PagerDuty, Inc. (PD) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary
March 9, 2021
Earnings Call Speaker Segments
Joel Fishbein
analystGood afternoon and morning to those joining us in the morning, but good afternoon and welcome to the Truist Tech Conference 2021. Before we begin, I need to read the following disclaimer. This call is arranged by Truist Securities research for use by institutional investors and institutional clients and issuer clients by -- defined by FINRA. If you are not an institutional investor or an issuer, please disconnect at this time. For the required disclosures, please see our website at truistsecurities.com or our equity research library. And on today's call, I am very excited to have PagerDuty, both Jennifer Tejada and Howard Wilson. Jennifer is the CEO and Chairperson of PagerDuty. She's had a great track record in product innovation and optimizing operations and scaling public and private enterprise technology companies. Prior to her role at PagerDuty, she was the CEO of Keynote Systems, which had strong profitable growth before its acquisition by Dynatrace, and she's also held several senior positions at Procter & Gamble and i2 Technologies. Howard serves as PagerDuty's CFO. A lot of you guys know and have interacted with Howard, previously served as PagerDuty's Chief Commercial Officer. Prior to PagerDuty, he oversaw SaaS business at Dynatrace, and he was previously Chief Operating Officer at Keynote Systems, where he was responsible for all customer-facing operations. So I will tell you, he's not your [ product ] typical CFO. He has operational experience as well. So thank you, both of you, for joining us today and excited to have you.
Joel Fishbein
analystI'm going to start it off by -- you're coming off a great third quarter. Revenue increased 26% to $54 million. You have over 13,500 customers now using PagerDuty in their digital transformation efforts, and your customers with annual recurring revenue over $500,000 was up 40%. And so I guess the question to you is you've seen reinvigorated demand, improving close rates, really upbeat about normalizing growth and good large customer traction. Love to just hear what's happening and how things are going.
Jennifer Tejada
executiveWell, thanks so much for having us today, Joel. We really appreciate it and to everybody who's tuned into the Truist conference. Q3 was a real inflection point for the business. We really saw our customers return to investing in strategic and what we think of as transformative initiatives on the back of, one, taking the first steps towards having to almost entirely digitize their business due to COVID; but two, really understanding that as your business becomes almost entirely digital, you need a new operations environment to support the demand that comes from consumers or employees or customers that want a perfect experience in seconds every time. And so in many ways, COVID has strengthened some of the secular tailwinds that we'd historically seen, digital acceleration, cloud migration and DevOps transformation and frankly, really helped business leaders to understand how important availability and the performance of digital assets is to driving both your top line and your bottom line. And so we saw that as an inflection point. We feel very confident about the business and have continued to focus on the things that are strengths for us, really identifying through software, detection and automation, mission-critical, unstructured, but an unpredictable work and intelligently routing that work to the right distributed teams that can make decisions on the spot to drive better outcomes for the business.
Joel Fishbein
analystThat's great. So one of the things I want to clear up upfront and obviously, you talked about the 13,500 customers, is that people wrongly consider PagerDuty a cloud-first only company, right? So you're only helping companies that are on the cusp of cloud-first, right?
Jennifer Tejada
executiveYes.
Joel Fishbein
analystSo there's plenty of them out there, but that's absolutely not true. So talk to us about some of the things -- the innovative things you've done for what we would consider legacy companies or companies that aren't cloud-first. So...
