Recording in progress.
PagerDuty's Chairperson and Chief Executive Officer, and Howard Wilson, our Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, let me remind everyone that statements made on this call include forward-looking statements which involve known and unknown risks or uncertainties that may cause our actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from those expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements.
These forward-looking statements include our growth prospects and future revenue, among others, and represent our management's beliefs and assumptions only as of the date such statements are made, and we undertake no obligation to update these. During today's call, we will discuss non-GAAP financial measures, which are in addition to and not a substitute for or superior to measures of financial performance prepared in accordance with GAAP. There are a number of limitations related to the use of these non-GAAP financial measures versus their closest GAAP equivalents.
For example, other companies may calculate non-GAAP financial measures differently or may use other measures to evaluate their performance, all of which could reduce the usefulness of our non-GAAP financial measures as a tool for comparison. A reconciliation between GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures is available in our earnings release. Further information on these and other factors that could affect the company's financial results are included in filings we made with the Securities and Exchange Commission. With that, I'll turn the call over to Jennifer.
Thank you, Christine, and thanks, everyone, for joining us today. Q3 was an outstanding quarter for PagerDuty, delivering record revenue of $72 million, growing 33% year-over-year with continued momentum, especially in enterprise end markets. Dollar-based net retention remained above 120% for the fourth consecutive quarter. Our product, sales, and marketing teams delivered an outstanding quarter across the board, and I'm especially appreciative to our customers who continue to demonstrate their trust and loyalty in PagerDuty by expanding their relationships with us.
During the quarter, we increased our surface area across customers' digital operations and demonstrated the value of PagerDuty as the Operations Cloud for the modern enterprise. Importantly, we drove strong performance across all product lines, including incident response, AIOps, automation, and saw landmark success with our Customer Service Operations offering.
PagerDuty Operations Cloud empowers enterprises to deliver superior customer experiences by providing intelligent incident response and operational automation that increase uptime, reduce costs, and improves customer satisfaction. As customers expand their use of PagerDuty beyond DevOps, the platform tackles workflows across the enterprise and for multiple personas, technical, executive, back office or front office, wherever critical, unstructured work arises. This enables leaders to keep their teams focused on forward-looking innovation that drives end customer trust and ultimately revenue and growth.
We innovate successfully across use cases and departments, and as we do that, PagerDuty grows from the foundation of digital infrastructure to enterprise-wide Operations Cloud, a company's primary platform for engagement. Our platform is seamless to deploy and purpose-built to manage the increasingly complex environments and time-critical challenges underpinning the digital economy. In Q3, we continued to grow both our foundational presence in DevOps and IT and our functional use cases horizontally and vertically up to executive leadership.
We successfully executed against the $36 billion total addressable market within our customer base and have created multiple engines for durable growth as well as deepened our competitive moat. Increasingly effective execution of our land and expand motion against strong demand from enterprise and mid-market, as well as a favorable competitive environment, saw third quarter financial results exceed the high end of our guidance ranges and consensus, with revenue for the quarter at a PagerDuty record $72 million and our non-GAAP operating margin improving by 400 basis points over last year, also ahead of guidance and consensus.
In addition, new customers in the enterprise and mid-market segments grew 13% year-over-year during the quarter, and the number of customers spending more than $100,000 in ARR with PagerDuty grew 35% year-over-year. With the backdrop of favorable macro conditions, including digital acceleration, the talent shortage requiring increased productivity, increasing cyber threats, and ongoing cloud migration trends, we are confident this momentum will continue and are therefore raising our top and bottom line guidance for the full year.
Companies across all industries continue to adopt a digital-first outlook and invest to progress their digital operations, with the software, retail, and financial services verticals driving PagerDuty's growth in Q3. Broad industry traction, almost immediate time to value, clear monetization of new products, and renewal rates above 95% form the foundation of our durable revenue growth as we scale. More than 19,000 free and paid customers, both the largest companies and the most disruptive startups in the world, now run on PagerDuty.
The introduction of our free tier last year removed barriers to entry for startups and small businesses, while enabling our go-to-market team to focus on high-value mid-market and enterprise customers. According to research for our recent survey of global technology industry leaders, 72% indicate they're accelerating digital transformation in their organization. PagerDuty helps customers address the challenges of digital acceleration by operationalizing customer trust. In Q3 alone, two Fortune 200 companies turned to PagerDuty.
A consumer financial services company that deployed our platform to drive standardization, and a public utility that introduced PagerDuty to leverage automation for a better customer experience. These clients predict ROI between 400% and 650% within three years, with payback periods as short as three months. In addition, a multi-billion dollar automotive technology company now relies on PagerDuty to unify its incident management practices.
