Datadog, Inc.
Q4 2020 Earnings Call Transcript

Published: 12 Feb 2021

[Operator:]

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the Q4 2020 Datadog Earnings Conference Call. Thank you. I would now like to turn the call over to your speaker today, Mr. AJ Ljubich. Please go ahead.

[A.J. Ljubich:]

Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us today to review Datadog’s fourth quarter and full-year 2020 financial results, which we announced in our press release issued after the close of market today.

[Olivier Pomel:]

Thank you, A.J. and thank you all for joining us today. We are very pleased with our performance in Q4, which once again showed high growth at scale and demonstrated efficiencies. Despite the unique challenges presented by COVID, we continued in 2020 to introduce new products at a high velocity, grow top line at a rapid rate and demonstrate strong operating efficiencies. We are in particular, very proud of the way our teams have handled the pandemic as well as other unprecedented challenges. We ended the year with 2,185 employees globally, a 56% increase year-over-year with high growth of both our go-to-market and R&D teams.

[David Obstler:]

Yes. Thanks Olivier. As mentioned, we delivered strong fourth quarter top and bottom line results amid a difficult macro backdrop. Revenue was $177.5 million, up 56% year-over-year against the challenging year-ago comp. New logo generation was very strong, usage trends were solid, platform traction continued to be strong and churn was in line to better than historical norms.

[Operator:]

First question, we do have Sanjit Singh from Morgan Stanley. You are now live.

[Mark Rende:]

This is Mark Rende on for Sanjit. Thanks for taking my questions and congrats on the results and continued strong growth here. First, I just want to quickly get an update on the headwinds you’re seeing at the top line from the lower expansion you saw last summer. It seems like those trends have largely turned around and we should expect another quarter or two to kind of work through those impacts. I guess my question is as we get into the back half of the next year and the growth comps become easier, should we be expecting the combination of easier growth comps and ramping kind of products and partnerships with like Azure to result in an acceleration of growth? Is that an appropriate way for us to be thinking about it?

[David Obstler:]

I think that we’ve given our guidance, taking into account all of the potential upsides and risks, but you are right, the headwinds created in Q2 do create a drag on the revenue growth as we talked about, through Q2 of next year, and while we are not providing that quarterly guidance through next year, we expect that headwind in terms of the comp to abate in the second half of the year.

[Mark Rende:]

Got it. Helpful. And then maybe just on the two acquisitions announced. So on the security side with Sqreen you’re building out quite a portfolio now across observability and security at Datadog. And I guess my question on Sqreen is, kind of, how does this integrate with the core Datadog platform? How does it work with core Datadog versus being a standalone functionality? And then on the Timber purchase, what is the need for an observability data pipeline in the platform? Can you help us kind of better understand what timber is bringing to Datadog and in the platform do my customers really need this functionality? Thanks so much. Really helpful.

[Olivier Pomel:]

Yes. So I’ll take the question on M&A. So on the Sqreen side, what is really interesting is the focus is application security. And application security is one of the areas where the conflict, I would say, between application and that’s basically ops and security is the most present. And the responsibilities are not really clear-cut in there. We think it’s one of the areas where we can show particular strength because our APM is already deployed, it’s already in the heart of the application, and we can inject the security protection and detection in there directly. So we think this is a product that will make a lot of sense to our customers that are using APM and that’s going to be the products the same way basically. So that’s for Sqreen. For Timber and Vector, which is the product, what’s really interesting there is we hear and we see from customers over and over again that they have a number of different data sources that produce logs in particular, but also other kinds of observability data. And many of those sources are legacy system, log management systems, for example. And one thing they want to be able to do is to aggregate all that data before it leaves their own network environment, make sure they have the right privacy controls on them so they can filter PII for example and things like that and then decide to wrap this data to us for example, back to our cloud service. But also maybe two other places, maybe to an archive they want to keep in-house. So what we think this will allow us to do is to satisfy that need from customers, make sure they’re fully in control of the observability data and make it a lot easier for customers to in the end, send us all the data that is relevant to them.

[Operator:]

Next question comes from the line of Chris Merwin from Goldman Sachs. You are now live.

