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(View the original posting of this article on DevOps.com)

Digital transformation may seem like the enterprise tech buzzword of the moment, but it completely came to life for attendees at the inaugural PagerDuty Summit. C-level executives, industry leaders, developers and IT operators all came together to discuss why and how companies are navigating our digital world with operational maturity and excellence.

PagerDuty Summit was described as one jam-packed day filled with an impressive lineup of speakers, panelists and industry leaders including Gene Kim, author, researcher and founder of IT Revolution; Maynard Webb, chairman of the board at Yahoo!; and execs and ITOps folks from Google, IBM, Airbnb, Netflix, Splunk and more.

Digital Dependencies

Jennifer Tejada, PagerDuty’s CEO, kicked off the conference with an opening keynote noting digital is no longer just a convenience, but a dependency. Based on the flurry of tweets from the audience, her message about the importance of delivering digital experiences to consumers and how DevOps fits into the greater picture resonated with the audience of C-level execs, VCs, IT managers and engineers alike. Tejada pointed out how the importance of micro-moments matter in a world where the stakes are higher than ever before and just how much the end-user experience suffers if applications or services go down.

Getting the Crucial DevOps Piece Right

Soon after, Gene Kim took the stage to share his top five DevOps surprises and learnings for digital transformation, delivering key insights from his 17-year journey of studying high-performing technology organizations. He was preaching to the choir when he noted that the business value of DevOps is even higher than thought, and all agreed that he made a compelling case for the importance of measuring code deployment lead time. Surprise No. 5 on Kim’s list was that DevOps isn’t just for the unicorns; it’s for the horses, too. DevOps enables dynamic, learning organizations—and, equally as important, digital transformation itself, for companies in all walks of life, whether they are legacy enterprises or agile startups.

Twitter activity made it clear that attendees were particularly pleased to receive advance copies of Kim’s latest book, “The DevOps Handbook,” which has been five years in the making.

Highlighting New Features

No event would be complete without the announcement of new features. There were positive reports when PagerDuty took the stage to demo and share details around new platform features to make incident management and response better than ever, including:

•   Workflow Extensions: Building on PagerDuty’s ecosystem of more than 175 native integrations, organizations now can configure operational workflows between PagerDuty and other third-party services. This bi-directional flow of information helps provide consistent information across teams and services for faster incident resolution.

•   Live Call Routing: This feature allows anyone inside the organization to directly reach the operations team to report a problem by simply calling a number. Calls get routed via the same on-call schedules and escalation policies in place, and the ability to report incidents in real-time helps restore services faster.

•   Response Notes: This capability ensures that all relevant contextual and human generated data around incidents are captured and time-stamped, creating a clear timeline of the actions taken and the people involved. Response Notes delivers clear visibility on the current status of incidents and a historical record for postmortems, resulting in a reduction of future resolution times.

Wrapping up PagerDuty Summit 2016

From the fireside chat with Maynard Webb discussing cloud wars, containers and where he sees the industry going over the next five years, and the inspiring breakout sessions on all things ITOps, the first-ever PagerDuty Summit was, from all accounts, both informative and poignant. Attendees said it spoke to how DevOps and operational excellence form the backbone of successful digital initiatives and transformation, and all walked away with strategies, best practices and use cases for adapting to the evolving digital landscape.

For a more in depth look at PagerDuty Summit 2016, visit the blog:https://www.pagerduty.com/blog/pdsummit16-event-recap/.

Joe Franscella is a regular DevOps.com contributor and full time Bhava Communications employee. PagerDuty is a Bhava Communications client, but Joe Franscella does not work on the company’s account.