Mike Maciag, Chief Marketing Officer, Dynatrace
By Jarrett Banks
With application portfolios increasingly shifting to the cloud, Exec Edge sat down with Dynatrace Inc.’s (Ticker: DT) Chief Marketing Officer Mike Maciag to find out more about this seismic business shift.
As companies look to implement a hybrid-cloud architecture for workloads that require performance monitoring and analytics across multiple clouds, more than 50 percent of application portfolios will be on the cloud in the next five years. The surge in apps available in the cloud adds to the IT monitoring complexity, which cloud-native solutions offered by Dynatrace are well suited to address.
Despite a pandemic-driven pullback in IT spending, Dynatrace’s long-term growth prospects look solid, as enterprise clients may accelerate workload migrations to the cloud once the economy rebounds.
Exec Edge: What does Dynatrace do and what type of clients do you work with?
At the highest level, Dynatrace provides software intelligence to simplify cloud complexity and accelerate digital transformation for the global 15K largest organizations. Our platform combines automation and AI-powered intelligence to provide observability into the multicloud environments that underpin the digital services our customers provide, which define modern banking, manufacturing, healthcare, and so much more.
To power digital services, organizations are shifting from traditional on-premises data centers to multicloud environments with Kubernetes as the orchestration layer. These environments are dynamic, with applications, microservices, containers, and infrastructure coming and going in seconds, and a volume, velocity, and variety of data that’s beyond human capacity to manage. There’s no time to manually configure and instrument them. Everything needs to be automatically watched, analyzed, and adjusted 24×7.
To illustrate, consider driving a car without a dashboard – you would not understand how fast you are going, your vehicle’s temperature, how much gas you have, or if your engine needs service. Now, imagine this scenario in a modern “multicloud” environment, which is 1000-times more complex. Dynatrace provides digital teams with the instrumentation they need to maintain observability into these environments, including the overall performance and the impact on user experience.
Having a single source of truth across the entire cloud stack, including the network, infrastructure, application, and user experience layers, allows for easier cross-team collaboration and makes digital teams more efficient and effective.
Exec Edge: What is the market outlook for the ‘observability’ space?
The market opportunity is strong. It is driven primarily by two compelling macro trends – digital transformation is accelerating, and it is cloud-first. Businesses and governments are powered by software, and the range and scale of these applications continue to increase daily. IDC projects that over the next three years there will be as many new applications built and deployed as have been built and deployed over the past 40 years.
We are only in the beginning stages of multicloud environment expansion. To maintain operations in these complex environments, companies must implement better workflow processes and lean into AI to streamline manual, routine work that costs organizations an average of $4.8 million per year.
As companies begin to adopt automation and intelligence, they’ll realize the value extends far beyond cost savings, helping them drive revenue, remain connected with customers, and maximize employee productivity.
Exec Edge: How does Dynatrace deliver unique value in the market?
Dynatrace has a strong and expanding leadership position in the observability market. We boast strong financials, a seasoned leadership team, and are a mature business showing both growth and profit. We remain focused on working with the top 15,000 global organizations, and continually invest in our technology as well as our go-to-market capabilities.
Our all-in-one platform, with a unified data model and automation and intelligence capabilities at its core, continues to differentiate us. Instead of stitching on newly acquired tools, we apply the Dynatrace lens, so to speak, to our customers’ expansive IT, DevOps, and business use cases. This provides a time-to-market, efficiency, and cost-of-ownership advantage over general purpose data analytics solutions.
Exec Edge: What’s new with Dynatrace?
This past month, we announced our entrance into cloud application security. Just as we redefined the observability market, leveraging the transformative impact of the modern cloud, we’re doing it again in application security, a market which we estimate will grow to $18B by 2025.
According to IDC, by 2022, 90% of new enterprise applications worldwide will be developed as cloud native. Traditional approaches to application security can’t keep up in these constantly changing environments. Despite having multiple tools to manage security threats, organizations continue to have blind spots and uncertainty about exposures and their impact on applications. When vulnerabilities are detected, current approaches require manual processes that deliver imprecise risk and impact analysis and force teams to waste time chasing false positives. In addition, accelerated innovation and DevSecOps processes have placed more responsibility on developers to ensure code doesn’t have vulnerabilities. With no time for teams to manually analyze, assess, and manage risks, even the most common and well-documented vulnerabilities can remain undetected and open for hackers to exploit.
The Dynatrace Application Security Module provides continuous runtime application self-protection (RASP) capabilities for applications in production as well as preproduction and is optimized for Kubernetes architectures and DevSecOps approaches. This module inherits the automation, AI, scalability, and enterprise-grade robustness of the Dynatrace Platform. Our customers can launch it with the flip of a switch, empowering the world’s leading organizations currently using the Dynatrace platform to immediately increase security coverage and precision.
Exec Edge: Dynatrace has reported 120% net expansion for ten consecutive quarters now, and total revenue growth holding steady around 35%. How have you been able to sustain growth, and what does this mean for the future?
Dynatrace’s platform-approach with automation and intelligence at the core makes it an attractive option for organizations looking to make their digital transformation easier and faster. Customers that have used the platform recognize the value that automation and intelligence can have on their business, and this empowers them to want to explore more opportunities with us, especially as their cloud environments continue to grow in complexity.
We continue to invest aggressively in expanding our platform’s functionality, broadening the use cases covered by our existing modules and extending beyond the modules we offer today. This helps us attract new customers and expand usage among existing customers, based on their needs.