[Chris Merwin:]

Thanks so much for taking my question. I wanted to ask about new land. I think you called out that 75% of those lands are with two or more products. So beyond infrastructure, can you give us a sense of where you’re seeing the strongest traction more recently with the rest of your suite? Thanks.

[Olivier Pomel:]

It’s easy, pretty much in the order of introduction of the products. So the most matured behind that are APM and logs, which are neck and neck in terms of which are the other ones that are getting a dash first. And then you go one step down to Synthetics, and then you go one step down to NPM and RUM, and then you go down to security. So that’s the order, which by the way, I think the question we might get later but we’re planning to invest a lot more, because we see so much success with that platform approach. We see all these products have a pretty interesting growth curve and we think there is a lot more prominent space for us to cover, which is why we are aggressively building the team and hiring and also proceeding to these acquisitions.

[Chris Merwin:]

And just a follow-up, if we look at billings, I mean, on a pro forma basis, I think you said it was up 61% RPO, CRPO was up in the mid-60s, but then the revenue guide for ’21 is in the high-30s. So I realize billings are going to factor in usage. But can you help us think about how to reconcile really strong billings growth we saw exiting ’20 with the revenue growth guide for ’21? Thanks.

[Olivier Pomel:]

Yes. I think we had a strong new logo. We also had as we mentioned an extension of the duration of billings and contracts from our clients. So those were some of the factors that caused the strong performance. We try to get everyone sort of back to the revenue growth and then the linearity within quarter which one can look at ARR, because of the variabilities in billing and RPO due to billings. But we did have strong new sales as well as the extension of duration in the quarter as we mentioned, which contributed to that performance.

[Operator:]

The next one on the line is Sterling Auty from JPMorgan. You are now live.

[Sterling Auty:]

Wanted to revisit the security topic again. And traditionally when we think about WAF adoption that’s usually been the security CISO organization kind of driving that adoption. RASP is a newer area and what I’m curious is do you need a dedicated security sales force to properly penetrate the opportunity or is there enough buying decision and influence coming out of the DevOps areas that your existing sales force can adequately push the security products that you have?

[Olivier Pomel:]

So the short answer to that is we don’t know yet. And first of all the deal is not closed yet. Right. So we are sticking into hypothetical but the companies are not merged yet. But the way we’re seeing it is by starting from an APM product we really lowered the friction that is involved in deploying and application security product, which typically is the problem you have. When you try to deploy a RASP product there is a high friction to deploy and the person who wants to deploy it is not the person who actually has the authority to do it or actually managing the server as managing the application, and we saw that Datadog. So we think it opens up new avenues of frictionlessly deploying those products. Now, how we translate on the go-to-market side and if we need to have specialty sale, we don’t know yet and we’re open to it.

[Sterling Auty:]

All right, great. And then one follow-up would be just in the two-plus products you mentioned kind of the land and the adoptions by the maturity curve, but what I’m curious about is, are you seeing the use cases especially for Log and APM driving into newer areas than what you saw, let’s say, maybe three or four quarters ago? Are you getting expansion of those products in particular new areas of your customers?

[Olivier Pomel:]

So those products are still expanding a lot, right. So the adoption curve for our customer, they usually starts small and then they grow and they expand the products to more and more and more of their business units and various activities. And so Log and APM are not different, but they keep growing with customers that way. So even when we say 70% of the customers have adopted the products, there is still a lot of growth to be had within those customers.

[Operator:]

Next one on the queue is Brad Zelnick from Credit Suisse. You are now live.

[Brad Zelnick:]

Thank you so much and congrats on a strong end to a crazy year. Oli, my question is on Timber. Yes, for sure. My question on Timber is the idea of Vector to be in agnostic data pipeline and to be able to feed data to any observability platform and in that case, how should we think about them rolling that into your offering potentially create competition if you will, amongst observability platforms or am I not thinking about it right to express it that way?

