Dynatrace 1Q27 Earnings Conference Call

Greetings, and welcome to the Dynatrace first quarter fiscal 2027 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. Please note this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to Noel Ferris, VP of Investor Relations. Thank you. You may begin.

Good morning, and thank you for joining Dynatrace's first quarter fiscal 2027 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 annual report on Form 10-K and subsequent quarterly reports on Form 10-Q. The forward-looking statements contained in this call represent the company's views on August 5, 2026. 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 discussed today are year-over-year and non-GAAP, reflecting constant currency growth, and per share amounts are on a saluted 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. And with that, let me turn the call over to our Chief Executive Officer, Rick Thanks, Noel, and good morning, everyone.

Thank you for joining us today. On our last earnings call in May, we expressed confidence that the growth drivers we put in place would drive a year of ARR acceleration in fiscal 2027. The strength we saw across the business in Q1 reinforces our conviction and ability to deliver this outcome. Here are a few of the noteworthy highlights from the quarter. Total ARR grew 17%. That new ARR was $85 million, growing 66% and 41% organically. We achieved record new logo growth of more than 160%. Both total and subscription revenue exceeded the high end of our guidance. And we delivered a non-GAAP operating margin of 29%, reflecting the disciplined investment and approach you've come to expect from us. Q1's strength reflected healthy enterprise demand for end-to-end observability, stronger execution, and growing complexity across customer environments. We are seeing AI contribute in three ways, which I will expand upon shortly. Increasing consumption across our platform, creating demand for new AI observability capabilities, and directly monetizing agent usage. This Q1 performance reflects both the significant market opportunity and our strong execution to begin the fiscal year. Good morning, I'd like to discuss the observability market, why we believe Dynatrace is built for an AI-first world, and how we expect to drive incremental AI monetization. The observability market has entered a new era. Software that took months to build now ships in days. AI agents are taking autonomous action across infrastructure, and enterprise customers are now deploying AI rapidly, not because every risk has been resolved, but because standing still means falling behind. In this environment, unified observability matters more than ever. Systems are more interconnected, more autonomous, and more difficult to manage manually than ever before. The enterprises winning in this environment are the ones that can keep complex, fast-moving systems working reliably and quickly understand when they are not. Additionally, AI workloads do not simply add volume. They behave differently. They can operate perfectly and still produce incorrect results. That's a problem observability has never had to solve before. and addressing it represents a significant emerging opportunity. We estimate the AI observability total addressable market will exceed $10 billion by 2030, growing at more than 50% annually. We see AI observability as the next logical evolution of the broader observability market, and that evolution is already underway. way. What this means in practice is that observability in the age of AI has to answer far more questions than ever before. And while the majority of enterprises are still in early phases of their AI journey, the requirements are evolving quickly. Let me walk through three of the questions that matter most today in an AI-first world. The first, is it working? Are applications, infrastructure, and systems working as intended? This question is about business resilience and is the same question we ask of traditional workloads second is new is it accurate more specifically is the ai model delivering output that can be trusted and relied upon with confidence answering this means evaluating ai systems for accuracy and intended behavior determining whether an ai system behaves as intended before it ships is emerging as one of most important aspects of observability the third are my agentic systems delivering the outcomes they were built for enterprises are deploying agents to build software to pace that wasn't possible before the advantage goes to those who can accelerate the full life cycle and trust the results code that's built well ships safely and runs reliably the last question is where our newest offering blue box comes in built for ai first teams blue box helps development teams and their coding agents bring software into production in a way that customers can trust it closes the loop between building and running it gives coding agents live context from running systems before a change is released and once that change is live its agentic sre capability finds root cause and returns an evidence-backed fix with the developer in control across the entire AI delivery lifecycle. This is the moment for which Dynatrace was built. With AI agents increasingly acting alongside humans across development and operations, both need a common source of trusted context. Dynatrace provides that through Grail and SmartScape, giving agents and teams a unified understanding of system relationships and behavior. Dynatrace intelligence turns that understanding into action, combining deterministic and agentic AI to deliver the precise causal insight that lets both people and agents act with confidence. These core differentiators give customers one operating foundation across both human and autonomous workflows. Our platform has a distinct advantage with this depth of insight. And as agents become a larger part of enterprise operations, that distinction becomes even more important. Additionally, we are