Right, good afternoon, and welcome. Thank you all for joining us today for this investor presentation on PagerDuty. Glad to be here in New York. It's so much warmer than California. Well, not really. I was feeling a little bit embarrassed when I arrived yesterday and was chatting to the driver who came to take us from the airport, and I spoke about how cold it was in San Francisco and got the blast of cold air in terms of what real cold should actually feel like. B ut great to be here. We've had a warm welcome. Been a busy day. Been through seven investor meetings already, which has been fantastic, and glad that we have the opportunity here to tell you a little bit about PagerDuty, the company.
First of all, of course, just a reminder, safe harbor statement in terms of any statements that we make here. I'm sure you're all familiar with that. Also, these materials will be part of the conference materials and will also be published on our website. There is a fair amount of detail in these slides, and if you want to be able to have a look at them in detail, you will have an opportunity to do so. A little bit about PagerDuty. I wanted to start off with a bit about our purpose, our vision, and our mission, and particularly around our mission, because that really speaks to the product, platform, and portfolio that we have. Our mission is really to revolutionize operations for our customers. Our view is that we want them to anticipate the unexpected in an unpredictable world.
Our orientation is very much about helping our customers being successful in serving their customers. We're very much focused on being able to help customers service their customers in a digital world, where today, people rely on digital technology, whether it's web or mobile applications, multiple devices, to be able to serve their customers and deliver a really good experience. PagerDuty exists to be able to help our customers, in fact, achieve that goal. If we think about our core promise, we actually service developers, IT operations, customer service, and security. These are our main constituents, and we want to be able to serve those teams effectively so that they can keep their digital services running. That's a key element of us being able to help them effectively manage unplanned, time-critical work, all in service of their customer.
As a company, just a few highlights from our most recent results in Q3. We're at $109 million in revenue for Q3, a growth rate of 15%, for Q3, over 15,000 paying customers, and in fact, we have 22,000 companies on our platform, including both the free and paid, and non-GAAP profitable, so most recent quarter at 14%. M aybe a little bit about our customers and the journey that they take with us. M ost of our customers, or the majority of our customers, are across verticals which have a high level of consumer engagement, so software and technology, financial services, telecommunications, travel and hospitality, media and entertainment, and online commerce.
Across those particular verticals, these are all companies that are in, are driven to drive a great customer experience because that customer experience, drives their revenue, it drives their growth. W e play a key role in helping them managing their digital operations in order to be able to deliver, what their customer needs. Now, most of our customers are on a journey in terms of the evolution of their digital operations, that digital infrastructure that they use. T hey go from, on a maturity perspective, from either being on a manual side, where a lot of their processes and systems, in terms of how they manage their environment, are manual, to being reactive, being responsive, and hopefully moving more and more to the proactive or the preventative side.
Where they're able to leverage technology more successfully to use less in the way of human effort to manage the environment and more in the way of technology to help them to be successful. A lot of the time, our customers are dealing with what would be common enterprise priorities. They're wanting to grow their revenue by increasing their innovation velocity. T he way that this shows up for customers is that in order to be responsive to the needs of their customers, they're often releasing new versions of their application or their web app on a daily basis.
They're wanting to be able to respond quickly to that environment, and that is often the way in which they're able to, if they're a news organization, ensure that they are gaining subscribers, if they're an online commerce environment, trying to ensure that they're selling stuff to new consumers. If they're in travel and hospitality, it's about ensuring that if someone is about to book that flight, that they can actually do that successfully, because this really is associated with revenue. W hat they want to be able to do is that in the event that there is a situation building that could become a customer-facing incident, they want to be able to respond really quickly and resolve those issues before the customer's even aware of it. T hat's what we do.
All the digital services that you use every day rely on the fact that someone is able to respond really quickly to an issue before the customer knows and is able to act proactively to drive improvement in that infrastructure. The second area that we deliver business value is really around reducing costs so that customers can achieve operational excellence. So if you think about this environment that we're in, where customers do have a requirement for, saving money, spending less, our automation and innovation allows you to actually accomplish work by using technology instead of relying on expensive human resources to get the job done. A lot of what we do creates capacity in organizations. I t means that they do not need to hire as many people to perform the same functions, or they're able to leverage technology to get greater scale.