[Olivier Pomel:]

No, you are right. I mean it’s important for - I guess if you have customers who send all the data from all the sources, they have to have some flexibility to send it to various places, right. So that’s actually part of the mix there. We think it actually makes sense for us to do it. Obviously, the integrated experience with Datadog will be fantastic and so that it makes the most sense and it is the most interesting from a value perspective to in Datadog, but it is important for this to be open to cater to the various use cases where customers have another destination they want to consume the data or another source they want to add or some flexibility to filter on the fly with this end. In a way you can see that as an extension of Logging without Limits, which is back into the customers’ infrastructure.

[Brad Zelnick:]

And maybe a follow-up for David. David, how should we think about the level of sales hiring this year and the ability to ramp reps on the entire portfolio, which has expanded quite significantly?

[David Obstler:]

Yes, we’ve been successful last year as well as our plans for this year in ramping sales higher slightly ahead of revenues. So we’ve been, as we talked about in the 60%s, we have plans to do it again. And as we’ve talked about it involves both expanding into new geographies, it involves building out the teams within geographies where we’ve been already successful, and it’s what we did last year and believe we can do it again the next year.

[Operator:]

Next one on the line is Mohit Gogia from Barclays. You are now live.

[Mohit Gogia:]

Thanks for taking my question and all in all congrats on a very strong quarter as well. So my first question is around the Mendix deals that you guys announced last week. So wondering if you can give us more color there. It sounds like Mendix standardizing on Datadog as its observability platform. I think the release also mentioned that you guys replaced the existing incumbents, which were five or six tools that the customer is using. So if you can go into some sort of like the dynamics of your land there or maybe you are already there and expanded from there, but any more color on that customer will be very helpful?

[Olivier Pomel:]

I actually don’t have much more color I can provide because I’m not sure what I can speak to publicly. We didn’t prepare anything for that. But interestingly enough, this was not one of the customers we mentioned in the rest of the call, in the prepared notes.

[David Obstler:]

But I think as Oli has mentioned it. It has to be a press release, but it’s typical of what has been happening with the expansion of the products across the platform where most of the motion is landing smaller and then expanding given the value of the platform to across the product set. So it’s a typical type of motion.

[Mohit Gogia:]

Understood. My follow-up question is for David. So, David, in terms of - so I think you followed up the record new ARR in Q3 with another strong quarter here in Q4. Right. So if I mean obviously we understand the puts and takes to billings and RPO. But if I just look at ARR, it seems to be things coming together very nicely after looks like a slight or rather a dip in Q2. So, like how should we think about the guidance? I know this question was already asked, but if I sort of compare that to next fiscal year guidance versus really two strong quarters of ARR ad, can you help us reconcile that?

[David Obstler:]

Yes. As we said last time and it’s a typical approach, there is lots of positives and we’re very proud of it. But we continue to take a conservative approach towards guidance, given the uncertainty in the world from COVID and what might happen to enterprises. As we said, we’ve seen a less volatile world in terms of both the growth of client usage and new logos, but continue to remain prudent and conservative when we provide guidance as we have in our quarters as a public company.

[Olivier Pomel:]

One thing I will say is, when we look at our metrics internally, use that metrics in particular those are still noisier than they were before the pandemic, because they basically track the way the various economical impacts of the pandemic will go through the world, and the right layers of the economy. And so we want to be a little bit cautious there. It’s people’s behavior that’s changed this year. Like it’s fairly different from what it was the year before. An example of that is typically at the last year or the last week of the year there is a drop in activity because pretty much everyone takes the week-offs and some companies turn off their development environments and things like that. This year it was more pronounced, I think because many people haven’t taken any time off during the year and everybody to get time off at that time. So we want to be little bit careful about what we predict in the future. We’ve learned in Q2 that the numbers can change fast as changes in the economy happen.

[Operator:]

Next question comes from Matt Hedberg from RBC Capital Markets. You are now live.

[Matt Swanson:]

This is actually Matt Swanson on for Matt. Olivier, the strength in multi-product adoption has trended well throughout the year. I know we talk a lot of times about your opportunity being Greenfield rather than displacements. So when we start to talk about more and more customers adopting more and more solutions is this leading you into more of a displacement cycle and how is that kind of affecting your go-to-market strategy and the sales cycles and those upsells?