purposefully building for an open interoperable ecosystem. Our newly acquired Bindplane supports the open standard for open telemetry data collection. DevCycle, acquired earlier this year, supports the open standard for feature flags. These acquisitions aren't coincidental. They reflect a deliberate commitment to open standards and interoperability. Customers are not locked into proprietary pipelines. Our platform is built to work alongside the tools enterprises already use, including partners such as ServiceNow and to operate natively in MCP environments as the AI ecosystem evolves. We believe openness is a competitive advantage. It is one of the reasons enterprises trust Dynatrace as the intelligent foundation for AI-powered businesses, both powered by AI and built for AI. Our unified architecture becomes more valuable as AI increases complexity, and that growing value is reflected in higher consumption, broader platform adoption, and the following three new monetization opportunities. opportunities. AI workloads are similar to core observability workloads in that they leverage the same types of data, such as logs, traces, and metrics. But AI workloads generate dramatically more telemetry than the systems that came before that. This is one of the reasons why log management remains our fastest-growing product category, with consumption nearly doubling since surpassing the 100 million dollar milestone just two quarters ago. Bindflank facilitates easier data ingestion and it is already performing ahead of plan. Second, as I mentioned earlier, AI observability is an incremental monetization driver. It increases consumption of the platform as it validates whether the AI workloads are producing accurate results, behaving as intended, and operating safely and efficiently. This is the newest capability of the platform, and adoption is expanding quickly. Third, beyond AI workloads and the data they generate, we monetize our own AI and agents. Every time a customer uses Dynatrace Intelligence to get answers through AI function calls or MCP integrations, or when one of our agents, like the SRE or assist agent, takes autonomous action to resolve an issue, it drives DPS usage. As agents increasingly become consumers of observability, this represents a growing opportunity that didn't exist two years ago. Today, more than 1,000 customers use Dynatrace to observe AI and LLM workloads in production, up from roughly 850 last quarter. And more than 800 are running operations autonomously with Donytrace's agentic capabilities, up from roughly 500 last quarter. Additionally, consumption growth for customers in these AI cohorts is 1.5 times higher than that of non-AI cohort customers. Our platform integrates natively with Cloud Code, ServiceNow, GitHub, Copilot, Atlassian, and the major hyperscalers, AWS, Azure, and GCP, enabling autonomous action across development and operations at scale. Here are several examples of how customers are leveraging Dynatrace to advance their AI strategies and observability initiatives. In Q1, we signed a seven-figure ACV expansion deal, more than doubling ACV with a top global financial institution. This customer is using Dynatrace to validate model consumption, control costs, and maintain full data lineage from prompt to response, helping it deploy AI with greater confidence while reducing compliance and audit risk. We secured a six-figure ACV expansion, also nearly doubling ACV, with a leading recreational vehicle retailer. This customer used Dynatrace as their operational system of record while building a custom CRM application through AI-assisted development, generating approximately seven figures of savings and expanding usage of our platform. A leading digital insurance provider used Dynatrace AI observability to reduce onboarding time from days to minutes and identified an outdated model version that was driving unnecessary token consumption and costs. And finally, we secured an eight-figure ACB new logo win with one of Latin America's largest financial institutions. In a highly competitive sales process, the customer selected Dynatrace to consolidate a fragmented multi-vendor observability stack across a complex environment, supporting mission-critical citizen-facing services. Our differentiation continues to be recognized by independent analysts. Gardner named Dynatrace a leader in the Gardner Magic Quadrant for observability platforms for the 16th consecutive year. Gardner described SmartScape and Dynatrace intelligence as the gold standard for real-time, high-fidelity dependence mapping to automate root cause with Dynatrace and third-party agents. We believe this recognition validates both the strength of our architecture and our ability to help customers confidently scale AI and agentic workloads. Finally, as many of you have seen, Jim plans to retire from Dynatrace by the end of the fiscal year. We will conduct a thorough search for his successor over the coming months, and I'm confident we will have a smooth transition. Jim has been an exceptional partner, playing a critical role in scaling the business, strengthening our financial profile, and positioning Dynatrace for its next phase of growth. I am deeply grateful for his leadership and many contributions, and we will miss his valuable insights and guidance when he retires. To wrap up, Q1 was a tremendous start to FY27 and a powerful reflection of the momentum we are seeing across the business. Organizations are increasingly looking to consolidate on platforms that can help them manage growing complexity, unlock greater productivity, and realize the full potential of AI. As enterprises accelerate their AI initiatives, we believe Dynatrace is uniquely positioned to help them innovate faster, operate more efficiently, and maximize the return on their technology investments. In an AI-first world in which observability and autonomous operations become more critical day by day, we are more enthusiastic than ever about the opportunity.