Jennifer Tejada
executiveYes. In fact, we think of those customers as hybrid customers where they are making investments in cloud-native deployments, whether it's in new product applications or their consumer-facing environment, but they still have significant [indiscernible] costs and dependence on legacy or more traditional on-prem environments. And I would say that describes most of the enterprise business community, which is where, I think, we've really demonstrated our leadership and our unique position in -- within that market, and part of that is because we have been able to serve those hybrid operational environments and help them to improve their efficiency in terms of identifying, managing and responding to unplanned incidents but also becoming more proactive and preventing issues from happening by having a cloud-native platform that does enable hybrid teams to address and work collectively on the same platform to that end to becoming more proactive and more operationally mature. And that's really validated through the strength we've seen, for instance, in the financial services sector where some of the largest -- most of the largest banks in the world are using PagerDuty in some way or another and continuing to double down and advance their efforts. And yet at the same time, we do see a lot of strength and still opportunity in the SaaS community, in computer software and Internet. So I think it speaks to the ubiquity of PagerDuty's solution, the fact that we're designed really with the developer, IT, security, customer service user in mind. And one of the challenges that all those users faces, they're constantly having to balance between platforms to get things done. And when time matters, that contact switching is very difficult. So PagerDuty, through its API integration environment, brings all that together for them in one place, makes it easy for teams and users, whether they're supporting a data center environment or a networking environment or an application service or even a paywall, a checkout environment. They can leverage our platform to work collectively across these teams and manage those dependencies very effectively as well.
Joel Fishbein
analystYes. So...
Howard Wilson
executiveI think, Joel, just to jump in there. The one thing I would add is that we have close to 60 of the Fortune 100 as our customers. And you go through that Fortune 100 list, a lot of those are traditional companies, as Jen mentioned, some of the large banking institutions, some of them are large retailers, some of them are within the travel space. So a broad range of companies are, in fact, our customers today. The other thing that I think has been interesting is for a lot of those companies who might be operating under what seems like a more traditional on-premise environment or a hybrid environment, they rely on the fact that PagerDuty is in the cloud and that we were a native cloud company because when they're trying to manage the environment and being able to integrate with us outside of their environment, it's actually powering that. You don't want the system that's actually got to tell when something is broken to be within the environment that's [indiscernible], right? So that's where the beauty of PagerDuty, being this cloud-based environment, is super powerful. And we see this with some of the largest software companies in the world, they're using us that way. Our integrations are able to feed the information that PagerDuty needs that helps them orchestrate people when they need to.
Joel Fishbein
analystThat's very helpful. Just in terms -- I want to take one step back, and it segues from what you just said, Howard, and that is that when PagerDuty comes in, historically, a lot of these people were using manual processes. And I think it's worthwhile for you to talk about that. It's that not -- PagerDuty is not ripping and replacing another piece of technology. It's not -- talk about the strategy from that standpoint. I think that's really helpful.
Howard Wilson
executiveSo I'll take a crack first, and then I'll let Jen jump in. But I think what you're saying is so true, Joel. Like we find that most of the time when we go into a customer's environment, they're not using anything vaguely like PagerDuty. And they often are thinking about things in very tactical terms in terms of just how do I deal when there's a problem. And so they're using a combination of either -- they have wiki pages with lists or they have spreadsheets or they have phone trees or they have any number of random collections of instant message groups that they're trying to use to manage their critical infrastructure. And when PagerDuty comes in, we suddenly bring so much sense to that environment. And we shift them from being able to just react when there's a problem to be able to get ahead of issues, right, moving them into the proactive demand. So our strategy is not just to help companies deal with when they have an incident, but we would rather they don't have the incident at all. We would rather they actually get ahead of it so that even before a customer knows that they have an issue that the problem is solved. And one of the studies that we did with IDC showed that companies using PagerDuty had a 70% reduction in the number of unplanned outages, right? And that's because you're getting ahead of the problem. So what we empower is the ability for them to understand their digital operations environment and manage it proactively so that, one, they can respond when there's an issue, but also they can act proactively before a customer even realize there's a problem.
Joel Fishbein
analystJennifer, did you want to add anything? Or...
Jennifer Tejada
executiveWell, I would just add to that, that most of our lands are greenfield. They're uncontested, and that becomes increasingly true as you move upmarket where there isn't another platform that's been able to prove its resiliency at scale the way PagerDuty has. And so if you think about just the amount of traffic and events that we see as a company, just in COVID, I think because of that very fast transition to digital, we saw events and issues on the platform increased by around 30% and yet incident response times improved by 15%. So even under pressure, we continue to prove out the fact that we can support just about any kind of company, regardless of their size and scale, do it very effectively and very securely. And at the same time, every time a team runs an issue on PagerDuty, the platform learns on the company's behalf. And so you're also building institutional knowledge for the company, but you're -- for the customer. And equally, you're leveraging all of that data -- now nearly 12 years of proprietary data that we apply machine learning against, which is what's driving that ability for customers to become more proactive. They're able to solve problems leveraging AI as opposed to doing it all manually.