[Olivier Pomel:]

Yes. We still, I would say just as dominated by greenfield as we were before and I think it’s going to be the case for the foreseeable future, which is why a lot of what we’re doing today is investing in building more products and growing the sales force so we can capture as much of these greenfield market as possible.

[Matt Swanson:]

Yes. That’s helpful. And then I know security is a newer opportunity. But could you touch on any changes you’ve seen following Sunburst maybe even outside of security? It feels like there might be some elevated concerns for enterprises around observability. And just kind of a renewed focus on knowing what is happening in their environment?

[Olivier Pomel:]

Yes. Well it’s both a challenge and an opportunity, right. I think the whole world is asking themselves what was happening with their software supply chain what they were running, which is good. I think it opened some opportunity that some - I would say minor short-term opportunity because we do see some customers that want to replace their network monitoring. And our network device monitoring product is fairly new. But we see some interest in that for that product recently. I think longer term, there is definitely a growing problem that is understanding what is running, understanding your supply chain and understanding what your application is doing and that’s why we’re investing in security. I think there is going to be a long-term opportunity there. So in short term, some replacements there. But the real opportunity is the longer term and can happen to prices basically was going on in their network and in the applications.

[Operator:]

Next question comes from Jack Andrews from Needham & Company. You are now live.

[Unidentified Analyst:]

This is for Jack. Can you provide some color on how your relationship with Azure is progressing and expected ramps in 2021? How should we be thinking about new logo product contribution from the partnership compared to your organic motion given Microsoft’s leverage?

[Olivier Pomel:]

It’s still not leverage, it’s in preview. So we have some customers that have limited access to it. And we’re expecting this to be live in the first half of the year, but we don’t fully control it. So there is two or three billings out before that. We look it’s hard to tell what the impact is going to be. But hopefully we do expect it’s going to have a positive impact. I don’t want to tell it before it happens. What I will say though is that we already got great feedback from existing customers and prospects that were already in our pipeline that this integration and the partnership with Microsoft is helping them move with confidence with Datadog and expand with us. So we’ve seen a few large customers already react very positive with that. So we are - I would say already pretty satisfied with the impact.

[Unidentified Analyst:]

Thank you. That’s helpful. And can you talk about some of the gains you’re seeing from customers who adopt solutions from your marketplace in terms of sales cycles and ease of use? Are you seeing any changes in like cohort behavior given that these customers can derive value from your platform more quickly?

[Olivier Pomel:]

Yes. Look the marketplace is selling, you’re right. So there is still quite a bit that needs to happen in terms of the offering there and the breadth of the offering, I would say. But we do have customers.

[Unidentified Analyst:]

Oli, I think you are on mute, not clear anymore.

[Olivier Pomel:]

Am I mute? Sorry.

[David Obstler:]

Yes. You are mute. Okay you are back.

[Olivier Pomel:]

All right. Let me try that again. I was saying that the platform is still fairly new at the marketplace, but we do see some customers that are already adopting applications through the marketplace and completing there Datadog platform with software that we haven’t written in-house, which is very, very interesting. And some of these marketplace deals are actually fairly meaningful. So this is I would say this is an encouraging sign. Again, there is still a lot of work to be done, a lot of building, a lot of partners to recruit in the platform. So still fairly early, but we have some very good validating signs very early on.

[Operator:]

Next one on the queue is George Iwanyc from Oppenheimer. You are now live.

[George Iwanyc:]

Thank you for taking my question. So Olivier kind of following up on the strong multi-product adoption, are you seeing any consolidation of the number of tools at your customers and kind of just a broad look at the overall competitive landscape?

[Olivier Pomel:]

Yes. Definitely. We mentioned a few examples of customers that are considering on us, right because they don’t want to have their teams jump between tools, they don’t want to have separate tools within the teams. So we definitely see that. In terms of the competitive landscape, it’s a bit boring that we haven’t seen any noticeable change in the past year, I would say. So, pretty much the same situation as it was before where the bulk of the opportunity is with you, a lot of occupancy shown is open source do-it-yourself and then occasionally, we’re going to have some large lands from customers that already had something before and switched to us. But that’s not the dominant motion.