Jim, over to you. Thank you for the kind words, Rick, and good morning, everyone. Q1 was an exceptional start to the fiscal year. Once again, we exceeded the high end of all our top-line growth and profitability guidance metrics, fueled by record New Logo ARR growth, expanding traction in logs, and continued robust consumption of the platform. These results reflect broad-based momentum across the business and reinforce our conviction that we are on the path to ARR acceleration this fiscal year. Let me review our first quarter results in more detail. Unless otherwise noted, all growth rates are year-over-year and in constant currency. Starting with ARR, we ended the quarter at $2.14 billion, up 17% year over year. Q1 net new ARR was $85 million, adjusted for foreign exchange movements, growing 66% from a strong first quarter last year. Excluding the $13 million ARR contribution from our bind plane acquisition, Q1 net new ARR was $73 million, or 41% organic growth. This strong performance was driven primarily by record new logo ARR growth in our continued success in winning large end-to-end platform consolidation opportunities, including an eight-figure ACV land. The maturation of our go-to-market transformation, which began in fiscal 25, is clearly reflected in improving net new ARR productivity. To help illustrate the momentum in the business, we believe trailing 12-month net new ARR is a useful metric because it smooths the quarter-to-quarter impact of large enterprise transactions. Due to that lens, we have now delivered four consecutive quarters of acceleration in trailing 12-month organic net new ARR growth. Growth reached 17% on an organic basis in Q1, up from 12% in Q4, demonstrating continued momentum. In Q1, we added 122 new logos to the Dynatrace platform. The average land size continues to build and was nearly $285,000, contributing to record new logo ARR growth of more than 160%. We remain focused on landing with high-quality customers with strong expansion potential. Our value proposition continues to resonate with enterprise customers that are outgrowing DIY or commercial point solutions. And AI-driven complexity is only increasing the need for a unified platform. Customers are seeking business value through tool consolidation and are turning to Dynatrace for the depth, breadth, and automation of our unified AI-powered observability platform. Simply put, we believe the Dynatrace platform was built for the AI era. Once customers experience the benefits of the Dynatrace platform, they often expand quickly. Average ARR per customer continues to increase and is now well over $500,000. reflecting broader adoption and the value we deliver. As we have shared in the past, given the significant cross-sell and up-sell opportunities within our enterprise customer base, we believe the average ARR per customer can exceed $1 million or more over the medium to long term. Gross retention rating Q1 remained in the mid-90s, underscoring the strategic importance of Dynatrace as a mission-critical component of our customers' operations. Net retention rate, or NRR, was 110% on a trailing 12-month basis. We continue to see broader usage and deeper adoption across the platform, particularly in log management. Logs remains our fastest-growing product category, continuing to grow well above 100% and reaching nearly $200 million in annualized consumption. As a reminder, we crossed the $100 million milestone just two quarters ago, We expect logs to remain a powerful growth driver, accelerating consumption while providing a path to future ARR expansion as customers consume their commitments and move into larger contracts. Turning to revenue, total revenue was $555 million, and subscription revenue was $530 million, both up 15% and 100 basis points above the high end of guidance, driven by strong net new ARR performance. Moving to profitability, non-GAAP operating margin was 29%, exceeding the high end of guidance by 100 basis points, driven by revenue upside flowing through to the bottom line and some expense timing between quarters. Non-GAAP net income was $140 million, or $0.48 per diluted share, $0.03 above the high end of our guidance. Now turning to free cash flow, we have updated our free cash flow definition to adjusted free cash flow, which excludes the impact of restructuring, acquisition-related, and other non-recurring cash expenses. This better aligns the metric with our non-GAAP operating income definition and provides investors with a clearer view of cash generation from ongoing operations of the business. We generated $309 million of adjusted free cash flow in the first quarter. Given seasonality and quarterly variability in billings, we believe this metric is best evaluated on a trailing 12-month basis. Adjusted free cash flow over the trailing 12 months was $579 million, or 28% of revenue. This includes 500 basis points of impact from cash taxes. On a pre-tax basis, adjusted free cash flow was 32% of revenue. Turning to capital allocation, we increased the pace of our share repurchases in Q1, buying back 7.1 million shares for $275 million compared to $224 million in Q4. This increased level of repurchases reflects our confidence in the company's operational momentum, long-term growth, and cash flow trajectory, and our view that the shares remain undervalued. We will continue to take a disciplined approach to capital allocation, balancing investment and innovation and growth, while also returning capital to shareholders. Moving now to guidance. Our confidence in accelerating AOR growth in fiscal 27 has strengthened following our first quarter performance. Demand for observability remains robust. The growth drivers we outlined in May continue to trend positively, and our teams are executing well. That said, we are still early in the fiscal year and consistent with our historical approach. We will remain prudent in our guidance. Lastly, with nearly 40% of our business denominated in foreign currency, the strength of the U.S. dollar since our last call creates a sizable headwind. We now expect FX to be a headwind of $14 million to ARR and $4 million to revenue. This represents an incremental headwind of $23 million to ARR and $19 million to revenue. And with that as context, let me summarize our updated full-year outlook that we detailed in this morning's press release. For ARR, we are maintaining our constant currency ARR growth guidance of 15.5% to 16.5%. As usual, we plan to revisit our full-year ARR growth guidance at the midpoint of the fiscal year. For revenue, we are raising our constant currency total revenue and subscription revenue outlook by 25 basis points at the midpoint, reflecting the operational outperformance in Q1. We now expect total revenue and subscription revenue growth of 14.5% to 15% year-over-year. Turning to profitability, we are increasing the high end of our full-year non-GAAP operating margin guidance by 25 basis points to 29.75%. quarters percent while continuing to balance top-line growth acceleration with margin expansion. We are also raising non-GAAP EPS guidance to a range of $1.97 to $1.99 per diluted share, an increase of four cents at the midpoint. This outlook assumed a diluted share count of 295 to 297 million shares and an effective cash tax rate of 18.5%. Finally, we are maintaining our adjusted free cash flow margin guidance of 26.5%. Our prior guidance was based on our current free cash flow definition, which didn't reflect the new adjustments. As a reminder, for your cash flow models, seasonality and billing patterns historically result in higher cash flow in the first and fourth quarters and significantly lower cash flow in the second and third quarters. As such, we believe trailing 12-month performance remains the most meaningful way to evaluate this metric throughout the year. Looking at Q2, we expect total revenue and subscription revenue growth of 15 to 16 percent, non-GAAP operating margin of 29.5 to 30 percent, and non-GAAP EPS of 48 to 49 cents for a diluted share. In summary, we are pleased with our strong start to fiscal 27 and remain confident that we are on the right track to accelerate ARR growth. We are focused on executing against the significant opportunity ahead in a rapidly growing observability market. We have a proven track record of consistent execution and remain committed to delivering a balanced combination of strong growth and profitability while continuing to invest in opportunities that will drive long-term value. With that, we will open the line for questions. Operator?

