Q4 2025 Dynatrace Inc Earnings Call

In This Article:

Participants

Noelle Faris; Vice President of Investor Relations; Dynatrace Inc

Rick McConnell; Chief Executive Officer, Director; Dynatrace Inc

James Benson; Chief Financial Officer, Senior Vice President, Treasurer; Dynatrace Inc

Patrick Colville; Analyst; Scotiabank GBM

Matt Hedberg; Analyst; RBC Capital Markets Wealth Management

Brent Thill; Analyst; Jefferies

Rob Owens; Analyst; Piper Sandler

Raimo Lenschow; Analyst; Barclays Capital Inc.

Kast Rangan; Analyst; Goldman Sachs

Andrew Nowinski; Analyst; Wells Fargo Securities, LLC

Sanjit Singh; Analyst; Morgan Stanley

Pinjalim Bora; Analyst; J.P. Morgan Securities LLC

Will Power; Analyst; Robert W. Baird & Co., Inc.

Jacob Roberge; Analyst; William Blair & Company, L.L.C.

Keith Bachman; Analyst; BMO Capital Markets

Presentation

Operator

Greetings, and welcome to the Dynatrace fourth-quarter and full-year fiscal 2025 earnings conference call and webcast. (Operator Instructions) As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It's now my pleasure to turn the call over to Noelle Faris, Vice President, Investor Relations. Noelle, please go ahead.

Noelle Faris

Good morning, and thank you for joining Dynatrace's fourth-quarter and full-year fiscal 2025 earnings conference call. Joining me today are Rick McConnell, Chief Executive Officer; and Jim Benson, Chief Financial Officer. Before we get started, please note that today's comments include forward-looking statements such as statements regarding revenue, earnings guidance and economic conditions.
Actual results may differ materially from our expectations due to a number of risks and uncertainties discussed in Dynatrace's SEC filings, including our most recent quarterly report on Form 10-Q and our upcoming annual report on Form 10-K that we plan to file later this month. The forward-looking statements contained in this call represent the company's views on May 14, 2025.
We assume no obligation to update these statements as a result of new information, future events or circumstances. Unless otherwise noted, the growth rates we discuss today are non-GAAP, reflecting constant currency growth and per share amounts are on a diluted basis.
We will also discuss other non-GAAP financial measures on today's call. To see reconciliations between non-GAAP and GAAP measures, please refer to today's earnings press release and supplemental presentation, which are both posted in the Financial Results section of our IR web page.
And with that, let me turn the call over to our Chief Executive Officer, Rick McConnell.

