Dynatrace, Inc. (DT) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everybody. Day 2 of the Goldman Sachs Communacopia & Technology Conference. What a real delight to be able to host you all. Like I said, a couple of statistics, we have about 2,600 registrants at the conference, a little over 200 companies, thanks to your attendance as well. So we are able to line up some really good quality content. Day 2, we've got one more day to go. And it's just gaining more and more momentum, especially day 2 starting off with coffee break with Dynatrace. I'm just calling that term, it's not the official title of the presentation. Rick is a repeat guest here. Thank you once again for coming to the conference, and Jim Benson, new CFO of the company, relatively new, right? We'll hear from both of you guys.

I thought maybe to set the stage, first of all, caveat, if you hear me say, let's drill in, double click, segue, drinks on me, had the reception tonight. So we'll try to avoid all these code words that people use the finance community and instead use natural language search, natural language, prompt engineering, just straightforward English language questions, right? So Rick, where do you want the company to be in 5 years? Now it's been 2 years since you joined as CEO. Congratulations for a terrific performance. The last 2 years when you managed the company, you've got in when the economy was strong, and then we went through whatever -- a downturn. We're still not calling for a recession. So you've managed an up-cycle, down-cycle, where do you want the company to be in 5 years?

Sure. Well, first of all, I thank you all for joining us for the first session of the day. Much appreciate it that you got up early to kick off the day with us. Cash in any long-term horizon, I always begin with market. The market opportunity for observability is absolutely enormous, estimated to be in the order of $50 billion. Most of that today continues to be DIY, do-it-yourself. This consists of organizations that are producing internal dashboards, primarily to try to analyze whether they're software loads and workloads are working correctly or not. In our view of the future, you need much more sophisticated tooling and analytics to be able to run the software of the future. And that software is really here today. It is driving an explosion of data, a massive increase in its complexity and that's requiring analytics and tooling that we provide from Dynatrace. So market is moving our way and cloud migration, digital transformation is only making it bigger. So that's where the first part is market. Second part is the differentiation of Dynatrace. And this is really where you get into the AI analytics capability that we've had for more than a decade. We didn't start 6 months ago, that we've had for a long period of time, massive data stores with our array of capability that continues to evolve to deliver substantial differentiation in the market, to deliver real answers, not just data. And that really is one of our biggest selling points. In terms of adjacencies, it's going to move from full stack observability to include security, to include log management, to include developer observability and other areas as well.

As you look at this market, what does it take to be successful in the next 4 to 5 years? I mean do you view -- the end markets is not fully appreciating. So you're no longer APM-only company, which is very clear, right? I mean at the moment you joined, you said I'm going to focus on application security, log management. So it continues to surprise us as to how big these adjacencies are and how you could actually leverage core expertise in one thing and quickly develop new -- how are you able to do that? I mean you launched Application Security and that's on track to being a substantial business. What about the company's core engine [indiscernible] develop these products with ease and launch them? What are the core competencies that help you?

Well, this is really -- this is, in many ways, the keys to the kingdom of Dynatrace is our core technology. We have capabilities like Grail, for example, massively parallel processing data [indiscernible], took us over 4 years to develop. In the market today, deployed and used by customers. It provides massive analytics capabilities.

Is it like a Snowflake or Databricks?

You can think of that as a purpose-built Snowflake for observability capabilities, but importantly, it keeps all data types in context. And that is a huge differentiator. In observability, many, many different other vendors in the space will treat logs, traces, metrics, really the core route data sources independently. And Grail, we store all of those together combined, and we retain them in context. That enables us to provide an analytics engine on top of that using our Davis AI Engine that becomes very compelling because now you can access all of these data types in context, to get to root cause analytics very rapidly, very efficiently.

We just didn't know about Grail, but it's been around for quite some time.

Well, Grail, we launched in October of last year. So it's been still pretty new to market but for example, everybody who is -- every one of our customers that's on AWS, that is in a SaaS environment is already using Grail today. So it's -- didn't require a migration, it had happened in the background, they're already using it, already get the benefit of it.

Yes. I've got to tell you -- I've got to do Jim in a second, but your user conference, which I attended. I was blown away by looking at all the demos. I mean the more the demos you see and [indiscernible] and get deep in, there's solid technology behind this. I mean these Austrian engineers who sit there and [indiscernible].

And I think a key word that Rick did use, but probably will hear coming up is unified. Everything is unified in a common platform. So this is not technologies that are like adjacent technologies that you stitch together. Everything is unified in one common platform. And that truly is the secret sauce of the company.