Joel Fishbein
analystThat's great. You guys are making this easy because you're setting up to every single next question, so...
Jennifer Tejada
executiveWe're here to help, Joel.
Joel Fishbein
analystSo it's the question that you like -- that you and I talked about before, which was -- talk to me about AIOps, right? Because the industry loves to throw around these terms, but it -- actually, in your instance, it actually means something, right? So talk to me about AIOps and where Pager fits into that hole, that ecosystem.
Jennifer Tejada
executiveSure. I think there's a misperception that AIOps is really about observability. It's just about the monitoring side of things. And historically, the way a lot of traditional companies thought about AIOps was they had a small team of analysts that sat in a room somewhere and looked at historical events and tried to figure out where root causes are. I mean that's not the way modern digital companies operate now. So AIOps for us is much more distributed and democratized. We want every developer, every IT team, every security team, every user to have access to the best information in the moment that can help them not only quickly identify a root cause or understand dependencies between services and teams and people but get to that solving that issue very quickly in service of the end customer experience. And so it's a very different approach and requires the sort of API-driven ecosystem that we have where we integrate over 500 of the most important monitoring environments, observability, application security, ticketing, et cetera. We consolidate all of that, run machine learning and AI against it and help operators, regardless of what team they're in, make the best decisions in the moment as opposed to going back over history and trying to figure out what you do next week. It also means again that your -- that the system is constantly learning. So even when someone deploys a new service, our AIOps solution can help them understand what impact their service may have on other services and likewise, what they need to be aware of. And we know that most incidents -- 80% of incidents, I think, are driven by change. So recently, we also invested in innovation to integrate PagerDuty into change management environments that really helps not only understand what changes have taken place, but what may happen going forward if you make a change. So again, continue to see that shift from reactive to proactive. But I frankly think we are redefining AIOps by bringing true AI to digital operations across the business.
Joel Fishbein
analystThat's great. So you're just...
Howard Wilson
executiveAnd I would...
Joel Fishbein
analystYes. Sure, Howard.
Howard Wilson
executiveYes, it's sort of the same. I would underscore that as well that Jen's point around action and mobilizing people is really what makes us different, one. So a lot of the other AIOps solutions that are out there are really about being able to serve up data to you in interesting and useful ways, right? But they actually don't take you to the action. So the way that we've approached it is we've embedded this within our product so that we were able to give you context and get you to action on the basis of that data as opposed to still leaving it up to you to decide what you need to do, right? So that I think is one thing that really sets us apart.
Joel Fishbein
analystSo you brought up a good point, which I think from an industry background perspective is -- you talked about 80% of incidents driven by change and change management. The acceleration of how quickly things are changing is a point, right? Remember, we used to be on a release cycle that may be 6 months, 9 months.
Jennifer Tejada
executiveTotally.
Joel Fishbein
analystWe're in real-time change, right? So...
Jennifer Tejada
executiveYou can be deploying 100 times a day, 1,000 times a day, depending on how big your organization is.
Joel Fishbein
analystRight. So the criticality of it. The other thing I just wanted to talk to you about, which I think is a pretty big competitive differentiator on top of the data, which I think is underappreciated, and that's the platform integration, right? So you've really spent a lot of time and energy developing this integral platform, right? And I want to talk to you -- do you explain the importance of that, right? Because if you're just a stand-alone company and sitting on top of -- and watching, that really might help some. But when you're really integrated with some of these platform partners, that really is a differentiator. So why don't -- can you just explain that or elaborate on that?