Thank you. We will now be conducting a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star 2 if you would like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. We kindly ask that you please limit yourself to one question. Our first question comes from the line of Brent Hill with Jefferies. Please proceed with your questions.

Thank you. Good morning. Just on the net new ads, you mentioned the overwhelming strength. Maybe if you can just drive into what you're seeing in terms of the success with those new logos, where you're finding them, any more color would be helpful. Sure, Brent. This is Jim.

Again, I think what you've seen, this is not the first quarter that we've seen strength in new logos. I think this is the fifth consecutive quarter that the average land size has continued to build. This quarter alone was almost $285,000 on average land size. So it is a function of some of the go-to-market changes that we made two years ago, where we weighted investments in strategic and enterprise accounts. And what you're seeing is growing traction. And specifically, what I talked about roughly two years ago about this emerging trend, of customers looking for platform consolidation tool consolidation and going from fragmented tools to one vendor we are benefiting significantly from that that's been our number one uh sales play and we expect it to continue uh even in this environment where people are evaluating where budgets go uh consolidation actually is an economic benefit to customers because when they consolidate fragmented tools and they go to one vendor they can get better economics and a better outcome from Dynatrace. So those are really the reasons why we're benefiting and continue to benefit from new logo lands, you know, at a very large size.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Gray Powell with BTIG. Please proceed with your question.

Oh, great. Thanks for taking the question, and congratulations on the really strong results. So, yeah, I'm just looking at the numbers and i just want to make sure that i understand everything correctly but if i back out fine plane it looks like you need to grow net new arr by about 17 to hit your fiscal 27 guidance i know it's only one quarter that you're going to wait until q2 to update but you just posted 40 growth in that new arr it sounds like there are a lot of tailwinds out there particularly long monitoring so could you maybe just help us rank the upside drivers that you saw in Q1, and then just how should we think about the sustainability of those drivers?

So, Gray, it's a great question. And actually, your math is right, but the math would suggest for Q2 through Q4 at the high end of our guide that you're at the high team's growth rates. We're coming off a quarter, obviously, organically, where we grew 41%. You're not going to see that every quarter. We've talked about that in the past, that the nature of an enterprise sales motion, in particular where we are going after large strategic accounts is your land sizes are going to be very big both for new logos and for expansions and so it is a bit of the nature of the business and so you're going to see timing we had an exceptional start to the year actually stronger than we expected we knew the first half would be strong but to your point about tailwinds we expect the tailwinds to continue i expect we will continue to be able to land large with new logos. I expect that in the back half of the year, where we have a significant increase in our DPS contracts that are coming up for renewal, that you're going to have an opportunity for expansions. Consumption is continuing to grow at a robust rate. Logs, as we mentioned, is nearly $200 million. So there's just a lot of momentum building in the business. We have a lot of confidence that we can continue that. I'd say one of the questions that I got from last quarter's earnings call was, hey, you know, this guide looks a bit ambitious, Jim. Hopefully what this demonstrates is that there is building momentum in the business. This is the fourth quarter in a row that we've had trailing 12-month improvement and net new ARR growth. So that smooths out variability quarter to quarter, 17% in the first quarter on a trailing 12-month basis organically. So this business is showing significant momentum, and we expect that that will continue.

I think Jim definitely covered the highlights, Gray. It's about consumption. It's about logs. It's about those elements. But one element that I'd love to add in is just the notion that AI is driving even greater consumption on the platform. So we talked about some of the metrics and the prepared remarks, but those workloads are driving increased consumption. It's also shifting the market mindset to one of AI observability, which we also referenced. So, that's an incremental driver to some of the other ones that Jim already mentioned.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Will Power with Baird. Please proceed with your question.

Okay, great. I guess, first, to you, Jim, just, you know, congratulations on your retirement, and thanks for all the help here over the years. I guess, Rick, you made the comment that, you know, you're seeing organizations increasingly, you know, run autonomous operations. I think you said just sequentially the number of organizations moving to autonomous operations has gone from 500 to 800. Maybe just, you know, talk about kind of the key drivers of that. I mean, you know, AI obviously, you know, feeds into that. But, yeah, any color you can share on kind of what's driving that, and then just anything you can drill down in terms of, you know, how you monetize that. You know, I know DPS is the contracting vehicle, I guess, but, you know, the color on that front would be great.

