Today's applications are no longer just monolithic applications housed in tightly monitored and secured on-premise data centers. Not only is the application itself programmable, but the application stack that runs it, and the underlying infrastructure it all lies upon, are all now entirely programmable.
It is the age of automation of application stacks.... of distributed application architectures that use SOA and microservices... of distributed infrastructure that lies on-prem, in the cloud, or across clouds, that must shrink or grow as needed... or of no infrastructure at all, as cloud workloads move more and more into serverless environments. Customers need better tooling to manage multiple development stages (dev, test, staging, production), across any environment or cloud. Deployments could be centralized on one cloud, or scattered globally across many, and now even into edge networks. It is now a land grab for DevOps tooling, between developer pipeline tools, observability platforms, application cybersecurity, and incident management platforms.
Datadog can help its customers adapt through it all, as they migrate to the cloud and better hone their application stacks to natively leverage the cloud's capabilities. I've been enamored with them since their IPO in Dec-19, and it has remained a top holding of mine since – with a position fluctuating between 9-16%. However, since then, I haven't written on it much, so it's finally time to revisit what Datadog is providing, and how it can be an essential tool as companies migrate to cloud infrastructure and, most especially, cloud application workloads.
Datadog ticks off many boxes in what I look for in hypergrowth. It provides necessary tooling for development, and has been experiencing hypergrowth since IPOing. It is excelling at Land and Expand, as shown in its high customer growth and NRR consistently over 130%, with the number of enterprise customers growing +50% YoY, while having 75% of new customer lands being for multiple products. It has a customer-driven product roadmap that drives that expand, and demonstrates a fantastic release cadence from the product team. It is API-driven, providing the building blocks that allow DevOps workflows to be instrumented around its platform, and for deep integrations from partnering platforms.