PagerDuty And TCS To Unveil Strategic Alliance Centered On Digital Operations Management

IT services and consulting giant Tata Consultancy Services will provide clients with solutions and services incorporating the PagerDuty platform, jointly developed by the two companies in a new solutions service center.

Global IT services provider Tata Consultancy Services will announce Tuesday a strategic agreement with PagerDuty through which the two will offer PagerDuty’s digital operations management and incident response platform as the foundation for a range of IT operations and digital transformation solutions and services.

The two companies will also jointly build and operate a PagerDuty-TCS Solutions Service Center within TCS to develop and implement digital solutions for joint customers worldwide in such areas as infrastructure managed services, cloud migration, ITOps and DevOps modernization, customer service and security operations.

The center, co-funded by the two companies, will also develop and implement industry-specific solutions, services and use cases around the PagerDuty platform.

[Related: COVID-19 Accelerating Digital Transformation: McKinsey]

“Our customers will benefit greatly from the [PagerDuty] real-time operating management platform,” said Gopinathan Krishnaswami, senior general manager and global head, software segment, hitech industry and infrastructure alliances at TCS, in an exclusive interview with CRN. “We have seen such a need from many of our customers.”

The alliance with TCS is PagerDuty’s first partnership with a global IT service provider. And Krishnaswami said the relationship is his company’s first with a digital operations management system developer, adding that: “What PagerDuty has is quite exceptional.”

PagerDuty’s digital operations management and incident response system, with its AI and automation capabilities, is used to detect, identify and diagnose IT issues and opportunities in real time and alert the necessary IT team members to fix problems. The company says the platform can resolve incidents up to 70 percent faster than using traditional approaches.

The PagerDuty platform is used for a range of use cases including DevOps, ITOps, AIOps, security operations, crisis management, cloud migration and digital transformation.

The San Francisco-based company lists General Electric, DoorDash, Zoom, Netflix and Shopify among its customers.

PagerDuty launched a VAR channel program in 2018 for resellers and in May of this year launched the Partner Program for Solution Partners and Managed Service Providers. But until now PagerDuty has only worked with regional and “boutique” systems integrator partners, said Jukka Alanen, PagerDuty’s senior vice president of business development and corporate strategy.

“This is our first global strategic alliance with a leading global systems integrator,” Alanen said, also in an exclusive interview with CRN. But Alanen said partnerships with other global systems integrators are likely in the future.

TCS will join the PagerDuty Partner Program for Solution Partners and Managed Service Providers as part of the alliance.

“All businesses are digital businesses today. The problem that many [businesses] face is that they are not operationally ready to act in this digital, always-on world. Many companies have slow, manual, reactive operations,” Alanen said, specifically citing many companies’ IT operations and DevOps teams.

“What we are trying to do is help our customers transform themselves from this slow, manual, reactive state of operations to a new state of operations that is real time, automated, intelligent and proactive.”

While executives at the two companies tout PagerDuty’s technology, they emphasize that to most effectively help businesses transform their operations, it should be implemented as part of a wider set of solutions and services – sometimes tailored for a specific industry.

“You also need to transform your operating model, you need to transform your business processes, you need to transform your business practices,” Alanen said. “And in many cases, you need more expertise and resources than you have today.

The alliance will especially target potential customers in financial services, retail and ecommerce, media and telecommunications, manufacturing and IT.

TCS brings its domain and industry expertise to the table, especially in such verticals as manufacturing and retail, not to mention its familiarity with its customers’ operations and specific needs. Much of the work developing solutions, implementation blueprints, use cases and integration technology will be done through the new PagerDuty-TCS Solutions Service Center.

The companies will develop integrations between PagerDuty and other IT systems and provide those integrations – even what Krishnaswami called “one-click integrations” – as cloud services. TCS will provide solution architecture and design services, integrated use cases and operational transformation roadmaps around PagerDuty.

TCS sees a lot of its customers asking for the type of digital operations integration that PagerDuty and TCS are offering, according to Krishnaswami. He said it would require a “substantially higher” investment if they tried to build such capabilities on their own.

“The more places you can connect PagerDuty, the more visibility you will have and the more you’ll be able to take action across multiple operations,” Alanen said.