Time to value is a competitive advantage for PagerDuty as the platform can be deployed within minutes due to ease of use and native interoperability with today's complex systems. Through first class APIs, it connects to services across an enterprise's ecosystem immediately, providing visibility, workflows, insights, and automation that translate to value in days and weeks rather than years. With more than 625 pre-built platform integrations, PagerDuty quickly becomes embedded in and automates our customers' operational systems, workflows, software telemetry, and culture.
No other platform is more reliable, secure, and resilient at scale than PagerDuty. Enterprises trust PagerDuty because we continually demonstrate increasing value and reliability, delivering rapid ROI and earning the confidence of senior leaders. Developers choose PagerDuty because of our relentless focus on not only their organization's goals, but also the user experience that improves their quality of work and life. Over time, these have proven to be deep, sustainable competitive moats for us.
PagerDuty has powered digital-first businesses for over a decade, freeing teams up to focus on innovating for their customers by accelerating and transforming their digital operations from reactive to proactive and preventative. By applying AI to harness both a deep understanding of human workflows and our rich proprietary data set combined with automation and Event Intelligence, PagerDuty reduces both the volume of work and the time it takes to complete tasks.
This quarter, we saw new customers, such as Burberry, launch PagerDuty to reduce response times to customer issues and improve the consumer experience. In a digital-first economy, the way we work has changed permanently. Now mission-critical work is managed by teams distributed across geographies and time zones, underserved by traditional ticketing workflows. PagerDuty uses machine learning to anticipate the needs of our customers and identify, escalate, automate, and resolve critical issues for these businesses before customers, employees, or the business's reputation are impacted.
This quarter, a Fortune 50 global technology company expanded their relationship with PagerDuty, adopting our Customer Service Operations offering in an effort to continually improve the quality of their customer service and experience. Previously, the customer was unable to manage code red incidents effectively, leading to customer escalations that reached its senior executives. Customer service leadership at the company chose PagerDuty to help them improve service levels for premium customers.
Our pace of innovation continues to accelerate, with product teams launching new PagerDuty applications for Salesforce Service Cloud and Datadog in the quarter. We kicked off Q4 with our fall product launch, which extends our platform to include intelligent automation, injecting control and logic at the event layer. PagerDuty's new Event Orchestration differentiates our AIOps offering, reducing manual processes to gain operational efficiencies. While our just-launched Service Standards enables account owners to enforce best practices at scale for all of their managed services.
PagerDuty Automation is currently being deployed in a customer's environment and is also now available as a cloud service, providing the high availability, security, and scalability our customers expect from us. We now provide the only cloud-native platform that combines real-time incident response with time-critical AIOps insights and automation to help enterprises more quickly realize their digital first strategies. Typically, our customer cohorts follow an adoption pattern that maps to the digital operations maturity curve.
Most organizations start by manually and reactively managing issues as they arise. The most mature companies predict and prevent issues before they even impact customers or the bottom line. Most PagerDuty customers are still early on this curve, providing a long runway for growth within our existing customer base. Our platform accelerates the speed with which enterprises evolve their digital operations, and as customers move up the curve from manual to reactive towards proactive and preventative, both their annual investment with PagerDuty and their ROI expand.
As our product expands virtually across use cases, PagerDuty emerges as the operations cloud and a standard platform for engagement across the enterprise. Guidewire, a nearly $10 billion technology platform that serves the property and casualty insurance industry, has been a PagerDuty customer since 2013. In Q3, Guidewire expanded their use of Event Intelligence and deployed our Customer Service Operations applications for Salesforce Service Cloud to support ongoing cloud migration efforts and to streamline operations in order to meet rising customer expectations.
Guidewire's customer and cloud operations organization needed a comprehensive and reliable system to manage their increasingly complex digital operations. PagerDuty is their central partner to detect and resolve issues before their customers experience them. Today, 17 teams at Guidewire, including the senior executive team, use PagerDuty to centralize and integrate all of their monitoring tools, increase cross-team collaboration for time-sensitive incidents, and automate action on mission-critical items. This is a typical customer journey across our installed base.
Initial deployments rapidly demonstrate value, leading to expanded PagerDuty use across multiple teams within the organization. Last week, we released PagerDuty's second annual Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity Report. Our company's commitment to equity remains unwavering as it's foundational to our values, part of our mission and culture, and embedded in our business strategy. We are more innovative, higher performing, and more successful when we reflect the diverse communities we serve.
The report is a transparent account of our progress in building an equitable, diverse, and inclusive board, company, and culture, which we share both to hold ourselves to high standards and to hopefully inspire other companies in their own ID&E journeys. While I'm proud of some of the milestones we have achieved, like gender pay equity and one of the most diverse boards in the industry, we have more work to do and remain committed to leading the industry by example. Finally, PagerDuty is poised for a record revenue result in FY 2022, with annual growth accelerating a $36 billion TAM and a strong demand environment in front of us.