Great question as well. So, to start, we absolutely see a genetic evolution both in our traditional workloads as well as AI workloads. So, for example, perhaps a couple of quarters ago, I mentioned the evolution of traditional observability in moving from reactive to proactive to predictive on to autonomous. And it is in this autonomous environment where you get the benefit of using Dynatrace's deterministic AI to provide causal interpretation and insights as to what's going on in that environment. That deterministic AI enables agents to then take action in an autonomous way, and those agents can actually provide, then, results to allow for elements such as auto-remediation. So that's in traditional workloads, and that's where agents can actually take action. On the AI observability front, you're adding incremental questions like, for example, is the information coming out of LLMs accurate? it again agents are then helping you build and run code. In both areas, you have agents that are increasingly operationalizing your observability systems, and in both cases, we expect to monetize those agents directly to enable us to benefit from that agentic usage. And so it is, as you mentioned, these 800 customers using Argenta capabilities up from roughly 500 last quarter that we like to see because it's increased agent usage.

One thing that I'd add to that, Will, and I think to your point, is, you know, while enterprises are still early in their adoption of AI, I think to Rick's point, it's building and i think what we outlined there is consumption is growing at a very robust rate for the company in total and customers that are leveraging ai grow at one and a half x that rate so that significant volume increase in consumption that again you with the nature of the dps contract you don't have to purchase something you have access to full um capabilities of the platform you will burn down your commitments earlier, and our expectation is if this continues, that that should lead to a source of future expansion.

And perhaps just to put a pin in it, I did cover this in the prepared remarks, but just to highlight it, because I really do think it is important, we're thinking very acutely as to how we monetize and evolving AI space. Number one is just around increased consumption of AI workloads that consume way more telemetry. Number two is that you've got incremental workloads that require AI observability, namely, are they delivering accurate responses coming out of LLMs? And then finally, we're monetizing, as I mentioned earlier, the agents themselves. So three different, very discrete methods of monetization of AI workloads and agentic work models as we look at.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Keith Bachman with BMO Capital Markets. Please proceed with your question.

Hi, good morning. Thank you. I wanted to ask about the renewal installed base, and if you could just provide a little bit of context on how that installed base looks over the next three quarters versus what it was in the June quarter. Frankly, is it a greater target-rich audience when you think about that installed base? Any nuances that you want us to consider as we look out over the next three quarters? And additionally, any update on how that installed base, when the renewals unfold, the behavior? In other words, what's the ratio that you're picking up as those customers, in fact, renew their DPS contracts, any change in behavior, upsell rates associated with those DPS renewals, in particular, as we think about what that installed base may do? And I'm going to try to sneak in. Just, Jim, any comments on what buying plane will grow? You mentioned 13 million, which was ahead of our number. But any comments on how that will grow and contribute to the ARR? That's it for me. Many thanks.

A couple of questions in there. So, as we shared before, Keith, that the weighting of our renewals, DPS and just other non-DPS renewals, are very weighted to the back half of the year. And so, Q1 and Q2 are light renewal quarters. And so I think the statistic is for DPS, I think 70% of our renewal activity or annual resets actually occur in the back half of the year. And so I've shared before that if consumption continues to grow at the rates we're expecting, we believe that you should see NRR inflection in the back half of the year. I don't think you're going to see it in the first half of the year just because it's a light renewal period. and as I shared before your DPS contracts this year you're having all three cohort classes come up for the first time and so if consumption continues to grow at that rate we do expect to see an improvement in expansion activity and I'd say what we see what we saw in Q1 very consistent customers that you know some customers go on demand and some customers do expansions and so again because it was it's a light renewal period you're not notably seeing an uplift in NRR yet, but our expectation is you will in the back half. And relative to BindPlane, you're right. So BindPlane, you know, I think we used big CRAN numbers when we said $10 million. So what we inherited was $13 million. We are very pleased with BindPlane. It's exceeded our expectations, and you should expect that that will be a contributing source to aid our logs business to continue to accelerate at the rates that it's done because buying plane will be an accelerant to logs. And so we expect that to be an additive source. We haven't necessarily outlined a specific growth target for it, but you can expect that it's going to grow at a robust rate.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Andrew Sherman with TD Cowan. Please proceed with your question.

Oh, great. Thanks, guys. And Jim, congrats on your retirement. It's been great working with you. Is it fair to think that the deals that slipped in EMEA last quarter closed? How did that region perform in the quarter? And then globally, how is the pipeline of big deals in Q2 and for the second half?