So Jim, back to you now, tell us about yourself, you must have done a few public conferences. People know you. You have been a public company CFO. What do you see as mission unaccomplished for Dynatrace that you want to work on [indiscernible] strategic objectives?

Well, so I've been here, it will be a year in December. So interestingly enough, similar to Rick that really the big driver of me coming here was I looked at the market opportunity. I knew the space a little bit before coming here. And so I'm a believer in significant workloads continuing to move into complex multi-cloud environments. And so the need for observability is becoming more and more important. And so I believe in the space, it's exploding. So I looked at the space and I said, I checked the box. This is an exciting space. And then I did some channel checks on the company itself. And what makes truly great companies is technology. And the technology in this company is unmatched. It's obviously, you've read, independent industry analysts that recognize what Dynatrace has been for over -- I think it's been 13 years in the top Magic Quadrant and continuing to differentiate itself. So great technology and actually easy to integrate technology because sometimes great technology can be difficult to work with [indiscernible] easy-to-integrate technology. And the last thing was, I really liked the financial model of the company. The financial model of the company has always been balanced growth and profitability, which makes a lot of sense, and that really wasn't in vogue 2 years ago, and now it's becoming more in vogue. And so I think to your point, what's -- what means -- I think this -- we have the juice in this company for this company to be a $3 billion to $5 billion company in the not-too-distant future. And so it's all about scaling. It's scaling on the go-to-market side. On the technology side, obviously, you need to continue to scale on the technology side, but I feel pretty good about that. We have some work to do on the go-to-market side relative to GSI partnerships and working more with the hyperscalers. So I think these are good problems and fun problems to work on because they're growth-oriented problems. The company has been well managed, and I'm excited to be here.

That's great. That's great. So look, I have gotten this question every once in a while, and maybe I thought I would just ask any of you. So there's a perception, perception can be very different from reality. So a company called Compuware, mainframe or into technology, so Dynatrace, how much of this technology is new versus something coming out of Compuware? Help us disabuse the notion, how much of Dynatrace is still from Compuware or none or what is the [indiscernible].

Yes. I mean Compuware was ancient history. I wouldn't factor any attribution to Compuware at this point.

Yes. I get that from time to time, and try telling people that they didn't do APM.

No, it's moved well beyond that. I mean the secret cash of Dynatrace, as Jim alluded to, is our incredible ability to deliver answers from an extraordinary amount of data. And we do that by leveraging all this data in content, apply it with an AI engine that then delivers true precise answers and automation. And that, as Jim indicated, is just simply unmatched.

Got it. So Jim, to you and then come back to you, Rick, sorry about this. You take on the pulse of the spending environment of the customer and also your prognostication or maybe looking backwards, the ARR dynamics in the most recent quarter, and you were pretty clear talking about how the previous quarter had some [indiscernible] if you can just refresh those dynamics.

Yes. So I would say the spend environment is -- I would characterize it as unchanged. Unchanged means it's still a challenging macro environment. And what does that equate to? Well, challenging macro environment means it equates to longer buying cycles, more approvals, more budget scrutiny, which means deal cycles are getting elongated. I would say the environment we're in is no different than it's been the last couple of quarters. So I'd call it unchanged, but still somewhat challenged. I will say though that even in a challenging environment, customers are buying observability. And so they have put observability as an area of criticality that continues to spend on that. Now they may not be spending at the level they were maybe a year ago. But -- so it is a -- it's still viewed as a critical component. And so I'd say what we're doing now is we're navigating within that environment. And relative to ARR, we actually feel pretty good. We had a good start to the year. We exceeded kind of our own internal guidance expectations that we set. I think as you know, I was very clear that I thought that the mix of ARR would be a little bit more back-end loaded into the back half of the year.

The build-up of net new ARR.

Right. The net new ARR was going to be more in the back half of the year than the front half of the year. And part of that was we had a fantastic end to our fiscal year. We had a blowout fourth quarter and we indicated that in the fourth quarter that we had about $13 million of call it, early expansions. And those were expansions that would have taken place more naturally in Q1, but customers bought earlier. And so when we look at Q1, we kind of exceeded the internal guidance that we set. We maintained it. And I think that there were some people that said, well, geez, you beat, why didn't you increase the guide. And I think the way I look at it, cash is -- I told the investor community that we'd probably be 35% in the first half, 65% in the second half for net new ARR. So call it, you have one quarter under your belt, call it, 18% of the year is done. I think I would have been kidding myself and you to tell you that we had that much visibility that I would change the guidance. I still have strong conviction that we can deliver what we outlined. But I just didn't think it was prudent to do that. And so we maintain the guide. And again, we had a strong Q1 both on the top line perspective and the bottom line perspective. So we inched up our operating margin guidance for the full year to almost 25.5% to 26%. So we're kind of in a rare ARR relative to profitability for the company. And we're just trying to maintain prudence, given the macro environment because what we have found is that deals can happen in one quarter versus the next. And it's difficult to judge whether or not it's going to happen in this quarter or the next quarter and we just felt...