We have an incredible team, terrific partners, and customers we admire. While our results speak for themselves, I wanted to reiterate our vision, the mission we are on, and our purpose, which inspire our innovation and our drive to ensure our customer success over the long term. We envision an equitable world where we transform critical work so all teams can delight their customers and build trust. We're on a mission to revolutionize operations and build customer trust by anticipating the unexpected in an unpredictable world.
Importantly, our greater purpose is to empower teams with the time and efficiency to build the future. Trust is central in all of this, something we seek to earn every day. I want to thank our customers, our Dutonians, our partners, and shareholders for placing their trust in us. With that, I'll turn the call over to Howard, and I look forward to your questions.
Thank you, Jen, and good day to everyone joining us. Our financial results for Q3 demonstrate our continued momentum and success in becoming the operations cloud for the modern enterprise. Consistent execution in the enterprise and mid-market led to another strong quarter with revenue of $72 million, an increase of 33% year-over-year, and above the high end of our guidance range. International revenue grew at 36% and represents 24%, 24% of total revenues. Our high dollar-based net retention rate at 124% is driven by consistent user expansion, plan upgrades, and new product purchases.
Our rate of 124% compares to 119% in the third quarter of last year to hit the high end of the range that we guided to in our Q2 call. We expect net dollar-based retention to fluctuate from quarter to quarter. We are confident we will achieve at or above 120% in Q4. We ended Q3 with 14,486 paid customers, up 6% compared to a year ago. As a result of focused targeting, our product innovation, and go-to-market efforts, we saw paid enterprise and mid-market customers up 13% year-over-year. In addition, the number of total companies on the platform exceeded 19,000 at the end of the quarter, up 29% compared to a year ago.
You may recall when we introduced our free tier a year ago, our intention was to drive focus on higher value, lower acquisition in the enterprise and mid-markets and remove barriers to entry in SMB. This is working well as we see good growth in enterprise and mid-markets and strong growth in overall companies on the platform with a more efficient go-to-market motion for startups and SMBs. General strength and momentum in enterprise and mid-market continued in Q2 as 543 customers achieved more than $100,000 of ARR on PagerDuty, up 35% compared to a year ago.
The growth in this cohort represents both new logos and expansion. Our Digital Operations Plan, which handles both our core and new offerings, including AIOps and Rundeck automation, grew 65% year-over-year, representing approximately 22% of our total ARR, up from 18% a year ago, demonstrating success in upsell and expansion in our customer base, especially in the enterprise and mid-markets.
In Q3, our non-GAAP gross margin remained best-in-class and scaled at 85% within our target range of 84%-86%. This demonstrates the efficiency of our infrastructure, our differentiated, scalable, resilient architecture, and programmatic approach to customer support and success. Non-GAAP operating income improved to a loss of $5 million or 7% of revenue compared to a loss of $5.9 million or 11% of revenue in the same quarter last year. Overall, our non-GAAP net loss per share was $0.07, slightly better than $0.08 in the third quarter of last year.
In terms of cash flow for the quarter, cash from operations was $3 million, and free cash flow was $2 million. We expect cash from operations and free cash flow to decline sequentially due to Q4 outflows attributed to our employee stock purchase program of $5 million and the semiannual interest on our convertible debt, $2 million. Free cash flow will also include platform-related leasehold improvement expenditures of approximately $1 million. Turning to the balance sheet, we ended the quarter with $535 million in cash equivalents, and investments.
Total deferred revenue ended the quarter with $143 million, up 32% year-over-year. Quarterly billings were $81 million, which was an increase of 34% year-over-year, at the high end of the range we provided of 25%-35%. As a reminder, in Q4 of FY 2021, total deferred revenue included the benefit of approximately $6 million from early renewals. This creates a tough comparison this year, as we anticipate these contracts will renew again in Q4, and we do not foresee any early renewal benefits again this fiscal year.
Given this, we expect our quarterly billings growth within the range of 20%-25%. On a trailing twelve months basis, billings grew by 31% to $297 million compared to a year ago. We expect trailing twelve months billings exiting the fourth quarter to grow at approximately 25% compared to Q4 of the prior fiscal year. Turning now to our guidance. For the fourth quarter fiscal 2022, we expect revenue in the range of $75.5 million-$76.5 million, representing a growth rate of 27%-29%.