First, thank you. I'll just remind you, I'm not going anywhere yet, so you guys are stuck with me for a while. But thank you for the kind words. Relative to EMEA, you're right. We saw a little bit of softness in EMEA in the fourth quarter. EMEA actually had a very strong start to the year. So EMEA had a good Q1. And so, I mean, they weren't the primary source of the growth for the quarter, but they had a rebound from Q4 to Q1. And then your second question was on the pipeline. Pipeline, again, pipeline continues to be weighted to large deals. That is not new. It's the nature of our sales motion, which is why we mentioned that having a trailing 12-month metric to look at net new ARR is a good lens because it smooths out the timing that you'll see with large deals like that. But the pipeline continues to be robust.

Our next question comes from the line of Fatima Bhulani with Citi. Please proceed with your question.

Oh, good morning. Thank you so much for taking my questions. Jim, I wanted to follow up with you on something that you were potentially ideating on last quarter. And because you started the new fiscal year, it behooves me to ask you, there was some consideration around, you know, potentially having more, let's just say, elastic or more premium skewing pricing on on-demand consumption behavior. knowing what you know seeing what you're seeing in the pipeline as it relates to the renewals cohort their behaviors their consumption patterns i'm wondering if you uh maybe have an update or a finer point you could put on um the decision around uh you know more premium pricing elasticity on odc uh and how that factors or doesn't factor into your guidance for the remainder of the year Thank you.

So the short answer to that question, Fatima, is that we've not made any decisions to change our pricing mechanism for on-demand consumption. As you mentioned, we do not charge a premium. It is something that we've evaluated and continue to evaluate internally. So within my guidance does not assume any change in that. That's not to suggest that we wouldn't make a change. It's just not something that we've contemplated yet. And obviously, when you make a change like that, you'd have to roll that out over a period. You could do that for new customers. You'd have to figure out the timing of doing it for existing customers. So even doing it would not have a material impact on the fiscal year.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Sanjit Singh with Morgan Stanley. Please proceed with your question.

Yeah, thank you for taking the question. Congrats on the strong Netanyway R performance in Q1. And it seems like this quarter was strength across the business, but really the story is the new logo performance, I think kind of more than doubling the size of the average lands. When I think about that NRR and I think about just the momentum that you guys are seeing, explosive momentum you're seeing on the log side of the equation, I guess the question is why isn't the logs driving that improvement in NRR? I know we have like the renewal cohort in the back half, But why isn't logs a bigger driver for an NRR improvement?

So I think it will be. I think it's all timing, Sanjay, as we've said, that it, you know, everything is dependent upon who are the customers that are driving significant logs consumption. And so it's a bit of the nature of when do those customers fall into their renewal cycle. And again, as I mentioned, the Q1 and Q2 are light renewal quarters. And so we're already seeing some of it, but it just happened to be quarters where you're not going to see the same level of expansion activity. But trust me, they are going to be and we expect to be a future source of expansion activity. As we mentioned, you know, that just two quarters ago we talked about the business being $100 million, and now it's nearly $200 million. So you should expect that in the back half of the year, if this consumption growth continues, that we should see an inflection in NRR.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Matt Hedberg with RBC Capital Markets. Please proceed with your question.

Great. Thanks for taking my question, guys. Really a strong set of results here.

And I'm still kind of curious, when I look at the 41% constant currency organic net new ARR growth, I'm curious, did you see any pull forward from Q2? And I guess where my question is going, you know, you haven't changed the four-year ARR guide, but following such strong Q1 results, does it change how you think about kind of that first half, second half split? I think our initial assumption was something like maybe 44% to 47% of net new ARR in the first half.

But any commentary on sort of like the linearity of the results? Because it seems strong really across the board.

Thanks for the question, Matt. But, you know, you're right. We did say in our last call that we thought that the first half seasonally, relative to what it historically is, would be a little bit more weighted. And we certainly had a better start than we expected. You know, relative to pull forward, you're always going to have deals that push. You're going to have deals that you're able to close. And that is going to continue to be the nature of the business, especially with our pipeline weighted to very large deals. the timing of those are always going to be a bit variable. I would say an exceptional start. I think we might deal, you know, I expect a very strong half one. I do expect that net new ARR, even though we don't guide quarterly, is going to be in the double digits every quarter. You know, timing of, like, how much more people contribute, I'd say, is going to depend on, you know, the nature of when these deals land. But we are very confident that the momentum in the business is building, and I think we're just trying to be prudent. We don't, as you know, we don't historically change the guide after the Q1 results. But don't misunderstand that to mean that we don't believe that the business momentum is growing. One of the things I said in the prepared remarks, and Rick, we are quite confident that we are on track to accelerate ARR growth for the year.

Yeah, this is a really critical point that I want to highlight as well. Our focus is ARR acceleration for the year. That's what the drivers are suggesting, and that's what we're promoting with regard to strong consumption, log management and log growth, the evolution of AI workloads, the increase in consumption overall of the platform relative to ARR, backup renewals coming up. There is a large set of drivers that we believe deliver confidence in the overall outlook for the year.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Koji Ikeda with Bank of America. Please proceed with your question.