That's one of the key ways in which we're able to drive efficiency at scale. Of course, for many customers, the risk of an operational failure can be really high. You know, reputations can be damaged by a failure in terms of availability of a particular application or website. There's also, in some cases, in highly regulated environments, the ability to respond quickly to meet service levels is critical. Otherwise, you could be faced with penalties of some sort. PagerDuty really strives to help companies modernize their environments, and in modernizing that in those environments, they make them more resilient. They're able to then service their customers better and get a better value equation.
To highlight some of that complexity, a lot of us have heard about, you know, how observability products, the application performance monitoring, the infrastructure monitoring products, so well-known names like Datadog, Dynatrace, New Relic, AppDynamics, all these different companies provide different services around observability. Just to highlight the complexity, one might think that, oh, well, if you're a company, you choose to have just one of those. Well, most enterprise companies have more than 10. 66% of enterprise companies have more than 10 observability tools in the environment. So that just highlights the complexity of the signals that they're needing to capture in order to be able to manage that infrastructure.
We've done a very good job of instrumenting our technology environment so that we can capture signals at the database layer, the network layer, the core infrastructure, at the application layer, but all those signals need to be managed in order to orchestrate action. I n some respects, if you think about it, if you had all those signals, it's a bit like having an alarm go off in your home, but no one taking action. W hat PagerDuty does is we provide effectively a platform of action that takes those signals and is able to then pull them together and make sense of those signals in order that you can get the right person on the right problem or opportunity at the right time.
The way that we do this is really through the PagerDuty Operations Cloud, which is effectively our set of offerings that combine to create a really unique value proposition that allows companies to go all the way from detecting that there's potentially an issue through to auto remediation and learning. And so if you have a look at our environment, we actually sit at the center of an ecosystem of more than 700 other applications, companies, and players. W e have integrations with all the monitoring and observability players, with security environments, with DevOps and lifecycle tools, with data operations tools, customer service, business operations, ChatOps and collaboration, ITOps.
Any number of different, different players are able to either provide signals into PagerDuty, or PagerDuty is able to push signals or push content or workflow out into some of these other environments. I n a typical environment, what you would see is a number of monitoring and observability players who would be in amongst the 66% of companies that have more than 10 of these in their environment, would be feeding those into PagerDuty, along with maybe some of the information from their DevOps and lifecycle around code that they're committing. 0 f course, those are then fed into PagerDuty. We apply machine learning to that and are able to surface when there is a potential problem and orchestrate a team to be able to get to work on that issue.
In so doing, we could bring in that group and have them collaborate via Slack or MS Teams. We can initiate them being able to start a video conference via Zoom or Teams. And so there are any number of mechanisms that we have that enable that collaboration. W hile that particular issue is being worked on or resolved, this is kind of the heat of the moment, get that issue fixed. We can leverage automation to do diagnostics, leverage automation to run some pre-built scripts to maybe restart a service. O nce the issue is resolved, we are able to push that work into an ITSM tool like ServiceNow or maybe a long cycle, long-term fix that needs to happen, something where the resolution is not as time critical.
Our world is a world where we're dealing in seconds, minutes, maybe hours, whereas often your ticketing solutions are dealing in days, weeks, or months. W e end up sitting at a really useful part of the infrastructure for our customers in terms of being able to orchestrate this work for them. So what are the pillars of our of our environment? Well, we have incident management, which is where PagerDuty started in terms of incident response and on-call. We have our AIOps solution, which deals with huge volumes of of data and ingests that with a view to being able to help customers identify similar incidents, help them have a look at correlation between events, enables them to look at probable cause, and provides them with rich context around problem resolution.
We have Process Automation, which allows us to create reusable pieces of content in order to drive a, not content, reusable pieces of automation or scripting that allows them to be able to, on demand, provide or run automation. Then Customer Service Ops allows us to capture the customer signal. W hat's interesting, despite companies spending, you know, millions of dollars in terms of instrumenting their environment with monitoring tools, there's still about half of the issues that are encountered by large enterprises are identified by their customers. So let's imagine you're in a situation where you're trying to check out, and you're not able to check out from this purchase that you're wanting to do.