Non-GAAP net loss per share in the range of $0.05-$0.06 with shares outstanding of approximately 86 million. This implies a non-GAAP operating margin in the range of -4% to -6%. For the full fiscal year 2022, we're increasing revenue guidance for the full year to $278.5 million-$279.5 million, representing a growth rate of 30%-31%. We expect non-GAAP net loss per share of $0.33-$0.34 with basic shares outstanding of approximately $ 84 million.
This implies a non-GAAP operating margin of -9%. I want to thank our customers for trusting us and our team for delivering continued momentum with a strong third quarter financial results, strengthening our position as the operations cloud for the modern enterprise. This underlines our confidence in continuing to deliver durable revenue growth. With that, I will open up the call to Q&A.
Before you do that, Howard, I was gonna make some closing remarks, if that's okay.
Sure.
Very quickly, I just wanted to summarize. Q3 was a terrific quarter with continued momentum, accelerating annual growth, and a confident outlook driven by a positive macro environment, product innovation, and room to expand in our base. Great execution by our team. We have become the standard for incident response, providing a strong core business that we are building on top of, that we're building new products and services on top of. Our business grows durably as we advance our position as the operations cloud in the modern enterprise. With that, I will turn it over for questions. Sorry about that.
Thank you, Jen.
Excellent. Thank you. We're going first to Sterling Auty with JP Morgan. Sterling, go ahead, please.
Yeah, thanks. Hi, guys. I think it was about this time last year, you talked about the premium model and just pricing in general. Just curious, did you make any modifications at this point this year, and how are you thinking about that moving forward?
Well, the premium model has continued to be a great learning and kind of growth opportunity for us as a business. You know, remember, our original goal was to make it easier for developers in the most disruptive startups to leverage PagerDuty and build that into their infrastructure. As you know, we have very strong retention. As those customers grow, it creates the opportunity for us to grow with them. What that's done, by automating that part of the funnel, it's freed up resources to focus on more advanced mid-market and enterprise customers.
That's allowed us to, you know, learn more and more about how we can push our high velocity motion upmarket, which has created some great efficiencies for us. We continue to learn, but we are really happy with how the free trial or the free tier is working alongside of our free trial, which converts our customers to paid as well.
Howard, one follow-up for you. In terms of noting the incremental operating margin, you know, the incremental operating leverage that you generated not only in the quarter but also in the guidance for the fourth quarter. You know, is that purposeful or where are you in kind of your hiring plans?
Yes. Thanks, Sterling. It certainly is purposeful. We in fact have been doing really well in terms of hiring. Q3 was a record hiring quarter for us, which also supported business, you know, engineering, sales, and other functions as well. We have been looking at how do we deliver better efficiency in terms of sales and marketing and G&A. We obviously always trying to keep our R&D spend to around 25% of revenue, which we expect to do within Q4. Certainly, again, looking for efficiencies in the other two areas without compromising on growth opportunities.
Makes sense. Thank you.
Thanks, Sterling.
Okay, we'll go to Rob Oliver with Baird.
Hey, this is Shrenik Kothari on for Rob. He had a conflict, sorry. You announced the Rundeck Cloud and AWS partnership a couple of weeks back, and just curious how Rundeck is doing as new logos. Is that still a factor? Are you still kind of more expansions with existing accounts or see if I can expand maybe.
Thanks for the question. Well, first of all, really excited about both the announcement of PagerDuty Automation available in a cloud offering. We think that opens up opportunities for customers that prefer to deploy through the cloud as opposed to in their own environment. Rundeck has continued to perform very well in terms of both new customer land and expansion. I think most important, bringing automation into our platform alongside of incident response AIOps and now Customer Service Operations really makes the platform much more complete as a total operations cloud for a customer and really differentiates the platform competitively.
We're happy with how that is going. Equally, I'm really thrilled with the way our partnership with AWS has advanced. We've historically worked with AWS in Marketplace. We've doubled down with them from a go-to-market perspective. Customers can retire AWS committed spend on PagerDuty licenses, and now the AWS sales force can also retire quota against PagerDuty consumption. It's a great channel opportunity for us. AWS continued to be a very good relationship for us from both a product and a go-to-market perspective. Excited on both fronts.
Thanks, Jen. Really helpful. Just a quick follow-up for Howard here. If I remember, you mentioned that the expansion rate last quarter had some contributions from the joint customers from Rundeck as well. I just wanted to understand the dynamic there with the NRR coming at the high end on some slides and unpack a bit a little bit with Rundeck and comps.
Yeah, sure. I think just for context, you know, Rundeck remains like a from a size perspective, it doesn't move the needle materially in terms of that dollar-based net retention. I think you have to see it in the context of our larger business, which is now, you know, over $300 million in ARR. Certainly the contribution is there, and we're seeing, you know, both the expansion of customers acquiring Rundeck and, you know, one customer that comes to mind for me this quarter was, you know, Zscaler, who had been a digital operations customer and then added the automation, PagerDuty automation or Rundeck into the mix for them so that they can broaden their scope to be able to cover all the way from detection to auto remediation in delivering, like, a good experience.