Yeah. Hey, guys. Thanks so much for taking the question. I wanted to ask about logs. And it's very clear that your log strategy is working with log consumption, over $200 million. Just real quick here. As I think further out, if log growth starts to slow, you did lay out three monetization levers for AI. That's higher telemetry, AI observability, and then monetization of Dynatrace agents as a whole. Is there enough there with the AI to realistically become large enough to replace any sort of slowdown in logs? Or does the medium-term growth algorithm still primarily depend on logs growing nice and durably over the next several years?

Let me start with that. But I do not believe – while we do think logs will continue to be a huge source of consumption growth, growth outside of logs is growing at a very rapid rate as well. Infrastructure monitoring is growing at a very healthy rate. Full stack is growing at a very healthy rate. So consumption of the platform beyond logs is growing at a very robust rate. So I don't expect that that's going to change. So your point about if logs slows, first, we don't think logs is going to slow. We think that, you know, at $200 million, when you look at the size of this opportunity and the differentiation that you have with Dynatrace, we think we're going to be a huge gainer of share in that space. So I don't think logs are going to slow. And I think outside of logs, the rest of the business is growing at a very rapid rate. So I think between logs, customers continuing to move more workloads, and the AI monetization attributes that Rick said, I think all three of them are going to be sources of growth for acceleration and ARR.

Yeah, Koji, I would just say that whether you're looking at the evolution of traditional workloads to include autonomous operations or you're looking at the evolution of workloads altogether to include AI, AI observability, it is critical to have an underlying foundation that begins with end-to-end observability. Essentially, every customer event that I do, every customer meeting that I manage, every customer with whom I engage, it's got to start with end-to-end observability because that's what gives you the underlying insights, the underlying analytics to be able to operate in an environment in a more autonomous way. You have to have logs, traces, metrics. You have to have application monitoring, infrastructure monitoring, about log management all in a consistent integrated platform in order to avoid manual oversight. And if you're looking for AI oversight of that platform, which you can get through Dynatrace vis-a-vis these causal insights coming out of deterministic AI, that begins with end-to-end observability as a foundation for everything else. And the reason I wanted to insert that into the answer to the question is because that is, in many ways, the core driver of the Dynatrace business before you get to any of these other elements. And then you look at log management growth as a component of that. You look at AI observability as an evolution of that. All of these elements are based on the foundation of end-to-end observability growth that is really the core business.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Sonic Chatterjee with J.P. Morgan. Please proceed with your question.

Hi. Thanks for taking my question. And if I could just follow up on Koji's question. On the last monetization driver that you mentioned, Dynatrace agents, and just curious to hear your thoughts about how you think about the sizing of that opportunity longer term relative to AI observability, I think you mentioned like a $10 billion incremental TAM, But just wanted to hear how you're thinking about size or sizing of the agent sort of opportunity overall, maybe a bit more longer term and any thoughts on sort of timing of seeing that sort of evolution.

It's going to evolve in a measured way over the course of time. So we're certainly not expecting any radical shift in mix from our core end-to-end observability capabilities relative to AI observability in the near term. but we do view that as a catalyst because the more AI observability you're doing, the more you're going to use us for end-to-end observability as well for traditional workloads. So I really see them growing in concert, but we do believe that that $10 billion TAM, as we look out over the balance of the decade, represents a significant increase in the addressable market that we can go after with Dynatrace systems. So we wouldn't provide a specific percentage, but we would say that that is going to evolve, by the course of time in a meaningful way.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Ryan McWilliams with Wells Fargo. Please proceed with your question.

Thanks for taking the question.

A few-part question here. Just I'd love to hear how consumption is trending overall in the business compared to the quarter before. And then on the AI workloads requiring more telemetry, we'll have to dig into that. I know it's early, but how does the observability required for AI agent activity compared for the observability required for, like, traditional software applications?

Well, let me take the second one on the AI agents and AI agent usage. You know, I think this is where it really comes back to the three questions that we ask. We look at traditional observability, traditional workloads as really largely addressing the first question that I indicated, which is, is it working? And is it working is really all about business resilience, business resilience. is indicating whether a mobile app is working, whether infrastructure is operating as expected, et cetera. The AI workloads and the agentic flows are adding these couple of additional questions. For example, is it right or is it accurate? And that really is assessing whether the LLMs are producing the right data. Can that data be relied upon to provide to our customers and users as a mechanism for action. And that is really the AI observability piece. And then lastly, increasingly what we are seeing is we are seeing that individuals or individual developers are really, over the course of time, no longer going to be writing code themselves. It is agents that are going to be writing the code, and individuals or humans are going to be overseeing that environment. So this is why we have a lot of confidence in the evolution of this business in the AI observability space, because we have all three of these questions at action. Number one, is it working? Number two, is it accurate? Number three, are my models delivering as expected? And if you put all three of those together, this is what is creating the increased telemetry coming from AI systems.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Atal Kajan with Oppenheimer. Please proceed with your question.

Thanks. Rick, I wanted to go back to the comments around the 1,000 customers that are using you. Excuse me, to monitor AI. Can you talk about the visibility that you have into your customer base and kind of how do you know what you're being used for, what kind of applications, use cases, number one, and number two, perhaps more importantly, how are you reorienting the Salesforce to make sure that they try and capture those types of use cases and workloaded customers?

