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Does Karma Count When Evaluating Technology Companies?

July 10, 2022 / poffringa

Contributing to the collective good isn’t a metric that we investors often include in our analysis of companies. This is what I generally label as “karma” – a bucket of activities taken on by companies (some more than others) that don’t appear to be directly related to a business goal. As investors, these activities may help us feel good about our companies at a superficial level, but can also raise questions about financial discipline. For some investors, these activities evoke visceral responses like “this is a business, not a charity.”

Databricks Data + AI Summit 2022

July 6, 2022 / poffringa

Hot on the heels of Snowflake Summit, Databricks held their annual Data + AI user conference from June 27 – 30 in San Francisco. The event was packed with announcements and informative sessions for 5,000 in person attendees and 60,000 virtually. Having these two user conferences in close proximity provides us with an opportunity to compare product direction and strategy. On the surface, the two companies appear to be rapidly converging towards a common vision of becoming the single platform needed for analytics, data engineering and machine learning. At the same time, the two companies currently cater to rather distinct audiences, use cases and implementation tolerances.

In this post, I will review Databricks’ product strategy, what was announced at Data + AI and how it all relates to Snowflake.

Implications of Walmart’s Cloud Native Platform

July 2, 2022 / poffringa

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.

Cloudflare One Week in Review

June 29, 2022 / poffringa

Cloudflare held another innovation week from June 20 – 24, this time focused on Zero Trust solutions. They introduced a number of new capabilities and aligned their marketing message around what is expected for a full-featured Zero Trust SASE platform. Included in this were comparisons to offerings from other vendors. While Cloudflare is not considered the leading SASE provider by industry analysts at this point, these latest developments bring them a step closer to feature parity. At minimum, they check all the boxes for a marketable SASE platform and have a growing stable of customers. The question for investors will be whether they can continue to move upmarket, win larger deals and displace leading providers for enterprise spend in this growing category of the security market.

In this post, I will review Cloudflare’s Zero Trust offering, the product announcements made this past week and the opportunities for Cloudflare to increase their share of the market.

Datadog Launches Observability Pipelines

June 25, 2022 / poffringa

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.

Snowflake Summit 2022 – Product Announcements

June 20, 2022 / poffringa

Snowflake held their annual user conference, Snowflake Summit, in Las Vegas last week. This included a number of product announcements and followed their Q1 earnings report, where the CEO promised “our most significant product announcements in four years.” Beyond the new product features, Snowflake updated their overall platform positioning and provided insight into future product directions. Mixed in with this was an Investor Day session, which included more granular financial detail. In this post, I will focus on the platform updates and product strategy, as I they provide the foundation for the next phase of Snowflake’s growth.

Datadog Named a Leader in the 2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant

June 16, 2022 / poffringa

Industry analyst Gartner just released their 2022 Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring and Observability. These reports are important because they are consumed by enterprise IT decision makers as an input to technology purchase decisions. They provide a directionally useful measure of a provider’s position in a product market and how its offering relates to competitors.

Snowflake Cybersecurity Workload

June 15, 2022 / poffringa

As I am parsing the many product announcements coming out of Snowflake Summit, the new Cybersecurity Workload is worth calling out independently. It was first introduced a little over a week ago. This workload’s purpose is to help customer organizations detect and respond to threats by leveraging the Data Cloud for their security analytics. During Summit, the Snowflake team hosted a separate Cybersecurity track which included 15 sessions and presentations from a number of customers. This level of engagement likely explains why Snowflake pre-announced the availability of Cybersecurity workloads, versus bundling it with the other product announcements this week. As an aside, I am planning to publish coverage of the rest of Summit shortly.

MongoDB World 2022 – Product Announcements

June 13, 2022 / poffringa

MongoDB held their annual user conference last week, bringing together customers, partners and employees at an in-person event in New York. As we would expect, MongoDB leadership used the conference to introduce a number of new product offerings and enhancements. They also hosted an Investor Session to tie the product announcements to MongoDB’s broader expansion strategy. The overall theme was to enable customers to address more application workloads with the MongoDB platform. Given the breadth and depth of the product improvements announced during MongoDB World, I think they easily achieved this goal.

Capital One Launches B2B Consultancy for Snowflake Users

June 10, 2022 / poffringa

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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