Jennifer Tejada
executiveSure. And I think what you're talking about is the ecosystem that we sit at the hub for, of all of the modern ticketing systems, security, threat management, monitoring environments, et cetera, and what that allows us to do is, one, consume signals across all different kinds of observability and monitoring environments. And it allows us to correlate and make sense of those signals. So instead of sending every alert to every team that's signed up to an alert, you're sending the one set of instructions or work to the right 4 or 5 people who need to do that work or uniquely equipped to do that work, either because they are owners of those services or they're subject matter experts or they're known to be available. All of that's really important, and that's what we refer to when we talk about intelligent orchestration. So we're connecting -- we're consolidating a lot of noise turning that into signal, then connecting that signal in a curated way to the right teams that can do the work, that can close the loop, finish the job, resolve the problem, so to speak. But then we're learning from that process and driving information back out to our ecosystem, whether that's back out to incident management platforms or customer service environments, et cetera so that you're also making the entire organization smarter and its ability to deal with customers and its ability to make changes to the environment to improve future operations, et cetera. So it's not just signal in. It's also signal and action out. And increasingly, what we've done is consolidated machine-driven automation and also people-driven information automation. So we're automating more and more of that process. We started with the automation of detecting the signal effectively through this ecosystem, which, when I joined the business, I think was around 175 integrations. Now like I said, we're over 500 and continuing to build on that year after year, and about 1/3 of those are built by customers and our communities, so there's a lot of engagement from the community as well. But we're now also, through the acquisition of Rundeck, automating the response as well. And Rundeck does some really interesting things, including runbook automation, but one of the things I really like about that product in that company is that you can apply Rundeck automation to lots of different use cases. And so that's the last point that I would make. PagerDuty is viral, not just within a developer community or in an IT team or a security team, but you start seeing clever teams across the business apply PagerDuty to different use cases that have similar traits in common. There -- it's unstructured work. It's unpredictable. You don't know when it's going to hit. It's time-sensitive. It's mission-critical. And Rundeck has a similar -- started with DevOps practices, but you'll see Rundeck applied to lots of different use cases across the business, and we see that representing a growth opportunity for us.
Joel Fishbein
analystAnd remind us where you are with the Rundeck and how you're going to integrate it into the current ecosystem.
Jennifer Tejada
executiveWe already had integrations built to Rundeck when they were a partner, and that was one of the things that drove our interest in the company was we saw increasing customer interest from that. And PagerDuty customers can leverage those integrations to seamlessly deploy runbooks through PagerDuty, which I think, again, like when time matters, you want to reduce that contact switching. The other thing that I would say is developers and modern technologists do not like black boxes. They don't want to push a button, an automation button, and wonder what's going to happen. So you're able to actually kind of unfurl and see what the runbook is going to look like, exactly what's going to happen, which equates to safe self-healing, really. And in a complex technology environment, which is the case for every single one of our customers, whether they're brand new and cloud native or they've been around for 200 years, that safe self-healing element has really built on the trust value proposition that PagerDuty has been delivering for customers for a long time and really helps us operationalize our customers' trustful relationship with their customers as well.
Joel Fishbein
analystThat's great. Yes. So one of the things that you've talked about in -- very much since you've been at the company, both you and Howard, is how much you're hyper-focused on customers and customer success, right? That's [indiscernible]
Jennifer Tejada
executiveYes.
Joel Fishbein
analystSo related to that, how have you found customers -- the stickiness of the platform, right, and your ability? And then I'm going to -- from there, I'm going to go into go-to market, but I'd love to understand the stickiness and how you view that.