We're definitely seeing that motion happening where existing PagerDuty customers are adding to their footprint with us by adding automation. It's just in general, customers upgrading their plans, taking on the new products, and adding new users is contributing to the really strong DBNR.
Got it. Thanks a lot, Howard and Jennifer. Congrats on a great quarter.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. Next, we'll be hearing from Keith Weiss at Morgan Stanley.
Excellent. Very nice quarter, guys, and thanks for taking the questions. I have one for Jen and then one for Howard. Jen, you talked about a favorable competitive environment in each quarter. Does that denote anything has changed in the competitive environment? Or is that more so a PagerDuty comment that with some of the product innovations that are coming out, you've expanded sort of the competitive gap and that's what you have the benefit from?
We continue to see land, see greenfield as we have in the past. In fact, we've seen the competitive environment improve, where because of the breadth of the platform, we're not seeing as much discussion around other vendors because there isn't anybody that's bringing AIOps and automation and incident response together. Frankly, it's improved, and you know, we're thrilled to see the investments that we've made, particularly in mid-market and enterprise from a product perspective pay off.
Again, you know, I think it's just really a nascent market. Our customers still have a lot of work to do to support their digital-first sort of customer experiences. I think PagerDuty is the right platform, you know, at the right time to help them solve some of those new problems that they're experiencing.
Got it. That's handy. Howard, actually two questions for you. One's just a clarification. Can you just talk us through the platform dynamic that you were talking about in terms of billings for Q4? I just want to make sure that we're clear on that. Are there any other kind of trends this quarter that we should be aware of? Then the actual question, just clarification. The question is the durability of dollar-based net expansion. You've had multiple quarters of a really good dollar-based net expansion. Is the mid-120s a more durable rate on a go-forward basis now?
All right. I'll start with billings, and then I'll come back to the dollar-based net expansion. In terms of billings, the adjustment that I was referring to there was really around in Q4 of last year, we had unusually high growth in billings for the quarter at 41%. Part of that was driven by $6 million of early renewals, which would have renewed in Q1 of next year. Obviously, those are gonna renew in Q4 of this year, so we don't have that same benefit. If I back out that $6 million and do a comparison on a trailing twelve months basis, in fact we will exit the year at around 30% in terms of billings growth. That is the full thing. We're not anticipating anything unusual like that this coming quarter.
Perfect.
On the dollar-based net expansion, you know, 124 is a really strong result. We think that for, you know, companies with our size and scale, being able to deliver a sustainable 120% is testament. For us, we are focusing our efforts on maintaining that level, and this will be Q4, our fifth quarter of being above 120%.
Excellent. Thank you very much. Have a great quarter.
Thank you.
Thanks, Keith Weiss.
I'm hearing next from Chad Bennett with Craig-Hallum.
Great. Hey guys, thanks for taking my questions.
Hey, Chad.
Hey, so I guess just on Digital Operations plan and how that performed relative to expectations in the quarter, it's still putting up really good growth, but obviously, you know, decelerated from doubling year-over-year last quarter to 65%. I think as a percentage of ARR at 22%, it's kind of been here. Just kinda how did that perform, whether it's from a net new logo sales standpoint or from a net expansion standpoint, and how do you expect that, more importantly, to grow over the next year?
Yeah. I'll take that, Jen, and you can chime in. We are really happy with the performance of our Digital Operations plan. It ties in really closely with the long runway that we have with our customers in terms of as they progress through the different phases of digital operations maturity, the Digital Operations plan becomes a very natural fit to help them move to those more proactive and predictive approaches. For almost every customer that we have, there's this opportunity for them to expand by taking on the Digital Operations plan.
We continue to see really good momentum with the Digital Operations plan. We have multiple upgrades in the Digital Operations plan within the core of the customers going from business to digital ops as well as new lands. There's good momentum there. We feel that 22% of our total ARR represents, you know, a real indication of product attach, if you like, and we expect to continue to see that perform well.
Okay. I don't know, I'll give this a shot, but can you speak to enterprise net expansion in the quarter, Howard, or was that 130% range or?
Yeah, for this quarter, we decided just to focus in terms of our metrics to make sure that it was easier and clearer for people to focus on the overall view, which is the view that we shared at the 124% range before.
Okay. Then last one, if I could. You're up to almost 550 customers over $100,000, kind of ADB, I guess you'd call it. Obviously you have a significant number of paid customers. Is there any reason to believe, you know, over the next couple years that that over $100,000 dollar cohort, you know, it's been growing kind of mid-30%. It seems like we're still like first, second inning where that should grow at that growth rate for the next few years. Is that too aggressive?