Yeah, thanks for the question. Absolutely. We can understand how they're using the AI workloads based on the telemetry that we can capture through the Dynastrace platform. So that's how we can accrue the numbers that you see here, that we have 1,000 customers now observing the AI and LLM workloads. We have that capability in the system. With regard to the sales force, the expectation is that we are driving a sales play regarding AI utilization and AI workloads to go after those workloads because of all the reasons we've been describing. It drives increased telemetry. It drives the increased usage of agents. It enables greater monetization. And so we are absolutely very visible in pushing our sales force to be not just looking for traditional observability workloads, but rather AI workloads that are evolving. So it's a key sales play.

Our next question comes from the line of Matthew Martino with Goldman Sachs. Please proceed with your question.

Yeah, good morning. Thanks for the question. And Rick or Jim, on go-to-market, I know you're extending the strategic account coverage model beyond the top 500 customers. What are you seeing in those newly covered accounts in the early going? And what's the realistic timeframe for that cohort to become a more visible contributor to the net new ARR?

Great question. So you're right. We were wildly successful with focusing on the global 500, a huge source of ARR growth over the last year. continues to build. As we extend down, we're already beginning to see traction in that. And so the good news is we're already seeing building go-to-market productivity. Go-to-market productivity continues to improve every quarter. Kind of go back to my point about this building momentum, looking at trailing 12-month net new ARR, the function of the go-to-market changes that we've made. And admittedly, that productivity improvement is coming from both what we call strategic accounts and the enterprise accounts. So our expectation, this is not, we're going to have to wait, you know, 12 months for that. We're already starting to see that. We're inserting that into the go-to-market equation. So the changes that we made two years ago, our expectation is that productivity will continue to build.

One key element also, Matt, that you described is that you have to think about it, not just in terms of the ICP or the intended customer being in the strategic segment, for example. It's all around who is the buyer. It's also about who is the buyer within those accounts. And this is where we have traditionally sold to CXOs. We've sold to IT ops. We absolutely do expect an expansion in an AI world toward SRE, toward platform engineering, toward developers themselves. We are shifting left in the platform, and our third-gen capabilities in our new platform have the capabilities needed for developers to access the platform and to be able to use it in free trial mode and other elements to incorporate it much, much earlier in the development process. And this is going to be a key aspect of us winning in the AI space.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Roddy Sultan with UBS. Please proceed with your question.

Awesome. Yeah, thank you. I just wanted to double-click on the DPS renewal cohorts. I know the renewals are more back-athleted, but I guess is there any trend you're noticing in those renewal conversations for the three-year DPS renewal customers compared to the one- and two-year annual reset cohorts? And I'm just curious how different the upsell opportunity is shaping up to be for the three-year DPS renewals versus the one- and two-year annual reset cohorts.

Yeah, I'd say there's no real difference in the trend. And, again, what we, you know, I'd say the general nature of what you see is that when a customer is in, call it, the first year of their three-year DPS contract, you know, they're more inclined to maybe go on demand if they are exceeding their commitment. As they're in year two and year three, they're more inclined to do an expansion. And so that behavior has not fundamentally changed. Again, Q1, because it's a light renewal quarter, is, you know, I'd say the body of kind of renewals is not substantive enough that there is any change in that trend other than it continues. And so our expectation is if that continues and consumption continues to build, that we have a source of upsell opportunity in the back half of the year. As I mentioned, we have a significant amount of ARR coming up for renewal or going through an annual reset. in the back half of the year, and our expectation is it's a source of expansion opportunity.

Thank you. Our final question will come from the line of Eric Heath with KeyBank Capital Markets. Please proceed with your question.

Awesome. Rick, Jim, just coming back to logs, I guess, one more time, I'm curious to drill in further on where that strength is coming from, whether it's new customers or ramping of existing customers, and also curious to hear maybe how monitoring AI apps might be contributing to the logs consumption figure. And, Jim, if I could, just a housekeeping question here, but fine plane, is that part of the $200 million consumption figure you guys are citing? Thanks.

So what I would say simply on logs is it's effectively all of the above. We're seeing traction in lands with logs because I'd say we have a very unique differentiated set of capabilities. Obviously, the consumption growth that you're seeing is both from new customers and existing customers. We're seeing that cohort class continuing to build from starting maybe smaller with us and continuing to expand their logs journey. So we continue to have a building number of customers that started smaller, getting bigger, quite a few million-dollar-plus logs customers. And your housekeeping question on buying plan, yes, buying plan is included in our logs consumption.

All right. Well, thank you all for your engagement, ongoing support. as usual. Thanks for your questions during the call. We had a very, very strong first quarter. We believe it reinforces our conviction in the path to ARR acceleration for this fiscal year. We are, as you can tell, very enthusiastic about the opportunities ahead, and we look forward to connecting with you at upcoming IR events. Thank you, and have a great day.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much. This does now conclude today's teleconference. We appreciate your participation. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Enjoy the rest of your day.