Jennifer Tejada
executiveI'll take a crack at that, and then I'd love to hand that over to Howard. I mean one is we win with the user. So we're -- a lot of people refer to it as bottoms up, but it really is almost a consumer-like relationship. We build our products and services to make it really easy for users to find us, to deploy us and then to leverage us to enable them to do their work more effectively, more efficiently, to free them up to do more purposeful innovation, et cetera. But when you win with the users, you win through word of mouth. So many of our customers and new acquisitions come from a person who's used PagerDuty at their last 5 companies, right? So that word of mouth is really important to the virality of the customer. And one of the reasons why I think we are very sticky, and Howard can speak to the numbers on that, is because it really don't let our users down. Like we don't send them a false positive. We don't send them work for something they have nothing to do with, right? We are very thoughtful about how the technology works in service of the teams that use it. And when the rest of the world has a bad day, PagerDuty has to be up. I mean we measure ourselves on [ 4-9s ] not just for availability but for the transit of events. So that level of commitment to the market requires a pretty big financial commitment on our part from an infrastructure perspective and yet, we've really innovated around the architecture of our platform, which is what enables us to produce best-in-class gross margins and still have among the best availability track record in the market, and I think that also makes us very retentive. The last thing I would say is if you look at the way we integrate into someone's environment and the number of out-of-the-box integrations that exist and how seamlessly it connects different teams and services and platforms, it's meant that we have essentially become essential infrastructure for our customers. And the risk of carrying that infrastructure out even in the 3 days that the customer may be exposed and not be on top of what's going on in their environment, this isn't worth it to many of our customers. And the fact that we continue to invest there and continue to get better, I think, has really driven a lot of that loyalty and that retention, which Howard can quantify.
Howard Wilson
executiveYes. And I think the way it shows up in the numbers is, first of all, like our renewal rate or retention rate is really high. Like we lose less than 5% on an annual basis from customers leaving us. So product is really sticky. And then I always just look at our average revenue per customer, which we've now had 15 consecutive quarters of that increasing, right? So customers continue to stay with us and grow with us, and that shows up to our net retention rate last quarter with 119%. So we see this continuous expansion from customers as well.
Joel Fishbein
analystWell, that's a great -- another great segue into the next thing -- question, and that's go-to-market. So obviously, as the companies evolve, the go-to-market has to evolve, right? You're going after larger customers. They're probably a little bit more demanding, et cetera. I know you do love the developer and the end user. But talk to us about how the go-to-market shifts have happened and what's happening there.
Jennifer Tejada
executiveWe love the CIOs and the CTOs, too. And it's really been interesting. In the last 1.5 years, 2 years, we've actually seen a transition to technology leadership in a company coming from a more of a development-oriented background. And as that's happened, that's also -- that word of mouth that I talked about before, if you were a developer carrying the Pager early in your career, and now you're the CTO driving digital transformation, a huge financial institution, like that bodes really well for PagerDuty. And we definitely are seeing that shift, where companies realize they actually have to be technology companies. They actually are digital companies, and they need a technical leader driving their digital operations. So that's been, I think, a good trend for the business. From a go-to-market standpoint, bringing Dave Justice in to really help us scale our organization, deepen our leadership bench, and it really helped us do the things that we always did very well. So highly transactional, self-service land is still the same. But to build on that more strategic relationships, that's been really rewarding to see that develop as our productivity improved, and as Howard said, as our revenue per customer continues to improve, and our large customer cohorts continue to grow very healthfully. I really like where we're going. And at the same time, we don't lose sight of that user from a product-led design perspective. So it's a really nice balance, but there isn't really another model out there you can compare it to. We are building this hybrid go-to-market model ourselves where we maintain that consumer design mindset from a user perspective, but we are building strategic products and platforms that serve leadership like the digital operations management platform, which has continued to perform very well since we launched it.
Joel Fishbein
analystSo how can a CIO or CTO love you -- not love you? You make them look good or less bad every time, right? I mean -- so...
Jennifer Tejada
executiveIt's true. I mean the market is evolving because a lot of technology leaders historically didn't give their business leaders visibility to the performance of their operations and the availability. But as these incidents become more public -- you mentioned one this morning -- as they become more public and they impact users more because it's the only way to engage with the brand, it's become much more important for not just technology leaders to be literate in digital operations but also for business leaders. So we are finding -- we're gaining more friends than that going forward.
Joel Fishbein
analystYes.