That drives net new ARR so that can be pretty volatile. And to give you guys credit, not many companies disclose net new ARR. So -- and you do. We appreciate the transparency there. And we appreciate that it can move around from quarter 1. There's the opportunity, right if you take the [indiscernible].

Yes. One thing I can promise you, and Rick, I know feels the same way that we are very open and honest with the investor community. So what you see is what you get.

I hope the other companies also disclose net new ARR. Maybe Adobe does and you guys do, and I'm not sure if anybody else really does.

Not many.

So look, on AI, I was going through a list of what I should ask you about a week back or so. And I was pouring deep through your hypermodal AI Davis, Causal AI, Predictive, and I said to myself, man, I knew that after [indiscernible] user conference, the guts of this company technologically speaking, were really, really solid. But then this stuff is just mind-blowing, right? I don't know where to start. It is such an elegant framework that you've laid out. How would you frame this whole AI discussion in the context of Davis, which has already been an engine for quite some time, then you have predictive capabilities and you have generative capabilities, help us frame the whole hypermodal AI discussion, if you don't mind.

Great. Well, as I said, at the outset cash, AI is one of the core differentiators of Dynatrace and has been for well over a decade. So with the advent of generative AI, this is not new for us. This is something we've been doing for a long time. Now there are various different AI techniques. The AI that Dynatrace has been delivering has been in the area of causal AI and predictive AI for a long time. Causal AI is designed to evaluate precisely based on all these data types, what is happening in your environment and getting to a root cause. As soon as something gets out of alignment, then Causal AI can help determine precisely what the issue is and how to get it resolved. Predictive AI takes Causal AI to the next level, where you then apply machine learning to Causal AI to be able to predict when something is about to go wrong. At the end of the day, our vision is to deliver software that works perfectly for [indiscernible] customers to do so. And so it can't break and get fixed quickly to do that. You actually have to be able to predict when it's going to go out of alignment and then correct it in advance, Predictive AI does this. Generative AI then is a newer technique that obviously is much valued in the market right now that is really driven by productivity. Generative AI delivers substantial improvement in productivity, whether it is writing source code, providing data to a customer support individual that is better than they would otherwise know, et cetera. But it is only as good as the underlying data set. So if Generative AI is using a faulty data set, then you're going to get results that aren't what you expect. Putting together Generative AI with all its productivity benefits in concert with Causal AI and Predictive AI gives you an incredibly powerful result, gives you the productivity benefits of Generative AI, along with the very deterministic precise analytics Causal AI and Predictive AI. So what we do is we're not just delivering Generative AI to provide a natural language interface against data that isn't giving you precise answers. We are providing a Generative AI interface to get very precise answers coming out of Causal AI and Predictive AI. It is the combination of those 3 elements that we call hypermodal AI, which simply doesn't exist from any other provider in the space because they don't have the Causal AI and Predictive AI techniques that are underlying.

And is this something of a brand that is going to be the launchpad for the new Dynatrace hypermodal AI? I mean where do you see this going? And is this something -- is like a framework? Or is it a product? How do you price this hypermodal capability?

The AI solutions are simply part of all of our platform. And we have a series of core technologies. Grail, I mentioned, is a massively parallel processing data store. We have Davis AI which is expanding to include hypermodal AI. We have PurePath which provides dynamic tracing. So we have these capabilities that are in the core technology of the company and the core technology of the platform. And then sitting on top of that are the elements that we sell. So hypermodal AI will be part of that. We do -- it's early. We do expect to price incrementally for the Generative AI piece at the moment. But this will be released later this year.

Got it. Okay. The Generative AI piece off the whole framework will be -- and so you've not determined pricing yet.

No.

But it will be a new SKU that adds on to the Predictive and Causal?

It will be a new capability that gets added into Causal and Predictive AI that you already have as part of the base platform.

Got it. Is there where Davis CoPilot comes in?

Davis CoPilot is the Generative AI piece of hypermodal layout.

Got it. So we're all going to have -- I think my clients have heard me say this bad joke so many times yesterday, but we'll have more co-pilots than pilots.

Well, that may be -- that's [indiscernible] that may be true.

Another poor joke is that an on-prem company cannot really have Generative AI, you know why? Because you don't need a co-pilot when you're on-prem.

When you're on-prem. Okay.

In the cloud media, pilot and co-pilot.