[George Iwanyc:]

All right. Thank you. And then David, when you talked about the duration extending a bit, when you’re looking at your guidance, do you expect that to either flatten out or start to contract maybe later in the year?

[David Obstler:]

We think that can be episodic with as we talked about with that particular quarter and the contracts that come up. There hasn’t been any change in strategy. Our strategy is to get annual commits and to offer mainly upfront billing with on-demand that’s still the dominant way to go to market. So what happens in the variability is some clients want a multi-year arrangement or they want a certain billing. But we really haven’t changed our assumptions to sort of where we are longer term in terms of duration.

[George Iwanyc:]

Thank you.

[Operator:]

Next one on the line is Bhavan Suri from William Blair. You are now live.

[Bhavan Suri:]

Thanks for taking my questions, guys. And I’ll echo my congrats. That was a solid quarter. I guess I just want to touch a couple of quick things here on Synthetics. You started charging for Synthetics, I think it was, correct me if I’m wrong, Q3 2019. You've talked about seeing all attractions, just not to assume what the growth has been in that business, specifically, attach rates, maybe how it’s trending relative to your expectations because you did bring up a little bit in the call, but we think that there is much color, I’d love to hear how that’s doing?

[David Obstler:]

Yes, it’s going very well. I think we talked about the size and growth of the products is really aligned to when they were initiated and we said last quarter we had a tremendous success that Synthetics was multiple tens of millions of dollar type customer early in its growth. Had very strong adoption and that’s been as we talked about sort of the number four product in terms of the size after infrastructure logs and APM together. So we continued to see very strong reception as part of the overall platform.

[Olivier Pomel:]

Yes. And look we’re very - as I said at the earlier network monitoring and RUM, which were introduced after Synthetics both have adoption at very similar growth curves and a very good curve. So we are optimistic about all those products. Look the curves might differ a little bit between the products because they have different levels of friction, they have different levels of applicability and roadmap would have different depth I would say, but so far we don’t have any bugs in our platform. So we feel good about that.

[Bhavan Suri:]

Okay, good. Absolutely. And then one other one from me. You usually disclose this metric and maybe I got it wrong, but I don’t think you’ve given the 1 million customer count in previous quarters. I’d love to understand how that trended through the year, and if you saw a budget flush in December, which might have driven a jump in seven-figure deals?

[David Obstler:]

Yes, we said that we would be delivering that once a year and providing some color. So it’s the end of the year. As I think we told you we saw steady growth of that in the year. I think it sort of mimics the rest of the effect in the business where that type of evolution either from land or expand was more difficult in Q2 and improved throughout the year commensurate with our new logo and our expansion.

[Operator:]

For the next question we do have Pat Walravens from JMP Securities. You are now live.

[Joey Marincek:]

This is Joey Marincek on for Pat. I was going off that last question, I wanted to dig in on those larger customers. I’m just wondering, has your conversations changed at all to these larger customers, maybe just how you’re approaching them. Thank you.

[Olivier Pomel:]

The conversation hasn’t really changed much. I think it’s all in continuity with what has happened in the past, which is that those customers are adopting more and more of our products and they are deploying us more and more broadly and they themselves are getting deeper and deeper into the cloud. So the boundary between customers that are 1 million plus or 1 million, is I mean arbitrary. But we have a large number of customers right above it, a large number of customers right below it and we keep pushing customers up basically. There is nothing new or different there. I think what this speaks to is customers continue to adopt more of our products and more of our platform and they continue to move to the cloud.

[Operator:]

Next one on the line is Brad Rebeck from Stifel. You are now live.

[Brad Rebeck:]

Thank you very much. Oli, traditionally you’ve talked about the frictionless adoption of the platform is being a key focus. So as you continue to build out into new areas how important is it to maintain that frictionless type of environment versus taking on some more difficult problems that may include deeper sales efforts upfront? Thanks.

[Olivier Pomel:]

Well, we are okay with both, right. But there is a lot we can still do to play to our strength and we are very far from covering the full spectrum of problems we can solve in a completely frictionless way. So in summary, especially security like it’s possible that we will have different kinds of sales and I would say a bit more frictionless deployments. But we’re not done with the addition of frictionless products and the ones that we have today are still very far from being fully penetrated and have a variety of customers. So there is still a very long runway for all of that.

