Olivier Pomel
Analyst · Morgan Stanley. Your line is now open
Thank you, AJ, and thank you all for joining us today for our Q3 earnings call, which is our first as a public company. My co-founder, Alexis and I started Datadog about nine years ago with a mission to break down silos between developers and IT operations teams. Today, we are the monitoring and analytics platform for dev, ops and business users. We provide clarity and actionable insights into software applications and IT infrastructure all in real time. We exist so that our customers can understand everything that happens in their technology stack enabling them to deliver greater innovation, provide an exceptional user experience and achieve faster resolution of performance issues. While we are very proud of the company we have built, we’re even more excited for the future and a tremendous opportunity ahead of us. I would like to start with a quick review of our business and financial results. For the third quarter, revenue was $95.9 million, an 88% increase year-over-year. Non-GAAP operating income was $638,000, or a margin of 0.7%. We ended the quarter with 727 customers with annual run rate revenue, or ARR, of $100,000 or more, which is a 93% increase from a year ago. We achieved this while maintaining an efficient tax payback. As in past quarter, our dollar-based net retention rate was over 130% as customers increased our usage and adopted our new products. And we also continue to be capital efficient as our cash provided by operating activities in Q3 was $3.8 million and year-to-date $6.8 million. Since, this is our first call as a public company, I would like to spend a few minutes providing an overview of our market opportunity, our product, and our go-to-market, before I review our third quarter highlights. As you all know, a massive IT platforming is underway. Companies are moving from static on-premise IT architecture to public and private cloud as well as other ephemeral technologies like containers, microservices and serverless computing. These newer technologies allow for increased agility and innovation, but also compound complexity in ITs role. Meanwhile, historically separate developers and IT operations teams must come together in order to manage it chaos and better collaborate around a shared view of the IT stack. As businesses are becoming more and more digital, these challenges are affecting companies across all industries, geographies and sizes. We believe we are at the very early stages of essential market opportunity, which we estimate to be approximately $35 billion based on our bottom-up calculation. From a product perspective Datadog was founded in 2010 as a real time data integration platform that turns the chaos from disparate sources into digestible and actionable insights. Our vision was a single platform that would provide dev and ops users with a common view across sources, teams, and technologies. In 2012, we launched our initial use case infrastructure monitoring. Starting with infrastructure, gave us broad deployment across that environment and ubiquity across dev and ops users. In other words, we were deployed everywhere and used by everyone. Since initial launch, we have continue to innovate across more environments including containers and serverless as well as on-premise hybrid product in multi-cloud environments. Because problems rarely stop at the boundary between infrastructure and application, we saw a need for full-stack observability and we launched Datadog Application Performance Management or APM in 2017. We quickly added Datadog Log management in 2018 thus completing what we like to call the three pillars of observability. Earlier this year we also launched Datadog Synthetics to extend it to user experience monitoring by letting our customers simulate user journeys on their web applications in API endpoints. All our products, features and functionalities are offered within the same tightly integrated platform or customers can frictionlessly add-up new products or from this end user interface and powered by a common data model. We believe we win in the market for a few reasons. One we are a truly integrated platform allowing us to solve our customers end-to-end problems and innovate rapidly. Two, we were built for the modern dynamic stack offering end-to-end visibility. Three, we are simple but not simplistic, easy to install with no professional services. And four we are designed for use in collaboration across development operations and business team. From a business model perspective, we have an efficient operating model which has enabled us to achieve best-in-class growth and very modest cash burn. Despite significant and ongoing investment in R&D and sales and marketing we have only burned approximately $30 million in cash since we began. We had a very strong cash pay back. This allows us to continue to invest in our product and solve more problems for our customers. With that in mind, let’s review our third quarter performance. Overall, we are very pleased with our results. Strength was broad-based driven by both robust new logo additions as well as continued growth of existing customers. Our platform strategy is clearly resonating including strong initial uptake of synthetics product in the quarter. From the R&D perspective, we continue to invest in our product suite. And we announced over 15 new products, features and functionalities this July at Dash, our annual user conference. One of the products we announced was Network Performance Monitoring to allow customers to visualize the flow of network traffic in both club