I thought you said you were going to avoid double clicks and...

Did I say double click?

Yes. No, you did it.

Drinks on me then. So the industry is at a point where we've got the likes of Microsoft ServiceNow that have announced pricing and packaging. Do you think the budgets will bear an additional lift? And if so, how does the customer pay for this stuff? Is it productivity savings? I mean how do you justify why people pay more?

You're talking about AI?

Generative AI piece.

I think there's 2 pieces to it. So put aside whether or not you price maybe separately for Davis CoPilot. And we're working right now on monetization models around what we will do in that space. But even beyond pricing that separately, just having these capabilities cash means you're going to potentially have more people leveraging the capability because of natural language, other people, other users can use it, makes the platform stickier. It allows for more workloads to be monitored and so there's just a natural lift that you're going to get, even if you didn't price separately for the Generative AI component. But as Rick said, that we expect to have Davis CoPilot available at the end of the calendar year in general availability and we'll determine what the pricing model is for that. And again, I think we haven't talked about it, but you know we have a new contracting vehicle with DPS. And for folks that don't know what DPS is, it's the Dynatrace Platform Subscription. And it's basically a new way of leveraging Dynatrace as opposed to buying specific product SKUs, which is what we do today. You basically commit to a dollar amount over a finite period, it could be 12 months, could be 36 months. And you basically get access to the entire Dynatrace platform with a rate card, rate card for all of the capabilities. And so it provides a tremendous amount of flexibility for customers to be able to leverage different parts of the Dynatrace platform as opposed to contracting separately, which was the pain point for customers that if they wanted to try application security but they hadn't bought it initially, they had to contract separately with us. So we think it's going to be a new -- an important vehicle and things like Davis CoPilot. Well, we've hired that, it's part of the platform. It's just a -- it's a capability that you get and there'll be a rate card associated with it. And we expect this model with more and more customers leveraging will be ARR-accretive to a model that is, let's face it, very go-to-market sensitive because it requires another engagement with the customer.

Exactly, exactly. So do you foresee this being consumption-based price and delivered on a consumption basis, the Generative AI capability?

Yes. So that's right. I would -- the way to think about DPS is you commit to a dollar amount. So from an accounting and financial perspective, it's no different than what we do today. Customer commits 12 months, 36 months. Payment in advance for one year or whatever your contracting vehicle is. And the revenue recognition is the same. It's ratable. So even though it's a consumption-based model, the consumption drawdown, it's still ratable [indiscernible] revenue recognition. And then you're right, the customers consume and as they consume, they burn through whatever their commitment is. And we provide -- one of the things that we're doing that I think is really important for customers is we're providing very good telemetry and visibility for them around how much they're consuming and predictive using predictive models that allow them to say, okay, at current course and speed, you may burn through your commitment earlier. And so we're providing that because, as you know, customers are very conscious of what their budgeting spend is. And in many cases, our competitors, they'll be hit with a bill, that is a surprise. And we want to make sure no one is surprised with this vehicle. So we actually think we have the right attributes. It's -- and now it's a matter of getting more penetration in the field. And again, it's not a forced migration. The customers can choose if they want to buy in a product SKU model, they still can. But we think more and more customers will leverage this as a contracting vehicle.

Do you have any beta customers that are trying out besides Dynatrace?

Beta customers? Yes. Well, so DPS, we've had [indiscernible].

You mean on CoPilot? No, not yet.

Got it. Okay. So -- but the [indiscernible] will still happen by the end of this calendar year?

That's the plan.

Okay. Got it. Got it. Got it. So Rick, you launched security analytics. I mean that's been the thing that has been on your mind since you joined the company. Is this part of the AppSec or is it stand-alone? Help us dig into this whole idea of security analytics and whether that fits into the Dynatrace journey going forward because it had not been a part of the story before you joined.

Well, it was, but it was just beginning to get infused with Application Security. We believe quite strongly that Application Security and observability converge over the course of time. Why is this? It is because the analytics and observability provides are very useful in addressing security use cases. The security analytics piece that you mentioned is very much part of our Application Security offering. And it is designed to take advantage of Davis AI and Grail and so what you're getting is you're getting the advantage of the underlying technology of Dynatrace applied to security use cases. So that's what security analytics will do.

And this does require selling to the CISO, which is a different -- who is a different audience versus the [indiscernible].

It can be. The observability buyer that tends to be an IT operations type buyer or it could be the CISO. So either one of those is feasible here. But to take you through an example. So when Log4j occurred in late 2021, which was a significant vulnerability in an open-source library, many companies were trying to assess precisely where they were calling this library of their vast array of code and how to then manage patch. We could tell them based on observability analytics precisely where they were calling it and how often they were calling it at run time. This set of analytics came from the observability side of the equation, but applied to a vulnerability or application security use case. So it is that integration that can provide incredible synergistic value add.