What I would say is that we've seen a very steady increase every quarter. Obviously it's been very predictable as part of our, you know, durable growth as a company, is the fact that we continue to see customers moving through the cohorts. You know, we don't always share the numbers above 500 and above 1 million, but you see a similar pattern and fluctuation that progress. It ties into the very long runway that we have with, you know, the majority of our customers together to continue to do that. We don't anticipate that cohort should suddenly change. We will continue to grow our customers, and PagerDuty will continue to add products, add users to take on more advisors.
Got it. Thanks so much. Nice to have you on the call.
Thank you, Chad.
Thank you. Next we'll hear from Derrick Wood with Cowen. Derrick , if I could have you, do you wanna switch on your video?
Yeah. Great, thanks. Good to see you, team and PagerDuty. My first one for Jen. I think you mentioned that you had a landmark quarter in customer service. Could you just double click what was special about this quarter, you know, why you're seeing maybe adoption kicking into a new gear and perhaps comment on what kind of early demand you're seeing with the Salesforce offering?
Yeah. I mean, we're really excited about where we are from a customer service perspective because, you know, when you build an adjacent product, you know, based on kind of this analogous problem set, like when you think about how tech teams detect and deal with incidents, it's very similar to how customer service teams learn about customer issues and have the time sensitive challenge of having to like diagnose them, figure out how to deal with them, and then communicate them.
PagerDuty is a natural fit to that problem, and Salesforce has been a terrific partner in helping us bring together what we can do from a mission critical time sensitive work automation perspective within Salesforce Service Cloud. What's been really exciting to see are some of the larger wins that we've experienced. One in particular I mentioned in my prepared remarks was a Fortune 50 company where we did a seven-figure deal that was created and closed in the quarter through a reference from another executive.
I think it just points to how strategic customer service has become in a world where you have to win the customer over and over again and demonstrate trust and build their loyalty in a few seconds of a customer experience. If that doesn't work well, it's, you know, it's very costly for the company. This quarter, that particular customer expanded from more of a traditional PagerDuty implementation to our adding our customer service offering.
That's seen them really reduce the existence of these code red issues that make their way all the way up to leadership, where, you know, it's not a very efficient way to handle a problem if you have to get your executive team involved in it. You're saving time, you're saving money, you're improving the overall executive experience. I think what was exciting about that was, like I said, it was kind of a self-referencing deal. We see Salesforce in that partnership as creating, you know, a tremendous opportunity because they are all over enterprise and, you know, they are the platform of record for customer service and customer management.
We're pretty excited about that. What's interesting about the product is you can do all the things that you can do inside of PagerDuty without leaving Service Cloud environment. No context switching, you know, easy to use in a time sensitive environment, and very quick time to value. I think even a particular customer, more expansion opportunity.
Perfect. That's great to hear. Howard, maybe one for you. It looks like the new customer generation has stepped up nicely the last couple of quarters. I know these are probably a lot of them are at the lower end, but can you remind us how quickly you tend to maybe strike an expansion deal after you land a new customer? Then, you know, given that uptick in new customer generation, does that give you better visibility into growth in future quarters?
It absolutely does. I think this has been the beauty of the free tier for us, because what it does is that it gives us visibility into that customer's life cycle, you know, earlier than we would have previously, because with our two week trial that we had before, you know, two weeks if they didn't convert, they were gone. Like, we didn't see them. Whereas now we actually have them using the product, and we're getting far better at understanding the signals that indicate when a salesperson needs to be involved. Often we are able to watch that maturation process until they land.
It's not unusual for us to see a customer do multiple expansions in their first 12 months. They'll often start with maybe, if it's a smallish company, they may start with a small team, maybe 10 users, maybe 20 users. But then they do within that first 12 months as they bring more teams on, onto the platform. There's a you know a good spurt of growth. And then obviously depending on the size of the organization and depending on what's happening in the organization, it could then be driven by you know increased plan or plan upgrades or increased product adoption.
And what we also find is that we often exhaustively farm dev and often dev takes it into other parts of the business. And that is a pattern that we just repeat every quarter in terms of getting there. The example that Jen referenced at Guidewire is a really good example of that being in the dev team and into the IT team, into business teams, into the executives. It's a pattern that we see repeated.
Great. Well done. Congrats.
Thank you. Thanks, Derrick.
Thanks, Derrick.
Next we will hear from Matt Hedberg with RBC. Matt, go ahead.