50% of the time when there's an issue, it's actually someone reaching out to customer service via a chatbot that actually lets them know that there's an issue. So the instrumentation may not have picked it up, but the customer has. O ur CS Ops offering integrates us with some of the most popular customer service tools like Salesforce Service Cloud and Zendesk CRM. Allows us to pull those together so we can capture that signal and unify that and provide that full view. T hese are the key products from a PagerDuty perspective that make up our operations cloud. Most of these that you'll see on the slide, there are different ways in which these are priced and sold.
We have a large number of them are sold on a per user subscription basis, whereas our AIOps solution is one that's also sold, is sold on a consumption basis as outlined there. So me of the recent capabilities that we have launched that are worth noting is that within... You know, we're a company that has strong roots in AI. We started doing AI and Machine Learning more than seven years ago. And in fact, we now have robust offerings from an AI perspective that have been core to the company. And one of the latest innovations was a new AOps release with some increased capabilities in the fall release, which helps companies deal with huge volumes of data.
Think about a centralized IT operations team or Network Operations Center, where they're often dealing with hundreds of services, huge volume, lots of events. We make it easy for them to manage those events. Then we have a number of generative AI capabilities that we've launched, which is really about using enerative AI to take work that would often be time-consuming for a customer and giving them a great starting point. One example is post-mortem. When companies have a major incident, what they often do, a good practice, is that once that incident is resolved, you then do a review and actually understand what actually happened so that you can drive improvement in your process.
Well, we actually are able to take all the data out of that whole incident process and put that together with the timeline and the sequence and create a mechanism that is easy for, for someone to then start with. So instead of spending days collecting all the data, we produce it for them within minutes, and that creates the starting point for them to go and do the completion of that post-mortem. Huge time saver, huge productivity gain for, for the person working on that, and leads to consistent and better quality. W e have other capabilities around being able to automatically drive the creation of status updates. When you're in an incident, you want to inform folks around that, and how do you engage those stakeholders in a reliable way? PagerDuty has been recognized.
We've put a lot of effort in recent times to ensure that the industry analysts are familiar with a category that we've created. Y ou know, here are some of the recent results. We've been recognized by Forrester as a leader when it comes to the competitive landscape around AIOps. And from Gartner, we've also had a number of recognitions in terms of product leadership with nine Hype Cycle report recognitions. So why does PagerDuty win? The things that have been key to PagerDuty in terms of our success to date have been, one, the high level of integrations. We're the only provider who integrates with 700 other or more than 700 integrations.
Our AI and Machine Learning, which has been around for more than seven years, is the foundation of a lot of what we do. The way that we drive automation, both upstream in terms of the workflow automation that we provide, and downstream in terms of some of the process automation that we provide is what stands out from a technology perspective. What customers love about PagerDuty is the fact that we are highly resilient, highly scalable. We never have a maintenance window. Our Chief Technical Officer says that maintenance is for cars, not for software, so we're always available 24/7. We have a highly redundant, highly resilient infrastructure because our customers need to rely on us when things could be really difficult for them. A lso, we're easy to set up.
It's, it's easy for customers to get started. In fact, you can be up and running with PagerDuty in minutes. It doesn't require a long, you know, six-month implementation project. We were built by engineers, for engineers to be able to enable very quick ability to get started. W e drive, you know, phenomenal value for our customers, and some of those stats you can see there, driving, you know, ROIs of nearly 800% with very short payback periods. But we are creating a category, and we're in an early, under-penetrated, fragmented market.
Obviously, because we're not in any of the Gartner Magic Quadrants yet, or we're in a technology space that is still developing, we've done our own view on the total addressable market, which is based on looking at potential users of the PagerDuty solution in incident management, AIOps, and automation. We estimate, and this was based on research we did in 2022, about 75 million potential users of PagerDuty, which would then, you know, translate into a $38 billion total addressable TAM. We've organized our go-to-market around the fact that we can service some of the smallest, most disruptive startups to the largest enterprises. We go from customers who spend a few hundred dollars a year to customers who are spending millions of dollars a year with us.