Howard Wilson
executiveThe one comment I would just make is we had an IDC study, a repeat of the study done late last year. And that really shows the value to enterprises where we're talking about like a close to 800% ROI over 3 years. And so this is company saving, on average, like $3.5 million by putting PagerDuty in place. So they're essentially ending up with payback periods of just over 2 months. So like the CIOs love us, right, because what we're doing has a very clear demonstrable value to them in their organizations.
Joel Fishbein
analystWell, there was another stat, and I can't find it right here, but it was something like a customer before you went in there, they had an outage, and it was like $300,000 per minute in business. I forget what the number was, but it was something extraordinary that -- I mean it was a nonstarter for them not to have that. To stay on this go-to-market, can you -- talk about the cross-sell. I mean you've added a lot of product, a lot of functionality. How is that going? How is that resonating?
Jennifer Tejada
executiveYes, I'm really proud of our product and engineering team because I push them very hard on innovation and constantly identify new feature sets or new opportunities to create more efficiency for our customers and at the same time, help them more strategically mature their operations over time. And I think we've done that very well through Modern Incident Response, which really brought that smart orchestration into play. Event management has been a game changer for the company because if you just think about what's happening in the world, there's proliferation of data that is unprecedented coming at human beings. They cannot manage the amount of noise coming their way. So anything you can do to improve the signal there is a huge step forward and event management really -- that intelligence really leverages our data but makes sense out of it and turns it into -- like I said, curated instruction is a good way to think about it. The second thing is that it democratizes the insight that developers, IT teams, security teams need to make decisions in the moment. And if you go back to what the world used to look like 10, 15 years ago, ticketing systems were built for on-prem environments that moved a lot slower that deployed once every 6 months that had issues that you could spend weeks and months resolving. Like when something goes down in the digital modern world today, the news is all over it. Twitter is all over it. Reddit is all over it, et cetera. So our teams don't have that kind of time. So you think about proliferation of signal, the persistence of issues, look at the security environment of late, and those security teams are using PagerDuty. The persistence of issues coming at you is increasing. And then the complexity, the number of services, because of distributed architecture and distributed computing, containers, et cetera, it's impossible to manage. So Event Intelligence is really all about consolidating, correlating, making sense of that but driving to an outcome through a platform that automates for you on behalf of you. And I think that has really been what's driving the success that we've had with the digital operations plan where customers historically would start with on-call automation, move to incident management or Modern Incident Response and then move to digital ops. We're actually seeing them start with Event Intelligence, start with digital ops first. And we're seeing smaller customers, our commercial customers, make transformative deals with us, really building on the digital operations plan. And Howard can talk from the numbers perspective there, too.
Howard Wilson
executiveYes. And I think the digital operations plan, just for folks here at the conference, this represents really our strongest, call it, cross-sell opportunity because that includes not only our plan, our business plan, but also includes the products that we've been developing over the last 2, 3 years around Event Intelligence, Modern Incident Response, the Analytics and Visibility products. So what we saw in Q3 was that we had a 65% increase in net new ARR on that digital operations plan, which is really the plan that sets us apart from competition because what we enable through that is really quite different from simply on-call management or incident response but truly helps you get into that predictive and proactive mode.
Joel Fishbein
analystThat's great. So just a few minutes left. I want to hit on 2 more topics. The one thing -- and this is for both of you. You guys are high growth. You're in a great spot. You're in a class of companies that are growing and hiring. The question is finding this talent. Everybody's got -- wants to have these grandiose plans of hiring people and retaining people. What's the environment like out there right now? And is it hard to find talent? And if it's not, where are you getting great talent?
