The theme of cloud repatriation has been getting some attention lately. While this has implications for software infrastructure companies, the effect will be varied. Mega-retailer Walmart has been on a journey over the last few years to modernize their technology stack. Their CTO unveiled another milestone in Walmart’s cloud native platform journey last week. They now claim to run one of the largest hybrid clouds in existence. This provides us with a good example of a company choosing to run some part of their cloud infrastructure themselves.
Continue readingCategory: News Items (Page 1 of 2)
Quick takes on news items. These articles provide timely updates on company or industry activities. They will be shorter in length so that they can be published quickly. These articles supplement the longer analysis pieces.
As I have followed Datadog over the last couple of years, I have found that a useful signal for investors to track is the number of listings on the product grid displayed on their web site Pricing page. This has a honeycomb pattern of hexagons, which neatly snap together into rows. Each cell represents a product offering that has individual pricing associated with it. Customers can subscribe to just one of these offerings, or all of them.
Capital One recently announced that they are launching an enterprise B2B software business focused on providing cloud and data management solutions for other companies. The idea is that they want to share their expertise and best practices developed in managing large data sets serving over 100M customers.
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MongoDB (MDB) announced Q1 FY2023 earnings on June 1st. Overall, the results for Q1 were strong – particularly considering they represented improvement from a robust Q4 report. Revenue growth accelerated, profitability increased and customers expanded use of MongoDB’s application database platform. Forward guidance was tempered, however, with management expecting a slowdown in growth for small to medium customers as a result of macro headwinds. They quantified the revenue impact and raised Q2 and full year guidance slightly.
Continue readingSnowflake (SNOW) announced Q1 FY2023 earnings on May 25th. I will share a short summary of my reactions to the report, structured around positives, negatives and additional data points that are of interest. Overall, this report delivered a mixed bag, following a similarly obfuscated report in Q4. For investors, the challenge is to reconcile headline metrics with the underlying health of the business. Platform optimizations and the impact of customer macro concerns on a consumption business make this challenging in the near term. With explanations from management, these data points can be rationalized, but rely on faith in the long-term durability of Snowflake’s growth model.
Continue readingThis is my second installment of coverage on Cloudflare’s Platform Week, held from May 9th – 16th. In my prior post, I focused on the announcements related to new data products. These included several exciting new offerings to round out capabilities available to developers to store, process and distribute data. Highlights were a new relational database (D1), their R2 object store moving to GA (with pricing), a publish-subscribe system (Pub/Sub) and a time series database (Analytics Engine). Each of these provides developers with another tool for building modern Internet applications to run in a decentralized fashion across the edge of Cloudflare’s network. These products are also being monetized, which should start contributing to revenue going into 2023.
For this next post, I will focus on the announcements related to their core development runtime, the Workers engine. Cloudflare announced a number of key features during Platform Week that will make Workers easier to extend, combine and configure. These product improvements should open up Workers to more developers and application use cases. Additionally, they have removed any philosophical adoption argument based on perception of being a proprietary system.
Continue reading(Revised May 22nd. Added comparison to hyperscaler solutions at end)
Cloudflare held Platform Week from May 9th – 16th. This session focused on enabling developers to build rich applications using the Cloudflare platform. As we have been waiting excitedly for another innovation week, Platform Week didn’t disappoint. It was packed with more product improvements and new offerings than previous innovation weeks, once again demonstrating Cloudflare’s accelerating pace of product development. In fact, because the week included so many announcements, I am breaking up my coverage into several blog posts.
Continue readingDatadog (DDOG) announced Q1 FY2022 earnings on May 5th. Relative to earnings results from peers and consumer Internet offerings, Datadog’s report was stellar. Given the emerging headwinds to growth, Datadog’s durability is shining through. Of note is their sustained revenue growth coupled with strong improvement to the bottom line. While I was focused on y/y percentages of revenue increase, Datadog snuck in a quadrupling of operating income and nearly tripled free cash flow.
Continue reading(Revised May 10th. Added commentary on CapEx at end)
Cloudflare (NET) announced Q1 FY2022 earnings on May 5th. I will share a short summary of my reactions to the report, structured around positives, negatives and additional data points that are of interest. I won’t rehash all of the metrics, as those are readily available online in the earnings report and Investor Presentation. Additionally, Cloudflare has an Investor Day event scheduled for May 12th, which will offer additional insight into product strategy and long term financial targets.
Continue readingLast week, we received earnings reports for all three of the hyperscalers. These included Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform on April 26th. Then, Amazon Web Services two days later on April 28th. As is normally the case, results for the cloud infrastructure business units are included within the overall company earnings report. As hyperscaler performance can yield signals for cloud infrastructure spending trends in general, I wanted to provide a short rehash of the performance of each hyperscaler for the past quarter. In addition to summarizing the results, I will also highlight any interesting mentions in the earnings calls and prepared remarks.
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