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.

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Today AppDynamics announced integration with PagerDuty, a SaaS-based provider of IT alerting and incident management software that is changing the way IT teams are notified, and how they manage incidents in their mission-critical applications.  By combining AppDynamics’ granular visibility of applications with PagerDuty’s reliable alerting capabilities, customers can make sure the right people are proactively notified when business impact occurs, so IT teams can get their apps back up and running as quickly as possible.

You’ll need a PagerDuty and AppDynamics license to get started – if you don’t already have one, you can sign up for free trials of PagerDuty and AppDynamics online.  Once you complete this simple installation, you’ll start receiving incidents in PagerDuty created by AppDynamics out-of-the-box policies.

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It’s been about 12 years since I last scripted in PHP. I pretty much paid my way through college building PHP websites for small companies that wanted a web presence. Back then PHP was the perfect choice, because nearly all the internet service providers had PHP support for free if you registered domain names with them. Java and .NET wasn’t an option for a poor smelly student like me, so I just wrote standard HTML with embedded scriplets of PHP code and bingo–I had dynamic web pages.

Today, 244 million websites run on PHP which is almost 75% of the web. That’s a pretty scary statistic. If only I’d kept coding PHP back when I was 21, I’d be a billionaire by now! PHP is a pretty good example of how open-source technology can go viral and infect millions of developers and organizations world-wide.

Read the Full Post…

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Since we launched our Managed Service Provider program late last year, we’ve signed up many MSPs that were interested in adding Application Performance Management-as-a-Service (APMaaS) to their service catalogs.  Wouldn’t you be excited to add a service that’s easy to manage but more importantly easy to sell to your existing customer base?

Service providers like Scicom definitely were (check out the case study), because they are being held responsible for the performance of their customer’s complex, distributed applications, but oftentimes don’t have visibility inside the actual application.  That’s like being asked to officiate an NFL game with your eyes closed.

The sad truth is that many MSPs still think that high visibility in app environments equates to high configuration, high cost, and high overhead.

Thankfully this is 2013.  People send emails instead of snail mail, play Call of Duty instead of Pac-Man, listen to Pandora instead of cassettes, and can have high visibility in app environments with low configuration, low cost, and low overhead with AppDynamics.

Not only do we have a great APM service to help MSPs increase their Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR), we make it extremely easy for them to deploy this service in their own environments, which, to be candid, is half the battle.  MSPs can’t spend countless hours deploying a new service.  It takes focus and attention away from their core business, which in turn could endanger the SLAs they have with their customers.  Plus, it’s just really annoying.

Introducing: APMaaS in a Box

Here at AppDynamics, we take pride in delivering value quickly.  Most of our customers go from nothing to full-fledged production performance monitoring across their entire environment in a matter of hours in both on-premise and SaaS deployments.  MSPs are now leveraging that same rapid SaaS deployment model in their own environments with something that we like to call ‘APMaaS in a Box’.

At a high level, APMaaS in a Box is large cardboard box with air holes and a fragile sticker wherein we pack a support engineer, a few management servers, an instruction manual, and a return label…just kidding…sorry, couldn’t resist.

Simply put, APMaaS in a Box is a set of files and scripts that allows MSPs to provision multi-tenant controllers in their own data center or private cloud and provision AppDynamics licenses for customers themselves…basically it’s the ultimate turnkey APMaaS.

By utilizing AppDynamics’ APMaaS in a Box, MSPs across the world are leveraging our quick deployment, self-service license provisioning, and flexibility in the way we do business to differentiate themselves and gain net new revenue.

Quick Deployment

Within 6 hours, MSPs like NTT Europe who use our APMaaS in a Box capabilities will have all the pieces they need in place to start monitoring the performance of their customer’s apps.  Now that’s some rapid time to value!

Self-Service License Provisioning

MSPs can provision licenses directly through the AppDynamics partner portal.  This gives you complete control over who gets licenses and makes it very easy to manage this process across your customer base.

Flexibility

A MSP can get started on a month-to-month basis with no commitment.  Only paying for what you sell eliminates the cost of shelfware.  MSPs can also sell AppDynamics however they would like to position it and can float licenses across customers.  NTT Europe uses a 3-tier service offering so customers can pick and choose the APM services they’d like to pay for.  Feel free to get creative when packaging this service for customers!

Conclusion

As more and more MSPs move up the stack from infrastructure management to monitoring the performance of their customer’s distributed applications, choosing an APM partner that understands the Managed Services business is of utmost importance.  AppDynamics’ APMaaS in a box capabilities align well with internal MSP infrastructures, and our pricing model aligns with the business needs of Managed Service Providers – we’re a perfect fit.

MSPs who continue to evolve their service offerings to keep pace with customer demands will be well positioned to reap the benefits and future revenue that comes along with staying ahead of the market.  To paraphrase The Great One, MSPs need to “skate where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.”  I encourage all you MSPs out there to contact us today to see how we can help you skate ahead of the curve and take advantage of the growing APM market with our easy to use, easy to deploy APMaaS in a Box.  If you don’t, your competition will…

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