Jennifer Tejada
executiveWell, I mean, it is a crazy talent market. It's as crazy as I can remember in my somewhat long career. And Howard, I think, has a shared experience there. What I would tell you, though, is we, over several years, started to reduce our reliance on San Francisco as a market and open our recruiting up to both remote employees. So we're about 20% remote before COVID hit, and we already were putting in place processes, have a culture that supports distributed work because we are a very developer-centric culture in many ways and developers have deliberately led the way on that front. And so I think that has given us a bit of an advantage in terms of being able to identify talent from talent pools outside of kind of the traditional hubs where we historically saw them. Second advantage for us has been culture. So we have been very strongly oriented around building an inclusive and diverse and equitable environment, a culture where people can be themselves and do their very best work and feel supported and safe in doing that and a company where we measure our performance on the basis of our customer success. Like we're championing our customers at every turn. And if they're not winning, we will not win. That's led us to do some unique things. Like when we opened our third North American hub, we put it in Atlanta because we saw that Atlanta was producing the highest number of undergraduate engineers that are underrepresented in the market, but they didn't have access to careers in tech. And so we opened that opportunity up, and that has been a phenomenal hiring strategy for us. In addition, if you look at our Board and our leadership, we are more balanced and more diverse than just about any enterprise software company out there. And we've had to build that from the ground up. PagerDuty was not born that way, but that has enabled us to get to talent that maybe it doesn't look like the talent that you're used to seeing in the market. So we outcompete when it comes to, I think, diverse and underrepresented people, and there's a ton of talent there. And then the last thing I would say is belonging. Like if you don't like where you work, you're not going to stay there. And so we spend a lot of time and energy trying to make sure that people are surrounded by really smart people, but that there is no brilliant jerks in that audience that there are people who are collaborative and want to see everybody on their team be successful, and we measure that. We've spent a lot of time measuring our engagement, measuring -- lately, we've been measuring wellness, mental wellness because it's been such a long drawn-out kind of lockdown. And it's always going to be tough, but we look to find the best people for the job. We try and hire ahead of where the company is going. And you see that in our recent hiring of Sean Scott, who ran e-commerce and the Amazon.com website for many years in the product page and built the robotics business there. Dave Justice is running a much larger organization at Salesforce, we hired them. But one of the things those guys have in common is they're entrepreneurs. Like they really -- they're not afraid to get their hands dirty and they like buildings. So you also have to look for that fit, like can I find the mix of experience but the spirit of entrepreneurship and the willingness to build an inclusive culture in a leader, and I think that's been a really important key to our success.
Joel Fishbein
analystThat's great. All right. Last question for me, open up to both of you. So what's in store for 2021 and beyond? And what are the milestones for investors to pay attention to?
Jennifer Tejada
executiveGrowth. I mean we are very oriented towards growth. It is a very early and large TAM. And I think if humans are impatient, and it's really easy to get bored of something and think, "Well, that's done." We've been hearing about it for a couple of years. Like digital transformation has at least a decade in the front. And this acceleration that we've seen, the move towards cloud computing, DevOps transformation, still early in a lot of our very large customers. Like there's a lot of room to run in this TAM, and I have a theory that the TAM is expanding just because of the digital acceleration that we've seen. So we're going to continue to orient around growth, orient around success in enterprise and mid-market, continue to focus on digital ops being the de facto platform and operating performance environment for modern companies. And I'd really like to continue to see our use cases expand, seeing people find clever ways to use PagerDuty across the business.
Joel Fishbein
analystThat's great. Howard, so I have to -- will you insert the word profitable before her word growth?
Howard Wilson
executiveWell, as you know, we have earnings coming up next week, so I...
Joel Fishbein
analystYes. That wasn't about -- I wasn't asking about this earnings. I'm just...
Howard Wilson
executiveNo, no. But what I'm saying is, I've got to be very cautious about it and you guys [indiscernible], so...
Joel Fishbein
analystAll right. Well, [indiscernible]
Howard Wilson
executiveThe one thing I would add is that we have really moved the needle with innovation this last year. You can expect to see more exciting innovation out of us this next year too.
Joel Fishbein
analystGreat. Well, thank you so much for your time. This is my pleasure, and good luck next week and we'll talk to you soon.
Jennifer Tejada
executiveJoel, great to see you.
Howard Wilson
executiveThanks so much, Joel. Thank you.
Joel Fishbein
analystThank you.
This call discussed
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