Why PagerDuty (PD) Is Buying Rundeck For $100 Million

By Amit Chowdhry • Sep 22, 2020
  • PagerDuty, Inc. (NYSE:PD) announced this week that it has entered into a definitive agreement to buy Rundeck for about $100 million. These are the details.

Digital operations management company PagerDuty, Inc. (NYSE:PD) announced this week that it has entered into a definitive agreement to buy Rundeck, which is a leading provider of DevOps automation for enterprise. And this acquisition strengthens PagerDuty’s leading incident response offering with intelligent machine automation including auto-remediation and self-healing that bring increased productivity to resolution and recovery efforts.

Rundeck is providing front line incident response teams, including engineering, IT, customer service and security, a self-service way to run automated machine-centric workflows (or runbooks) that prevent, diagnose, and resolve incidents at the push of a button without needing to escalate to an expert. And customers have seen up to 50% reduction in incident response time using Rundeck’s automated runbooks, greatly improving team productivity and reducing poor customer experience.

The company’s automation solutions have achieved strong product to market fit with large enterprises, serving over 150 enterprise and mid market companies — who are seeking to improve the availability of their digital offerings. And Rundeck’s land and expand go-to-market motion starts with DevOps and is founded on an active open source community of over 60,000 users.

As part of the agreement, PagerDuty will acquire Rundeck for a total purchase price of approximately $100 million, subject to adjustment, to be paid approximately 60% in cash and 40% in PagerDuty common stock. This acquisition is subject to certain customary closing conditions and is expected to close in October 2020.

KEY QUOTES:

“Rundeck’s impressive track record in providing scaled automation for DevOps teams in the world’s largest companies, along with their easy to use, practitioner focused offering make them a highly complementary extension for PagerDuty. Together we can now automate unpredictable, emergent work for people and machines, from detection and diagnosis to recovery, remediation and learning, providing the most robust real-time incident response platform in the market. Our 13,300 customers trust us to ensure their digital services remain always on, and now we are ensuring they can do this faster, and more efficiently.”

— Jennifer Tejada, CEO of PagerDuty

“Rundeck was designed to solve difficult, time sensitive challenges for DevOps teams leveraging automation for hybrid infrastructure. With PagerDuty we can accelerate our growth in Enterprise DevOps and IT focused incident response, while continuing to innovate our offering and expand our open source community. Like us, PagerDuty is steeped in DevOps and digital transformation, with unparalleled leadership, trusted by a large, loyal community of users in large enterprise companies and early innovators. We look forward to bringing the power of the most holistic offering in incident response and digital operations to all our customers.”

— Alex Honor, CEO and co-founder of Rundeck

“Bad things happen, so infrastructure and operations professionals need to prepare automated operational responses; correlate performance analytics to predict and avoid incidents; support preventative assessments, drills/game days, and chaos engineering; and use postmortems to improve systems. PagerDuty, a vendor focused on automating incident response, brings presenters to its regional summits to talk about incident command so practitioners can learn and adopt best practices.” 

— Forrester Principal Analyst, Charles Betz