[Operator:]

Next one on the line will be Michael Turits from KeyBanc. You are now live.

[Michael Turits:]

Hi, David and Oli. One of your competitors has made some very extensive changes to their pricing structure. Are you seeing any impact from that or any pressure to make any kinds of changes structurally in the way you price?

[Olivier Pomel:]

We haven’t seen any developments there. No, I think it’s still possible that customers want to change the way they consume. But we haven’t seen anything so far. So as I said, the competitive landscape is boring in a good way so far.

[Michael Turits:]

And David, just a quick housekeeping. You talked about billings getting some boost from duration extension. Can you quantify that for this quarter?

[David Obstler:]

We are both in contracting billings they were both a couple of months. So both of them had been sort of in the seven to 10, 12, and so they both extended a couple of months. But again, we want to caution everybody that may be related to the bills that went out at the end of the year, etc. And we don’t expect any real changes in the way we’re sort of going to market and interacting with our customers.

[Michael Turits:]

And what is the invoicing duration on average now, what it’s been roughly?

[David Obstler:]

That range has been sort of in the six to eight range and the contract duration has been a couple of months longer than that and they both expanded. But again, we are not drawing conclusions based on one quarter and caution everybody.

[Michael Turits:]

So it has been six to eight and it was up a couple of months this quarter on invoicing duration?

[David Obstler:]

Yes.

[Michael Turits:]

Okay. Thanks.

[Operator:]

Next one on the queue is Gregg Moskowitz from Mizuho. You are now live.

[Gregg Moskowitz:]

So it’s great that the usage trends were good again this quarter and that you are now approximately back to pre-COVID levels and what I was curious about is now that we’re another quarter removed from the Q2 just to get your thoughts on the likelihood of a similar spike in cloud optimization reoccurring at some point. In other words, do you think that we would probably need to see another exogenous shock or long tail type event for usage to move around materially in any given quarter?

[Olivier Pomel:]

So I don’t know even what is going to happen to the vaccines and the rest of the pandemic. So I’ll defer on that. In terms of the cycles optimization they happen from time-to-time from our customers. Now whether they all got on the same schedule now because they were optimized at the same time, I don’t know. I don’t think all companies work the same way. But again, we don’t know. We want to be a little bit prudent with our numbers, because, as I said they are a little bit noisier than pre-pandemic and we want to set the right expectation there.

[Gregg Moskowitz:]

Okay. Thanks, Oli. And then just, David any changes to average deal size of this quarter across either new or existing customers?

[David Obstler:]

We did have more an increase of the new logos, broadly speaking, we have some range of that. So we talked about that was part of our new logo performance in Q4, and over time we have a steady increase of the average spend with our customers, as they grow with us as part of the land and expand.

[Operator:]

Last question comes from the line of Yun Kim from Loop Capital Markets. You are now live.

[Yun Kim:]

Thank you. So Oli, there was an earlier question on the impact of SolarWinds and Sunburst. Are you seeing that events driving closer collaboration between DevOps and security ops and is that what’s driving somewhat of -

[Olivier Pomel:]

I’m sorry, I think you got cut off. Should we take the next?

[A.J. Ljubich:]

Yes, maybe operator we end the call here.

[Yun Kim:]

Oli, have you -

[A.J. Ljubich:]

Sorry, we are ending the call.

[Olivier Pomel:]

Yes. So thank you everyone. Again, I’d like to restate the fact we’re very pleased of our performance in the fourth quarter and as well as the performance for the full-year. And as a closing word, I am very proud of our execution and I want to thank our employees for their hard work in what has been a difficult year for most people. One thing that’s important to remember is that we are more critical to our customers than we were before and the move to cloud is proving to be truly essential. So I and everyone at Datadog are excited to continue to make the lives easier to deliver value to them in 2021 and in the years to come. So thank you all.

[Operator:]

Ladies and gentleman, this concludes today’s conference call. You may now disconnect.