Walking the “Green” Carpet: The Summit19 Customer Awards
Last week during Summit, our annual conference, our co-founder and CTO Alex Solomon announced the 2019 PagerDuty Summit Award winners. These awards honor our best customers and partners across several different categories, and recognize them for their unique use cases, close collaboration, and positive business impact in leveraging the PagerDuty platform.
Read below to learn more about our incredible winners.
The Community Champion Award recognizes a member who is active in the PagerDuty Community. This award went to Alexander Hellbom, a true asset to our community. He created the Terraform PagerDuty provider in September 2016 to allow members of the PagerDuty community to automate the configuration of their PagerDuty accounts. Terraform is an open-source tool from HashiCorp that allows you to build, change, and version your configuration through code.
Today, Alexander continues to lead the effort, and the project contains contributions from over 40 developers from around the world! Not only are a lot of developers helping to build it, but the Terraform PagerDuty Provider is also widely used. In terms of total downloads, HashiCorp reports that the PagerDuty provider is one of the top 20 downloaded providers.
The International Customer of the Year Award honored an international customer that has played an integral role in PagerDuty’s global expansion. This award went to DAZN.
Based in London, DAZN is a perfect example of a company that has embraced and pioneered the HybridOps model in order to make an effective transition from a monolith codebase to microservices, enabling them to completely disrupt the market for live sports media entertainment. They combined DevOps principles, a brand new SRE team, SRE tooling (of which PagerDuty was a core part of), and their traditional Central IT Services team to deliver a brand new platform. Early on, they identified that delivering a world-class customer experience was so critical to their growth ambitions since, in the unique market of live sports content, there is zero tolerance for service interruption. Viewers missing that critical final-minute goal, basket, touchdown, or home run would have far-reaching consequences for customer retention and growth. Georgina Owens, CIO, accepted the award on behalf of DAZN
The Impact Award recognizes a nonprofit organization that uses PagerDuty to more efficiently and effectively address critical social or environmental challenges. This award went to The Trevor Project, a nonprofit focused on suicide prevention efforts among lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning youth. They use PagerDuty Platform Team for ITOps and reliability, and, more recently, to monitor their international peer support platform for user-published content that indicate possible self-harm or suicidal ideation.
The Trevor Project flags 2-4 incidents daily and leverages PagerDuty to meet a mean-time-to-respond of less than 15 minutes. The organization has successfully expanded PagerDuty usage to a new team, Crisis Service Supervisors, to monitor content from 350,000+ users and provide LGBTQ+ youth with resources that will prevent them from harming themselves or taking their own lives. John Callery, their Director of Technology, accepted the award on behalf of the organization.
The Inclusion Innovator Award celebrated a customer dedicated to building a welcoming company culture by fostering an inclusive community. This award went to Pinterest. With industry-leading equitable HR systems, including compensation, parental leave, and health benefits, the distinction of being a Best Place to Work for Diversity by Forbes and a best place to work for professional women by Comparably, Pinterest has truly created a community of inclusion. They’ve hired thoughtfully and continue to scale their global operations with belonging in mind. Balaji Narayanan, Pinterest’s Engineering Manager for Site Reliability, accepted the award on behalf of the company.
The Customer of the Year Award was given to a customer that uses PagerDuty’s capabilities to help their organizations deliver a memorable, world-class customer experience. This award went to Cisco, which is not only an avid user of PagerDuty, growing their account 50% year over year, but one of the most popular integration partners we have. AppDynamics, Webex, OpenDNS, Meraki, and Cisco DNA are just a few of the teams around the world leveraging PagerDuty to enable real-time work across their always-on business so they can deliver meaningful experiences to their customers. Cisco’s CIO, Manoj Acharya, was present to accept the award.
Our final category was the Real-Time Innovator of the Year Award. This award was presented to the organization that best demonstrates leveraging the PagerDuty platform in innovative ways to deliver business value. The award went to IBM, which is always looking to leverage new capabilities in new ways. IBM was the first customer to use PagerDuty for Customer Service teams at scale, and they are also making use of recently released new innovations such as Business Response. Additionally, they have consistently participated in the design partner program and given us great feedback on many new products and innovations. Senior IT Manager, Kirk Pedersen and DevOps Tools Product Owner, Peter Dichard, accepted the award.
Congratulations again to all of our Summit Award winners! PagerDuty would be nothing without the support of our customers and partners, and we are grateful for everything you do for our product and our company. Thank you for working, innovating, and growing with us!