Thanks for the support Antirez. We have still have a many things do to help our customers even more.
Also, thanks for you work on Redis and your essays (such as this one[1]). These are helping many startups reach needed scalability and fault tolerance.
More startups should do business to business IMHO.
Agreed. B2B is the space we're playing in at Fogbeam. Specifically, Open Source Enterprise Software at the intersection of Knowledge Management, Collaboration and BPM. We think most "enterprise social software" is a fairly useless replacement for / complement to, email. We're aiming for actually integrating "social" software into workflows and processes in a way that adds real value.
Maybe it's just me, but I honestly find consumer facing apps kinda boring. I see the enterprise space as having more interesting challenges to solve and fun problems to deal with, as opposed to creating the next "share pictures of cats doing silly stuff" site. :-)
Anyway, it's interesting to see this news, as we're not trying to raise money right now; but I was talking to somebody from a16z just yesterday and said "if we were trying to raise, we'd probably be trying to talk to you guys". They seem more specifically interested in the enterprise space than any other VC firm I'm familiar with.
Unfortunately we're on the East Coast (RTP, NC), and the a16z partner said that, while they are open to doing deals here, they would probably only do a follow-on round after local VCs. Which, to be fair, I can totally understand that.
That said, our hope is that we can bootstrap to profitability without ever taking outside money at all, but that may or may not prove to be realistic.
At first I thought, "why the heck would I pay these guys?" I can get nagios to do this for me. But, I was totally wrong. I see the value. PD seems like a really cool product that I'll have to try out. Thank you HackerNews!
PagerDuty is an awesome product, and Alex is a super nice guy. It's a great combination of a not-incredibly-sexy area with hair-on-fire customers. Really excited to see them continuing to grow out and help people.
Short answer is availability - we have three datacenters, and redundant connectivity around the globe. We have 12 of the Fortune 100 as customers for this reason.
Others:
Our phone and SMS alerts read the text of the alert to you, and you can ack/resolve/escalate right from there.
Centralized management of all alerting
If you lose a rack, we wake you up and tell you you have a thousand incidents, we don't page you a thousand times (and DoS your phone in the process)
Super-simple drag-and-drop scheduling
Easy multi-timezone rotations
Fantastic REST API
Happy to elaborate if you're interested - email is in profile.
Guessing a large portion of that funding go towards marketing. They've likely proven that their acquisition costs can scale profitably. They should grab customers before others come along with a similar offering.
We sincerely appreciate the support that so many of you have given us. If you'd like to let us know what you'd like us to build next, please vote on our UserVoice page: http://feedback.pagerduty.com/forums/18293-general
Also - we have an iPhone app now! It's in the App Store.
Didn't see this on the feedback section (granted, I didn't look through each page). Y'all should think about also having Disaster notifications for the general business. I know for my company disaster recovery planning is a big deal. Having the ability to initiate a DRP due to system alert, or manually and then have it blast to a call tree would be huge.
Well, it's the best product. Believe it or not, a lot of telcos still have pager backbones in production. Pacwest in California has something like 100k+ pagers still active.
AWS has an engineering team of 10,000+ people? Can that be right given Amazon has 56,000 or so total? Surely they meant an engineering team of 1,000 people.
Rackspace generates $1.2x billion in sales with about half that many total employees (not just on their engineering team). By most accounts I've seen, AWS is around a billion in sales as well.
More startups should do business to business IMHO.