base and hybrid environments. It is an extremely lightweight solution that is compatible with all major cloud providers and on-premise servers, giving customers the flexibility to monitor network traffic without sacrificing performance. Another new product was Real User Monitoring, which compliments synthetics for user experience monitoring. It allows customers to analyze the performance of applications directly experienced by the end users. We also continue to iterate on our existing solutions. For instance, Log Rehydration allows our customers to load our catalogs into the Datadog platform, to enable full indexing and analysis. And as a reminder the model allows us to chart for data indexing separate from ingestion. We added several service level objectives to our platform, allowing customers to easily track SLOs, which are relevant to both engineers and business users. And additionally, we announced enhancements to our machine learning and AI capabilities. Watchdog, our always on detection engine, now automatically surfaces anomalies within the infrastructure in APM portable platform. Metric coalition is another new feature that will analyze any metric exiting unusual trend and actively search for others that are displaying a similar pattern. And trace outliers will automatically analyze all incoming APM traffic following our customers who easily spot meaningful outliers. Last but not least, another exciting development we announced in October is that Datadog is currently in process for FedRAMP certification. And we’re very excited by the potential to extend our addressable market to U.S. Federal departments and agencies. As a quick note, to products announced at Dash in beta and we are not yet charging our customers for them. Now switching gears to talk about products, we already charge for. In Q3 we began charging for synthetics, which has good enough to a very strong start. This is in line with our traffic cut of new product introductions as our unified SaaS platform allows customers to adopt new products without any friction. In Q3 we saw strong adoption of our newer products from both new and existing customers. As evidence of our strong platform adoption, approximately 50% of our customers were using two or more products at the end of Q3, which is up from 40% last quarter and 15% a year ago. And we point out that our newer products are no more than about 2.5 years old. As I mentioned before, we have continued to invest in R&D. For the year-to-date period to Q3 non-GAAP R&D expense was 30% of revenue, which is an increase from 27% in the year ago period. Even our platform strategy and our proven track record of efficiently developing and selling newer products, we plan to continue to invest meaningfully in R&D. That’s it for products. Onto the go-to-market side. In the third quarter we saw strong new logo additions as well as extension from existing customers. As of the end of the third quarter, we had approximately 9,500 customers up from 7,100 a year ago. We ended with 727 customers with an ARR of $100,000 or more, up 93% from year ago, at an increase of more than 130 in the quarter alone. Given that more than 70% of our ARR is generated from customers over $100,000, we expect this cohort of customers to be a large driver of our future growth. Now let’s review some our key wins in the quarter. First, one of our new customers is a multinational telecom provider out of Europe. This customer adopted Datadog to support the e-commerce site ahead of the new iPhone launch. Our platform enabled them to have a successful launch without any major performance issues, but other carriers in the country experienced website outages because of traffic surges. This initial six-figure lens includes all three pillars, infrastructure, APM and logs as well as synthetics, second, an established Fortune 500 retailers had a six-figure upsell. This customer adopted infrastructure monitoring in 2017, followed by both APM and logs in 2018 and more recently synthetics. Over 100 of their internal teams are using Datadog as they adopt Microsoft Azure and container technologies. This customer spend with us has grown more than 5x since our initial deal and we believe there is still a lot more room for growth. Next, one of our largest Q3 deals was a seven-figure three pillars new logo from the higher education software and services company. These mid-market customers with fewer than 5,000 employees demonstrate the spending power of even midsized companies as they come to Datadog as a strategic partner to support the digital businesses. Finally, a large Europe based shipping and logistics company, was origins dating back over 100 years had a six-figure upsell in the quarter. This company was previously using built-in cloud provider monitoring tools which lacked the ability to correlate front and back-end issues. And this is a powerful example of how Datadog enables companies in origin and industries who are in the middle of their digital transformation. As we said during the IPO, we continue to invest in our go-to-market. This includes growing quota carrying reps by 70% year-over-year. As of the end of Q3, we do experience high returns on our sales and marketing investments benefiting from more very efficient business model and driven by our land-and-expand go-to-market. As evidence of our business model efficiency, our cash payback continues to be approximately one year and we intend to continue investing meaningfully in our sales and marketing efforts globally. With that, I would like to turn the call over to our Chief Financial Officer, David Obstler. David?