PagerDuty Taps Channel Veteran Timm Hoyt To Lead Partner-First Transformation: Exclusive

As cloud migration and digital transformation spur demand for PagerDuty’s digital operations management technology, Hoyt is charged with engineering the company-wide adoption of a partner-led sales and go-to-market culture.

PagerDuty, a developer of digital operations management software, has hired former Druva channel chief Timm Hoyt (pictured) to lead the company’s global partner and alliances organization, the company is expected to announce today.

As vice president of worldwide partners and alliances, Hoyt will lead PagerDuty’s global partner organization that encompasses the company’s VAR, MSP, system integration and cloud service provider partners. He also will work directly with other PagerDuty operations, including sales, marketing and product and teams, to shift the company to a partner-led go-to-market strategy and increase partner-driven revenue.

“The will of the company is there for a partner-first sales motion. There’s a wonderful foundation here, there’s a fantastic team. Now we’re in build mode,” Hoyt said in an exclusive interview with CRN, summarizing both what attracted him to the company and the task that lies before him.

[Related: The 2021 CRN Channel Chiefs]

“We are investing right now in the people, processes [and] programs that will help us build a name for ourselves – not just in the industry, because that’s there – but as a partner-first sales organization,” Hoyt said.

PagerDuty develops a digital operations management and incident response platform, equipped with AI and automation capabilities, that’s used to detect, identify and diagnose IT issues in real time, alert IT teams to fix problems, and capitalize on IT management opportunities. The system is offered for a range of use cases including ITOps, DevOps, security operations, crisis management, cloud migration and digital transformation.

The company’s customer roster includes Electronic Arts, DoorDash, GE, Genentech, Lululemon, Netflix and Shopify.

The central role PagerDuty’s software plays in cloud migration and digital transformation initiatives – both of which have accelerated during the pandemic – provides significant growth opportunities for the company and its partners. It’s also one of the reasons Hoyt joined PagerDuty.

“Cloud migration and digital transformation are not a revolving door. No one’s going back,” Hoyt said. “PagerDuty and what we provide to customers is at the epicenter of these, it’s a central nervous system for all these elements.”

PagerDuty, based in San Francisco, has been steadily expanding its channel efforts. The company launched a VAR channel program in 2018 and in May 2020 expanded its program to include systems integrators, consultants and managed service providers.

In December PagerDuty formed an alliance with IT services and consulting giant Tata Consultancy Services – PagerDuty’s first with a global systems integrator – through which Tata uses the PagerDuty platform as the foundation for a range of IT operations and digital transformation solutions and services.

While many of the components of a partner program are in place, Hoyt said PagerDuty is in the early stages of developing a company-wide “partner-led sales motion, a partner-led go-to-market motion.” And the opportunity to be at the forefront of that was a major reason he joined the company.

“The partner ecosystem at PagerDuty is very diverse,” Hoyt said. “That diversity is something that attracted me and I think I’ve got some unique experience in building teams and supporting the individual needs of those different types of partners.”

Hoyt joined PagerDuty from cloud data protection company Druva where he was global vice president of partner sales and alliances for four and a half years. While there he overhauled the company’s sales operations to become a partner-first company, increasing Druva’s partner-led revenue from 9 percent of sales to more than 80 percent.

Before Druva Hoyt was vice president of Americas enterprise sales at virtualization software developer Atlantis Computing and prior to that was vice president of worldwide sales and marketing at enterprise storage systems company Skyera.

In a statement announcing Hoyt’s hiring, PagerDuty emphasized his expertise with “building go-to-market engines” for the data center infrastructure and SaaS technology companies he worked for. It also highlighted his “extensive experience” with sales, marketing and building partner organizations in global markets and noted the several years he has worked in Japan, South Korea and Latin America.

While PagerDuty is just now disclosing its hiring of Hoyt, he actually began work at the company in February.

Hoyt’s channel chief post is a new position at the company. Partner organization management responsibilities were previously spread across multiple managers, Hoyt said, including Chief Revenue Officer Dave Justice, who initially recruited Hoyt and to whom he reports.

“PagerDuty sits at the center of the digital ecosystem and partnerships are critical as they allow our customers to integrate our platform with their entire digital operations, improving overall performance and working effectively across teams, no matter their preferred working tool,” said Justice, in a statement announcing Hoyt’s hiring. “Moving to a partner-first model for growth will help us to continue to expand how we deliver value to customers - helping them increase revenue, lower costs and mitigate risks.”

Hoyt told CRN that he has spent the first couple of months on the job immersing himself in what “people, programs, processes and tools” PagerDuty has to develop a partner-led culture, not just in sales but across all company operations including marketing, finance and legal.

“It’s not just seen as a sales initiative,” Hoyt said of the broader effort, noting that the company’s go-to-market transformation is endorsed by CEO Jennifer Tejada.

Hoyt said channel partners, including resellers and influencers, now account for a low double-digit percentage of PagerDuty’s total sales with direct sales accounting for the bulk of the company’s revenue. While the company intends to substantially increase the channel’s share of sales, Hoyt declined to disclose specific goals, citing the publicly held company’s quiet period.

“It’s important that SHI‘s vendor partners are focused not only on the value delivered to our shared customers, but also the value delivered to our partnership,” said Melissa Graham, senior vice president of global enterprise sales at SHI International, a PagerDuty partner. “Having a global sales leader that drives creativity and execution of the economics, programs and ease of doing business processes are essential aspects of any great partnership. We’ve been able to build meaningful partnerships previously with Timm and his team, and now are looking forward to doing so again with PagerDuty into the future,” Graham said in a statement to CRN.

The channel chief said his more immediate list of things to do include ensuring that PagerDuty’s sales and marketing organizations are equipped to effectively engage with partners. Strengthening the company’s go-to-market alignment with the AWS field organization and marketplace operations, with whom PagerDuty has a strategic relationship, is also on the list.

As the pandemic winds down, Hoyt is also looking forward to meeting more of his PagerDuty colleagues in person and hitting the road to meet with partners.