PagerDuty Acquires DevOps Automator Rundeck
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PagerDuty Inc., the operations management specialist, is acquiring enterprise DevOps startup RunDeck in a cash-stock transaction valued at $100 million.
San Francisco-based PagerDuty said Monday (Sept. 21) the acquisition would be paid for with about 60 percent in cash and the remainder in its common stock. The deal is expected to close by the end of October 2020.
Rundeck, Redwood City, Calif., was launched in 2015 with a DevOps tool for automating runbooks, or machine-based workflows used to diagnose, and resolve incidents. PagerDuty (NYSE: PD) said the acquisition strengthens its management workflow platform with “auto-remediation” and self-healing tools designed to boost developer productivity by quickly resolving workflow incidents.
PagerDuty and its competitors are increasingly using automation tools to view ingested data and incident summaries that help resolve workflow incidents. Rundeck currently lists more than 150 enterprise and medium-sized customers.
The key to the deal was Rundeck’s ability to provide DevOps teams with “scaled automation” through its real-time incident response capability, said PagerDuty CEO Jennifer Tejada. “Together we can now automate unpredictable, emergent work for people and machines, from detection and diagnosis to recovery, remediation and learning.”
“Rundeck was designed to solve difficult, time-sensitive challenges for DevOps teams leveraging automation for hybrid infrastructure,” added Alex Honor, CEO and co-founder of Rundeck.
Among the emerging incidence response tools emerging for harried DevOps teams are AIOps frameworks that seek to reduce the number of false alarms that waste developers’ time and resources.
PagerDuty’s acquisition of Rundeck reflects bullish forecasts for the AIOps platform market. For example, Gartner predicts that within three years, 40 percent of DevOps teams will utilize AIOps capabilities. Meanwhile, industry analyst firm MarketsandMarkets said the AIOps platform market is expected to grow to $11.02 billion by 2023.
Automated incident response tools address urgent requirements among IT teams under constant strain to meet service level objectives and quickly identify and resolve problems in increasingly complex IT environments.
“Infrastructure and operations professionals need to prepare automated
operational responses, correlate performance analytics to predict and avoid incidents [and] support preventative assessments… [then] use postmortems to improve systems,” said Charles Betz, an industry analyst with Forrester.
Also this week, PagerDuty announced platform enhancements that include integrations with Zendesk and Zoom. Those upgrades are aimed at expanding automation for IT and DevOps teams. For example, new AI and automation tools are said to reduce incidents by as much as two-thirds, the company claimed.