The way that we've organized this is that for the SMB segment, which for us is companies with less than $50 million in revenue, that is a programmatic digital sales self-service model, that we run through a small team that drives nurture campaigns, deals with hand raisers. So a very efficient model, and this has been a key element as we've moved to this model to driving, higher levels of, productivity from a, sales and marketing expense perspective. And then our other two segments are enterprise, which are companies with revenues above $1 billion, and mid-market, which is companies above $50 million going to $1 billion. W e have two motions there.
The one is a field-oriented model for enterprise, so tend to have people located close to the territories and customers that they manage so that they're accessible and in time zone. Tends to be, you know, high value-driven sales process, strong focus on value. And then our commercial space or that mid-market space tends to be more of a high velocity sale with often folks co-located in region, in a hub-like structure. T his has been, you know, successful for us in terms of being able to align to the requirements of our customers. S ome of the recent accomplishments, I've touched on some of the recent product innovations, so I won't repeat that and some of the accolades.
But, you know, one of the things that we are focusing our efforts on is really helping customers get the benefits of AI. So most recently, we've had announced some additional innovations around the generative AI piece, and one of those includes, if we look at our process automation offering, this can be a highly technical offering, but one of the capabilities that we've released allows the concept of co-authoring of automation runbooks. And that makes it easier. It reduces the barrier to entry of someone in the process automation space, because instead of being technical and having to create scripts, they're able to use a guided mechanism through the generative AI to be able to, in fact, then create these runbooks.
We've also created an automation that allows the in-incident responder to interact directly with our incident response platform during an incident to be able to get information directly from the environment that way. T hinking about ways in which we can leverage AI more effectively, but again, not simply because we think generative AI is a good idea, but because we think it improves the productivity, makes it easier for these people to do their jobs, and surfaces information in a very intuitive, flexible way. B ecause we have this large foundational data model, we're able to build this technology on top of it with confidence. We're also a company that believes very strongly on ensuring that we play a strong role in our communities.
We've had a structured program around ESG for a couple of years now, and we have a strong commitment to both employee giving and giving back. The PagerDuty team is known for being very active in terms of community efforts, in terms of volunteering, and in terms of gift giving. We've been recognized as a leader in the workplace, both in terms of the best place to work in the Bay Area and for millennials and with, you know, also the top Bay Area philanthropist for the second time in a row.
But certainly for us, we feel that it's important to be able to provide both the, you know, strong product and technology differentiation, but also as a company, we want to have a strong differentiation through the focus that we place on diversity, equity, and inclusion, and our role, from a social impact perspective. M aybe then just on to a couple of the operating metrics, just over time, just to give you a view on our revenue, revenue growth. You can see we demonstrate very strong operating margins. We typically have a gross margin in the range of 84%-86%, which we've managed sustainably now since we went public.
We've also been able to consistently grow the number of customers that we have that are spending more than $100K with us a year. And then just looking to our non-GAAP target operating model, this is a model that we put out at Analyst Day a couple of years ago, but this still holds true. In our modeling, we've thought about targeting a, you know, continuing to target a gross margin of 85%, so sticking in that 84%-86% range. We're already well on our way to achieving some of our targets from a sales and marketing perspective, and, you know, pretty much there with respect to R&D, with some future efficiency around G&A, looking to deliver at least a 20% operating margin as we get to scale.
Just a reminder, our mission at PagerDuty is to revolutionize operations and build customer trust by anticipating the unexpected in an unpredictable world. J ust in summary, as I get to the time for us to be able to have some Q&A, a few things that we think are really important about us from an investment perspective: We are the only real-time operations cloud platform today that goes all the way from detection to auto remediation and learning. This is a significant market opportunity. We have created a category, and we're still early in our progress against that total addressable market. We already have demonstrated our experience in terms of an expansive enterprise adoption. More than half of our ARR is coming from companies with... in the enterprise, that's companies with revenues over a billion.
80% comes from enterprise and mid-market together. So our exposure in terms of SMB is at around 20%. We also have a record of consistent innovation and execution. Every year, every quarter, we continue to release new innovation into the market, a we have a firm commitment to continuing to grow profitably. So with that, I will invite Mike to help facilitate any Q&A.
