SPECIAL NOTE REGARDING FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS
This Annual Report on Form 10-K (“Annual Report”) contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws, which statements involve substantial risks and uncertainties. Forward-looking statements generally relate to future events or our future financial or operating performance. All statements of historical fact included in this Annual Report regarding our strategy, future operations, financial position, estimated revenues and losses, projected costs, prospects, plans and objectives of management are forward-looking statements. In some cases, you can identify forward-looking statements because they contain words such as “may,” “should,” “expects,” “plans,” “anticipates,” “could,” “intends,” “target,” “projects,” “contemplates,” “believes,” “estimates,” “predicts,” “potential” or “continue” or the negative of these words or other similar terms or expressions that concern our expectations, strategy, plans or intentions. When considering forward-looking statements, you should keep in mind the risk factors and other cautionary statements described under the heading “Risk Factors” included in this Annual Report. These forward-looking statements are based on management’s current beliefs, based on currently available information, as to the outcome and timing of future events. Forward-looking statements contained in this Annual Report include, but are not limited to, statements about:
We caution you that the foregoing list may not contain all of the forward-looking statements made in this Annual Report.
You should not rely upon forward-looking statements as predictions of future events. We have based the forward-looking statements contained in this Annual Report primarily on our current expectations and projections about future events and trends that we believe may affect our business, financial condition, results of operations and prospects. The outcome of the events described in these forward-looking statements is subject to risks, uncertainties and other factors described in the section titled “Risk Factors” in this Annual Report. Moreover, we operate in a very competitive and rapidly changing environment. New risks and uncertainties emerge from time to time and it is not possible for us to predict all risks and uncertainties that could have an impact on the forward-looking statements contained in this Annual Report. We cannot assure you that the results, events and circumstances reflected in the forward-looking statements will be achieved or occur, and actual results, events or circumstances could differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements.
PART I. FINANCIAL INFORMATION
ITEM 1. BUSINESS
Overview
We offer the market-leading software intelligence platform, purpose-built for dynamic multi-cloud environments. As enterprises embrace the cloud to effect their digital transformation, our all-in-one intelligence platform is designed to address the growing complexity faced by technology and digital business teams. Our platform utilizes artificial intelligence at its core and continuous automation to provide answers, not just data, about the performance of applications, the underlying hybrid cloud infrastructure, and the experience of our customers’ users. We designed our software intelligence platform to allow our customers to modernize and automate IT operations, develop and release high quality software faster, and improve user experiences for better business outcomes. As a result, as of March 31, 2020, our products are trusted by more than 2,700 customers in over 80 countries in diverse industries such as banking, insurance, retail, manufacturing, travel and software.
Today’s leading companies are striving to deliver innovative, high performance digital services to expand market opportunities, compete more effectively, and operate with increased agility. Software is increasingly essential to how enterprises seek to accomplish these goals. Applications sit at the core of this software revolution and are central to the digital transformation of these enterprises—from the mission critical enterprise applications that power factories, enable trading, manage transportation networks, and run business systems to the applications that consumers use every day to bank, shop, entertain, travel, and more.
Developing and operating software is harder than ever, largely driven by:
Traditional approaches for developing, operating, and monitoring software were not designed for dynamic multi-cloud environments. Traditional monitoring solutions were developed in an era in which applications were monolithic, updated infrequently, and run in static data center environments. These monitoring solutions, including application performance monitoring, or APM, infrastructure monitoring, incident and alert management, and user experience monitoring, are difficult to deploy, narrow in scope, and were designed to operate in a simpler, siloed environment. Each tool in this approach only collects data about individual components of the computing stack, such as applications, infrastructures, logs, networks, or user experiences. In order to get an end-to-end view using these traditional approaches, IT teams are required to aggregate and correlate data from these disparate monitoring solutions in an attempt to identify actionable answers, including where bottlenecks occur, how best to optimize for performance and scalability, if an issue is impacting service, and if so, where to find the problem and what to do about it.
With the advent of dynamic multi-cloud environments, the challenges and limitations of traditional solutions have been exacerbated. What was once a well understood layering of applications running on operating systems on physical servers connected to physical networks has rapidly become virtualized into software at all levels. Environments have become dynamic. Applications are no longer monolithic and are fragmented into dozens to potentially thousands of microservices, written in multiple software languages. These multi-cloud environments sprawl from traditional backend applications run on relational databases and mainframes to modern IaaS platforms run on Amazon Web Services, or AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. All these factors result in an environment that is web-scale, extremely complex, and dynamic at all layers of the new computing stack.
We believe the scale, complexity, and dynamic nature of dynamic multi-cloud environments, including the applications that run on them, require a comprehensive monitoring strategy that we refer to as “software intelligence.” Starting in 2014, we leveraged the knowledge and experience of the same engineering team that founded Dynatrace to develop a solution to address the disruptive shift to dynamic multi-cloud environments. These efforts resulted in the creation of a new platform, the Dynatrace Software Intelligence Platform, or Dynatrace®. Dynatrace® leverages an automatic instrumentation technology that we call OneAgent®, a real-time dependency mapping system we call SmartScape®, our transaction-centric code analysis technology that we call PurePath®, and an open artificial intelligence,