Rick McConnell

Thanks, Noelle, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us for today's call. Dynatrace delivered a strong finish to fiscal 2025, having achieved several noteworthy milestones and accomplishments. Subscription revenue grew 20%. We surpassed $1.7 billion in ARR and $1 billion in DPS ARR.
We expanded our non-GAAP operating margin by more than 100 basis points and our pretax free cash flow margin by roughly 250 basis points, emphasizing the strength of our balanced business model. We surpassed 4,000 customers and 5,000 employees.
We announced major platform innovations, including Grail for GCP, observability for developers, preventive operations, cloud security posture management, AI-powered log management and analytics and AI observability to name just a few. And we were consistently named a leader in all major analyst reports for observability and AI Ops over the past year. Today, I'm going to cover my perspective on the observability market, growth, tailwinds and opportunities our agenetic AI vision and the growing criticality of business observability.
Let's begin with the market. While we are clearly in an uncertain economic environment, we continue to see strength in the observability market as virtually all organizations aspire to have their software work perfectly, just as our vision imagines. And now more than ever, customers need to deliver improved productivity and a better user experience at lower cost, which is precisely our value proposition. As such, we see observability spend continuing to be a priority. Additionally, cloud growth remains healthy.
Hyperscalers are now generating nearly $250 billion in annualized revenue growing in the mid-20s. And as organizations accelerate cloud and AI native initiatives, the need for AI-powered observability at scale has never been greater. We expect to see materially greater penetration in the coming year into hyperscaler workloads, where we expect the majority of observability market growth to occur, and we are innovating to capture this opportunity.
Our next major platform release planned for June will further empower cloud and AI native teams to expand their AI Ops and preventive operations. These new capabilities will provide development teams with easy access to hyperscaler and Kubernetes telemetry, leverage Davis to analyze all data with AI assistance and leverage Davis Copilot for remediation workflows or instant response.
We believe these secular tailwinds will fuel an addressable market opportunity that we now size at $65 billion in observability and application security. Beyond these market dynamics, I'd like to talk next about four key Dynatrace growth drivers. Each of these represents an intentional area of focus to drive consumption growth across the Dynatrace platform.
First, are the ongoing investments in our go-to-market efforts, including customer segmentation, partner enablement, and expanding our sales motion beyond application performance to include end-to-end observability and cloud modernization. We kicked off these initiatives at the beginning of fiscal 2025 and they continue to gain traction.
We expect them to drive sales productivity gains in fiscal 2026. We've seen a consistent trend in total pipeline growth, driven primarily by strength in strategic accounts, where pipeline was up 45% compared to last year, highlighting the traction in our customer segmentation efforts. More than 80% of our ACV closed in the quarter were partner influenced with over 40% of those coming from GSIs and hyperscalers.
And the expansion of our sales motion beyond our proven land-and-expand approach resulted in more than 50% of our anchor deals in the quarter, driving end-to-end observability. These investments are gaining traction and contributed to large deal closures in the quarter, including 15 deals with incremental ACV of over $1 million.
Second, our Dynatrace Platform Subscription or DPS licensing model continues to build momentum with over 40% of our customer base and more than 60% of ARR leveraging this approach as of the end of the fourth quarter. With access to the full platform, customers are adopting Dynatrace more broadly across their IT environments, resulting in increased consumption.
We expect this DPS adoption to materialize over time in early expansions or on-demand consumption beyond customer commit levels. Third is the massive opportunity in log management. We believe the logs market remains ripe for disruption, given expensive legacy solutions that largely operate independently from existing observability tools and result in lower value.
Our unique approach to log management and analytics integrates logs, traces, metrics and other core observability and security data types into a single platform, providing a holistic view of the help of IT ecosystems. Combined with our AI approach, teams can derive greater value from logs faster and at lower cost.
Leveraging Grail as our massively parallel processing data lake house, logs can then contribute near real-time insights at enormous scale. We are seeing strong adoption of our log management offering with 1/3 of our customers now using this solution. The number of customers leveraging logs is up 18% compared to last quarter, plus nearly half of our new logos added in the fourth quarter are deploying logs in their initial implementation compared to roughly 20% in the same quarter last year.
And finally, in what could arguably be our largest growth opportunity, the AI revolution is upon us. So I'd like to turn to that next. As you know, AI is evolving into a whole new era where systems can plan, make decisions and take action autonomously. According to IDC, by 2029, [GenAI-based] software testing tools capable of writing 85% of tests will be augmented by AI agents and agentic workflows. And we expect that as much as 80% or more of developers' time is spent ensuring that code is running properly in production by securing debugging and optimizing it.
In many ways, this is exactly what Dynatrace was purpose-built to enable and it represents a massive opportunity. We were pleased to see that Forrester recently recognized Dynatrace as a leader in AIOps with the highest score in the Current Offering category.
Our mission for many years has been to deliver answers and intelligent automation from data, well beyond dashboards and root cause analysis. Automation is enabled by an autonomous system that can recommend and then carry out action based upon trustworthy, deterministic conclusions from context-rich data. And agentic AI is the architectural approach for that system.
Indeed, our AI native platform is what sets Dynatrace apart from our peers. And we believe that as a result of this market evolution, it will become an even bigger differentiator in the future. In fact, Dynatrace has been investing in advancing our capabilities to evolve into a fully agentic AI platform that can automatically remediate, protect and optimize without the need for human intervention. A true agentic platform must be able to make intelligent decisions to act in real time. We postulate this requires various core capabilities.
You need a common data lake house to store all data types in context for accuracy, performance and scale without manual tagging. You must be able to act in real time without limitations of predefined schemas or indexing. You need causation of data, not correlation, to deliver answers that are trustworthy and actionable.
You need a combination of AI techniques, including causal, predictive and generative AI to facilitate the discovery and prediction of issues to provide these answers. And in autonomously preventing and remediating issues as well as optimizing cloud-native workloads, an agentic AI system needs to delegate and handle tasks not only on its own, but also to an ecosystem of AI agents.
We believe Dynatrace is uniquely positioned to lead in this space with Grail. Our indexless schema-free lake house designed for real-time intelligent AI automation at scale. Today, we already provide the knowledge, memory, reasoning, planning and actioning to meet the heightened requirements of an agentic AI system.
Our knowledge is fueled by one agent collecting all data types in context, normalized with our semantic dictionary cleansed, protected and then ingested through open pipeline. Grail provides instant access petabytes of short- and long-term data in context, the real-time memory to enable AI queries. Davis leverages the combination of causal predictive and generative AI to handle the reason.
Davis AI copilot can then intelligently plan actions based on context and reasoning. And finally, our automation engine is able to take action, autonomously executing tasks and collaborating with third-party AI agents. We plan to continue to innovate aggressively to meet the needs of the rapidly evolving AI landscape. I'd like to next turn to business observability. As the AI landscape continues to evolve, so too have our customers' needs for a more sophisticated observability approach.
They want more than technical analytics. Organizations want to use observability solutions to help them understand core business metrics. Business observability provides precise answers to help customers address not only operational issues, such as cost reduction and risk mitigation, but also customer-centric issues such as optimizing user experience and driving profitability.
For example, a large cruise ship operator is using Dynatrace to enable an exceptional on-ship experience for passengers. They begin with the core user experience as they want to track and then drill down into micro services and technical analytics rather than the other way around.
In many such customer deployments, our platform is playing an increasing role in our differentiation. Only Dynatrace captures business events in context with other data types, enabling quick and easy querying rich visualization dashboards and business-driven automation. (inaudible)
I'd like to welcome Steve McMahon to Dynatrace as our new Chief Customer Officer, replacing Matthias Dollentz-Scharer, who is retiring from the company. I wish Matthias well after an incredible career here over the past decade, and I am delighted with Steve's employment as his background and observability and security at Splunk, CrowdStrike and Zscaler provides him a terrific foundation or a rapid ramp. To wrap up, our market opportunity is stronger than ever.
We have several Dynatrace specific drivers supporting our growth. We have a significantly differentiated AI-powered observability platform that is leading the way toward us delivering a highly differentiable genic observability platform. We are increasingly bringing customers deep business insights. And we have a compelling business model which has enabled us to deliver a sustained balance of growth and profitability. Jim, over to you.