Hey, I have 15 minutes left. I have some questions on my side. Howard, if you wanna sit down?
We have a seat, yeah.
but-
I've been doing a lot of talking today.
Yeah.
I better get a drink of water, right?
Nonstop since 8:00 A.M.
But I, I have questions on my side, and if anyone has, please feel free to chime in. One of the things, again, like, you're, you're sitting across these different submarkets, right? We're talking about the Gartner MQ and how, like, there isn't a dedicated space, right? You have all these different integrations. So at a very high level, like, how do you think of PagerDuty as far as its positioning in the market? Are you like, is it fair to think of you guys as being a massive control layer on all these individual silos, or are you looking to consolidate those over time? Like, what's, what's your positioning here?
Yeah. I think it's interesting because the way our customers see us is really acting, in some ways, almost like a neutral hub-
Mm-hmm
... at the center of this ecosystem. b ecause we have this flexibility to be able to take in signals from almost any software-enabled system, application, or device, it does give customers a lot of flexibility. So we see ourselves at the center of that ecosystem, both in terms of inbound signals, but also our ability to push out signals we're required to drive work.
And then the other question I had is that I think when you guys put that slide up, it showed that you have the 700+ integrations.
Yeah.
Right? F irst, just so, I'm clear, like, are you guys on the hook for maintaining and making sure all those integrations are fresh? That's the first, and then the-
Yeah
... the second is how much of a competitive differentiator is having that volume of integrations-
Yeah
... in your back pocket?
Sure. Yes, so great question. I n terms of the integrations, we divide, a lot of the integrations actually come from our community.
Mm-hmm.
Right? So they get developed by people who see that there's something that needs to integrate into PagerDuty. We have an open API. They're able to develop that. They get that reviewed by PagerDuty, and us being able to say: "Yes, this is good." Give it a tick, you're able to use that, and we will publish that particular integration. T here's a lot of that work that gets done outside of PagerDuty. We then have elected to take the set of integrations that are most used by our customers, and we categorize those as tier one integrations, and we treat those as products. F or example, we have an integration with ServiceNow-
Mm-hmm
... and we're on the eighth or ninth generation of that after many years of working with ServiceNow. And so we treat that as, as important because it's key to our customers, and it's a, a key technology component. T hose, those, more frequently used, most popular named ones, if you like, are the ones that we manage directly ourselves as product, and we have a team dedicated to doing that. F or some of the outbound integrations to things like Slack and Microsoft Teams and Zoom, those we also manage, we manage from under our product team.
Now, from a product differentiation perspective, I think it's meaningful because it takes a long time to build those integrations and to have that flexibility that you can simply get started with PagerDuty and know that anything that you can imagine, it would have to be fairly esoteric, that we don't already have an integration-
Right
... for that piece. I don't think, like, volume is always an indicator, but it certainly is an indicator of the flexibility, whereas some of the folks who are in our competitive space may run into a couple of hundred of those, whereas we have a far broader set that is available.
And then, I guess another question I had, I'm hoping I'm not mischaracterizing, so help me out-
Yeah
... with this, but like, I know you said you have 15,000+ customers-
Yeah
... paying customers.
Correct.
22,000 or so, including free tier customers, right?
Yep.
So is the strategic value in having-
Sorry, $27,000.
Twenty-seven.
Twenty-seven.
See, that's okay.
Twelve-
That's what I said.
12 thousand-
Keep me honest. Okay.
12,000 free. Yep.
Having those free tier customers, is the strategic value in that more to help build up the size of that developer community that's building those integrations, or not necessarily?
Yeah, it's actually it achieves two things.
Mm.
The one is that it's often, as you say, smaller startups that end up in our free offering, and that's often how they get to know PagerDuty, and so we see that as a long-term funnel for growth. W e'd rather they get to know us when they're small and whilst they're still learning and get used to PagerDuty, so that as they grow, they're able to transition to a paid plan. It's not a free offering that we're trying to drive people rapidly through the program-
Sure.