That's great. So Jim, back to you now. We had some targets you set aside for AppSec, Grail. How are they tracking towards these goals that you've established?

Yes, just to level set, so the targets you're referring to is we said that the Application Security would be a $100 million ARR business within 3 years. And we said we thought that log management and analytics would be $100 million within 2 years. We've been at, obviously, Application Security much longer than log management and analytics, and we're tracking well on the Application Security side. So we feel very good about delivering against that ambition. And we feel really good about log management analytics that we already have a handful of customers, notably even one in Q4 that was a 7-figure deal, leveraging log management and analytics. We have a tremendous number of POCs going on right now. As you know, people start trialing on the log management analytics side. And then our expectation is we'll see more traction on log management and analytics in the back half of the year as POCs convert into new deals. So we feel good about both earlier on the log management side. But I would tell you that I think the opportunity is bigger on the log management side longer term. And it's a matter of getting more customers on POCs and getting more conversions. And I think we feel pretty good about where we are.

[indiscernible] pulse check. By the way, pulse check is not excluded. That's not a cliche term. Anybody has any questions, just raise your hand. If not, I have one. Our economist [indiscernible] has been calling for a soft landing for about a year or so. And when you look at software companies, they've seen decelerating net new [indiscernible], it's not just you guys, but the entire industry. I look at the average growth rate for the companies that are covered, it used to be 26%, 27% last year. You're proud of that [indiscernible] it's like 13 or 14. So there's been this task as everybody is like wired about recession, we pull back spending. It looks like we're going to -- it's a lower property of a recession. So if things are stable and rates, what we've gone through has been truly unprecedented, massive rate increases in 18 months. We kind of survived. Yes, we made it, right? Now if things are more static and we come back to more normal customer behavior, what do you think is the growth rate capability of the company? Could you do better than what we've been through the last 12, 18 months because it's been [indiscernible] to clear, and now it looks like it is. What does '24 look like for customers and for you guys? More optimistic about next year?

Well, I can certainly take a pass at it. From our perspective, what is the source or what is the result of a weak macro environment. On the positive side, companies still need observability. We deliver software that works better than it otherwise would. And that's always needed. We deliver more efficiency, we deliver better results in that software performance. So the good news is observability has continued to grow much faster than your average that you mentioned earlier. The other piece is that we've certainly not been immune to longer sales cycles, budget scrutiny and on other elements. So in a macro environment that frees up to some extent, then presumably, it gets easier to reaccelerate. Our pipeline has continued to grow and grow very nicely. So that's great. But the amount of coverage that you need in that pipeline to get to the same bookings number has also increased. If that renormalize in an improved macro environment, then you get acceleration in overall bookings and that's what we hope to see.

On that note, Anybody else has any questions here? Yes. Well, Oh, there's a question. Yes, we're going to call questions prompt engineering.

Just interested whether you could comment on the [indiscernible] down a little bit this year, just interested in the moving parts as you see that developing through the back half of this year and into the next kind of year or so as well, that would be great.

You're talking about expansion rate?

Yes.

Yes. Yes. So we had been at a 120% expansion rate for many, many quarters. Expansionary started to slow in the fourth quarter to 119%. We guided for fiscal '24 to be in the mid-teens and mid-teens to me is called 114% to 116%. We landed in Q1 at 116%, so kind of in line with our expectations. And I think some of the slowdown is very much macro-driven. And so what we're seeing on the expansion rate side, I'd characterize this for some investors is that customers that may be used to do a very large expansion, either a time of renewal or maybe when they were getting close to their committed levels, when they used to before to a very large expansion because they were moving more workloads in a more expeditious manner, and they've been more cautious given the macro environment. And so what used to be an expansion that was maybe, call it, a $500,000 expansion. What they're doing now is they're doing a $250,000 expansion and they're saying, you know what, we'll wait until we grow into it. And then we'll do a second expansion if, in fact, we move our workloads faster. So that's kind of what's going on in the expansion rate side. Again, we feel bullish about the longer-term opportunity because some of this is just caution as they move more workloads, expansions will follow. And if you generally look at our portfolio, the portfolio is broader than it was a year ago. So there's an opportunity for more cross-sell for -- within the portfolio. I just think that we have to get -- navigate through this environment, which is an environment of budget kind of cautiousness.

On that note, thank you very much, Rick, Jim for joining us. Have a wonderful day, and thank you for [indiscernible].

Thanks, Kash. Thanks for coming.