at doing lots of operations and growing as your data needs increase, and to top that all off I run on commodity hardware which means I’m really great for running on the cloud.

Awesome, oh by the way, what beer are you drinking tonight?
Tonight I’m drinking a Shiner from good old Texas.

Excellent.  First, I heard it on the grapevine and you did tell me that you’re highly available.  Can you confirm or deny these rumors, and what does that really mean?
Highly available means that a distributed system can lose one or more of its servers and still keep the cluster as a whole up and running.  In other words, because I’m designed to run on commodity hardware, failure should be expected.  In my scenario, I can lose a server and keep on chugging along without the cluster going down.

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Apache Cassandra, appdynamics, Big Data, Cassandra, Cassandra JMX, Cassandra Monitoring, DataStax, NoSQL