Because we've tried to make our free offering useful. I f you've got a team of five and you need to manage a, you know, a single application effectively, you can do so. You can do so with production quality, right?
Mm-hmm.
That, that's been the thinking behind that, that free plan. It does also garner, if you like, interest from the developer community who think about... Particularly if people are looking at building an API to PagerDuty, it creates like a useful mechanism for them to be able to, to test and try that out.
And then, I think you've already partly answered this, but, there's no forced migration, right?
Correct.
So are there structural limits on that free tier-
Yeah
—that, like, you trip and all of a sudden, you, in some way you have to convert and start taking a paid deal?
That's right. I t's, it's scaled for, like, a team of five.
Mm-hmm.
It means that if you needed to more users, then you would need to add more. And then there are other features within the platform in terms of if the number of services that you're trying to look after, you know, exceeds, I don't know if it's, like, three or something, but if there's more than a certain number of services, then you would need to move. Or if you're wanting to access some of our enterprise-grade application integrations, then you would need to move to a paid plan. But it gives you enough capability to work in a pretty basic environment, but with full capability.
I guess another question, but this is more around, like, the ingestion or the storage or how you're orchestrating the flow of all this data.
Yeah.
Right? And so there are folks in cybersecurity who have acquired storage engines, right? There are people in observability, like, Dynatrace as an example-
Yeah
... talking about their Grail Lakehouse architecture. How is it you guys fit into that storage avenue? The reason I ask is just because it's an expensive proposition.
Yeah.
There's uncertain value in retaining all that data.
Yeah.
Like, where is it you guys fit into that plane?
Yeah. So I mean, we process, like, billions of events.
Yeah, I can imagine.
Right? W e have a large volume that's coming in. Now, when we're receiving these events that are coming from these other integrations, we're not capturing all of the detail-
Mm-hmm
... that that is related to that event, but we're capturing key data that we believe is valuable for us to be able to help drive incident resolution or help drive improved visibility within that environment. And what we're doing is we create the connective tissue that would allow a customer to be able to drop down from what might be a Dynatrace event into Dynatrace, right?
Mm-hmm.
We keep that data, and part of that is we've become very efficient in terms of event ingestion and processing, but also in terms of being able-
Mm
... to manage that data layer for the purposes of driving our AI. T hat has been a key component for us. So what's actually interesting, when you're within PagerDuty, like you're not—it's not even visible to you as a user necessarily, like all this data that's come in, because we actually will suppress, like, duplicate events that are coming in.
Mm.
We will actually group them and make it easier for you, so you're not being pinged by the same thing multiple times. We'll actually, within a particular service, if we're getting a signal on this, on a related service from, say, Dynatrace, from their APM and maybe a New Relic Synthetics, we're able to group them together. W e remove so much noise out of the experience of the responder. But if they're wanting to drill down, they can actually see, like, where did the signal come from?
Mm-hmm
... right?
Yeah.
See, see some of the details.
The other thing, and then I just wanna make sure I'm getting this right. I think it was AIOps has a consumption pricing component to it.
Correct.
Right?
Yeah.
Can you discuss, like, what is the pricing mechanism that consumption is being driven off of?
Yeah. W e have this concept of what's called a processed event-
Mm-hmm
... which then defines effectively what we would see as being usable from an event flow that's come into the platform. T he way that our AIOps solution is oriented is some of the solutions that are out in the market today try and create a dashboard for someone to go and look at, to say, "Well, okay, here's a correlation of data that's come in from the event stream, and, you know, you go and make a decision based on that." What we do is we actually take that data in, and the way in which we apply the machine learning to that is we then put it into certain categories, like: Is this something similar-
Mm-hmm
... to what's happened before? Think about it a little bit like a recommendation that you might have, like from a recommendation engine. Or we show them, like, "Oh, this is correlated with another event," or, "This is happening on a related service. There's a service dependency." Or we provide a context around, "This is a change that happened recently." W hat we do is we try and unify that experience in useful ways, and then if an incident needs to be created, we actually create the object to drive the resolution of that issue.T ightly integrated into our incident management, but certainly surfacing context in a way that drives action.
And just on that point around the processed event, right? I s that something where, again, I'm thinking of data flow, right?