Yeah. Thank you. Obviously on for Matt Hedberg. Obviously really great to hear about all the success in CS. Maybe following up on Derrick's question and your answer to Jennifer about the analogous problems that when we think about beyond CS security and IT ops, is there a fourth use case? Do you see kind of those same themes that show a logical adjacency into finance or HR? Like you mentioned, the talent shortage is pretty broad right now. It seems like a lot of people could use your help.
You're exactly right. You know, there are infinite use cases across enterprise and business operations. We've seen them in sales, marketing. Our teams are pretty ingenious even in how they use PagerDuty. I think the common thread is you're talking about this shift in the way work shows up for an individual person. It used to be structured. You used to walk in and look at your calendar in the office and just go from meeting to meeting.
Now, you know, a lot of work that comes at you is unpredictable, it's unstructured, it requires collaboration across teams, across the business who are not, you know, within swivel chair reach to where you are, and requires intelligent routing and orchestration and increasingly more and more automation. Because every company I work with is looking to improve productivity over time and retain the people that they have and make sure they can uplevel those people's work to you know the most important most innovative work.
That's where I think automation has become really important. I think you're gonna continue to hear more about the challenge of time sensitive customer service issues. Today there was a public cloud outage and companies are depending increasingly on public cloud services on SaaS products and software isn't perfect. Those systems that you rely on are out of your control.
When one of them isn't having a good day, you need to be able to very quickly detect that issue, understand the dependencies of those services, and not just respond from a technology perspective, but be able to communicate with your customers and help them understand kind of where you are in that arc. You don't want to be in the doghouse with your customers because one of the services that you subscribe to failed. That's where PagerDuty being scalable and resilient and secure, you know, and always available in an environment like that is super important.
For instance, during the outage that happened this morning, we saw more than 8 x the event transit on the platform and didn't flinch. Like, we can undertake a lot of pressure in our system because of all of the redundancy that we built into that product.
That also allows us, I think, to be reliable for other different types of use cases, whether it's employee onboarding and off-boarding, managing, you know, web conversion from a growth marketing perspective or managing urgent issues in finance or other parts of the business. The more we can do to make our platform flexible, to make it easy to use, to reduce the sort of developer jargon that's in the UX and make it easier for just all types of employees, the better. Automation is a big part of that.
That's great. Maybe as a follow-up, that actually is a follow-up to my question. Those are sometimes kind of a rarity. From your Analyst Day, you talked a little bit about automation as a new landing zone in the customers. And as this talent shortage feels less like something you can, like, push through for a couple of months and now kind of more of like a new normal, which is another overused buzzword now, are you seeing automation being the new landing sticking to customers? What is that doing maybe from, like, a sales philosophy standpoint?
We are, and I think it's very early days for us because a number of the automation use cases that Rundeck, you know, is designed for and that it has managed very effectively, have nothing to do with incident response. That's obviously a place where our sales organization will naturally go. Because our automation solution starts with an open source community, there's opportunity to discover lots of different new automation use cases and then trade up into our enterprise offering.
I do believe that can continue to be a new land opportunity for us. You know, over time, part of the reason we've built a cloud-based automation service is so we can also build a premium funnel and a try-to-buy motion that is self-service over time. That is not something we've done yet, but a great opportunity for us to build out that land motion in the future for automation.
All right. Fantastic. Yeah, it seems like I build your product roadmap for you over time. Congratulations on the quarter.
Thank you.
Thanks.
Okay. I wanna remind our analysts that you can raise your hand if you do have a question for the team here. We have a couple hands still raised. Bhavan Suri, we'll hear from next. If you wanna switch your camera on.
Yes, thanks. I do have my question. I wanted to follow up on some of the previous questions here in a little bit. You know, you've got one point where you're talking a lot about competition. I love-
Bhavan, I think you're muted. We lost you.
Yeah. Oh, I don't know why I'm muted. Anyway, where does the lines you wanna draw about what you're automating versus a broader automation platform? IT ops, DevOps, there's broad automation platforms in there. ServiceNow does a ton of automation. You've got some of these workflow orchestration engines that do that too. Where do you draw the line today? Maybe does that line blur, and you start taking over some of those markets? How do you think about how your vision is ten years down the road?
Yeah. Our vision as the operations cloud is to take on more and more of the time-sensitive, unstructured, mission-critical work that has to happen across an organization. That is not functionally or use case specific. Like, we absolutely intend to expand our surface area across the enterprise. We specialize in that unexpected kind of unpredictable, unstructured work because of our ability to diagnose it and intelligently route it, orchestrate it across teams, and increasingly, you know, automate the response, not just the detection or the orchestration.
That's been a really important point, is that we have always been in the automation business. We maybe didn't characterize it that way, but if you think about what we do, using 625 integrations that sort of listen and see everything that's going on in the digital ecosystem to find signal in the noise and determine whether something is a major incident about to happen or an event storm about to become a major incident or actually something you shouldn't worry about and should just hit the snooze button on. Like, that's a form of automation.