Right.
It should be relatively automated, or is there still a manual component as far as pulling in?
Oh, no, it's all automated.
Okay.
So it just flows in.
Okay.
And so customers know when they... And the way that our AIOps pricing works is that-
Mm
... the customer effectively has a number of tiers.
Sure.
They basically select the tier, and essentially they acquire credits, and then based on the events processed, that sort of burns down that credit. They have instrumentation that helps them see, like, how they're tracking in terms of events that they're sending through AIOps or not. It does give them. They have control over how that gets you.
I know, I think it's approaching 60% of ARRs from customers with 2+ products, if I have this statistic-
That is correct.
Right?
That is correct, yeah.
The question is, what is it you guys are doing to further encourage more adoption? Is it either getting more product out the door, or is it just better... helping customers better understand the full offering that PagerDuty is delivering?
Yeah, both. I'll very quickly, what I would say is I think, you know, we've typically sold our products, like, almost each one standalone.
Okay.
A little bit of that has been our history, right? Of like we started in incident response and Incident Management, so then it was like, "Oh, and then you must buy AIOps, and then you must buy automation, and then you must buy CS Ops." But that makes no sense. What we've actually done is we have our sales team now educated to sell the Operations Cloud. The customers actually then, they may... Any one of the products could be an on-ramp, right, for them to get started, but they already have a vision of, like, where they, where they're headed. For some of us, from a selling perspective, us educating the market and our customers around the, the breadth of the offering. The second is innovation is still, like, key for us.
Mm.
As a company, we value that highly, and that's why even, you know, at the start of our next upcoming fiscal year, we've done so much in terms of innovation this last year that our sales team has a lot to sell, right?
Yeah
... in terms of capabilities. And we're gonna continue to innovate, and we have a very strong focus around customer-driven innovation in terms of, you know, what are the problems that customers are trying to solve, and how can we solve it for them as elegantly as possible?
I guess, we might only have time for one or two more questions here.
Sure.
But I look at the long-term model versus you guys being at, I think it was 14% operating margins most recently, right?
Yes, well, yeah.
Versus the short-term being at 20.
Yeah.
There are some organizations where you really need to squint to see it, but, like, you guys, I think you have a clear line of sight.
Yes, well, yeah.
especially if, like, G&A is something you need to leverage, right?
Yeah.
Or sales and marketing, not to belittle the amount of work that's ahead of you.
Yeah.
Is there a thought that, do those margins then go higher the next time you reestablish that long-term model, or are you guys starting to think through maybe a different capital allocation model? How do you weigh those different pieces?
Yeah, W e're really thinking about how to... You know, the job for me as CFO is all about how do you balance the growth-
Yeah
... with the expense? W e've got to this particular position in terms of our operating margin, and, you know, this year we're guiding to, like, 1,000 basis points improvement over last year, and last year we did 1,000 basis points improvement.
Mm-hmm.
My view is that we still want to operate efficiently, but obviously we're gonna slow that pace. It'll be a more modest improvement-
Sure
... in operating margin next year. But we are wanting to ensure that we're in a position to capitalize on the growth opportunity. I think this last year has been a bit of an unusual year of economic dislocation, which has had an impact on our growth, but we have a high degree of confidence in our ability to, one, execute better in this kind of macro environment and then pursue that opportunity. A s we see growth starting to re-accelerate, we want to be in a position to invest in that growth. I t's that balance. But, you know, over the longer term, we put that model out there thinking about when we're at scale, this would be a great place to be. Obviously, as we make progress towards that scale, we will revisit it in the light of kind of what the world looks like.
Thank you. I'll let you close it out with the audience, but any final points that you'd want everyone to leave the presentation here with?
Yeah, I mean, first of all, thank you for your interest today in attending the session. I hope a lot, a lot of people get to watch it on the, on the recording as well, and, you know, we appreciate your interest, of the, the audience in, in PagerDuty. PagerDuty is an interesting company. At the surface, it might sound like an unusual name called PagerDuty, but if you look under the covers, we're, we're solving really big problems for big customers, and we are helping them with, you know, realize value with some of the most important investments they've made in terms of their digital environment.