Intelligently routing that work to the right six people instead of getting 100 people on a call, that's automation. Increasingly, like, every time an incident or an event runs on the PagerDuty platform, the platform is capturing that information in our proprietary data set, learning from it, and getting smarter and helping you institutionalize getting smarter as a company on how you respond, and increasingly, like, proactively prevent bad things from happening, but maybe also address opportunities in a more time effective way and more efficient way, for your team.
Automation's always been a big part of the PagerDuty strategy, and it's gonna continue to be a very big part of where we go. I think, you know, one of the differences between us and maybe the ticketing systems and the project management solutions that are out there is that we were designed for distributed teams. We are cloud native from the beginning. We interoperate with just about everything in the ecosystem. We're flexible and very easy to use.
It means you can swarm to something and give the person closest to the problem the accountability and the responsibility and the visibility to act effectively in the moment. The next time you can automate that and have the machine do it for you. You know, we're not in RPA. We're not moving into some of those spaces, you know, that replace business process optimization. I do think that more and more of the type of work that we solve for is how work happens in the workplace now as a result of COVID and distributing work, remote work, et cetera. That's, you know, when I think about the macro environment, the way work has changed has been a tailwind for us.
Yeah. Let me flip that a little bit differently. You know, you started working with partners. Basic alerting functionality, there's not a lot of services involved. As you think about this automation, as you think about Deloitte, and I think your recent announcement was with Tata. When you think about these guys. While the incident response piece is really important, the automation, like this is happening, this needs to move next phase, next collaboration. Is that where they're seeing the focus and the interest from those guys, or is it across the board, and how are the partnerships coming along?
I mean, most of the partners that we work with are supporting customers in like big chunky digital transformation projects. Sometimes they'll employ us as part of the cloud migration side of that solution, but sometimes it'll be around the cultural change and the change management associated with doing work a different way, not relying on people in a network operations center manually watching blinking lights and escalating things, et cetera. It varies from partner to partner, but we do see that as an opportunity in the future to engage more readily with some of those more traditional systems integrators or strategy firms that are out there.
Got it. That was really helpful. Thanks, and congrats.
Thank you.
Yeah.
Okay, folks. It looks like Kingsley Crane with Berenberg gets to come with the final question for the group today, unless we see any hands go up additionally. Kingsley, please go ahead.
Actually, my question. This is Ed Madge in for Kingsley Crane. You stated the range of NRR to be between 118%-124%. You seem to high-end the range here. Do you believe the high momentum here was a function of improved adoption of customer growth? I would love to better understand the mix here and if it's been different to the last few quarters and the momentum there. Thanks.
Thanks, Ed. You know, for us, it's always a mix of factors that are driving that growth. Obviously, you know, given just the improvement that we've seen in the adoption of the Digital Operations plan has been a contributor. We've seen an increasing number of PagerDuty customers adopt the PagerDuty Automation or Rundeck solutions. That's been a contributor.
The largest contributor is still user seat expansion. We're not sold out in terms of users at any customer. Every customer has the opportunity to deploy us into another team. That certainly gets fed by, you know, if it's been embedded maybe added to IT or security or customer service. We're also starting to see customers using us in other business-side site expansions. Those are the elements that actually build into that expansion within the customer base.
Helpful. Another angle here. Last quarter you discussed momentum from customers spending more than $500,000 to $1 million with you guys. Any color you wanna share on these trends during the quarter help us further reconcile the enterprise? You think it's the same answer as we got for the NRR for the enterprise?
Yes. What I will say is we're seeing good momentum above $500, 000 and above $1 million. But we are focusing key potential on our key metric, which is, you know, grew by 35%, year-over-year.
Okay. Thanks for that. That's it for me. Congrats on the quarter.
Thanks. Thanks a lot, Ed.
Thank you.
Okay, that looks like it for questions from the analyst team. Jennifer, we'll turn it over to you for our final remarks, please.
I'd like to thank all of you for joining us today and just reiterate how proud we are of the record quarter that we've delivered and how confident and optimistic we are in the outlook going forward. I've personally been involved in this business, like, I'm in my sixth year, and I have never been more excited about the opportunity. We're really living up to the promises that we've made about becoming the platform that becomes, you know, the platform for engagement within our customers' environments.
And this vision around the operations cloud is finally coming to fruition, which is personally very exciting, but wouldn't happen were it not for our customers placing their trust in us and our talented and beyond employees who work every day to re-earn that trust. I just wanna congratulate our team, say thank you to our customers, our investors, and wish all of you a very healthy, happy holiday and a prosperous new year. Thank you.