Dynatrace: Always in pole position

The Gartner Magic Quadrant is legendary in the technology industry: for decades, this type of market analysis has been an important guide for companies, investors, and, above all, IT decision-makers. The consulting firm Gartner uses it to analyze key players in a market segment and visualize the results clearly. Who are the niche players? Who leads the market? Who stands out with their vision? One company has led the Magic Quadrant for “observability” for almost fifteen years – unchallenged so far.

The publicly traded US company Dynatrace, currently worth over $15 billion, was founded in Linz in 2005. Co-founder Bernd Greifeneder is still CTO and – a unique feature in the industry – heads global research and development from Linz, where a spectacular new building is currently entering its final construction phase.

Observability is a true specialized field, but one that is extremely system-relevant: without these monitoring programs, there would be no digital life, no money transfers, no logistics, and no e-commerce. Dynatrace monitors the "health of the system" and automatically warns of bottlenecks or disruptions. "Our customers have hundreds of thousands of software systems running, and they need to know what's going on," says Greifeneder. Today, 4,000 customers around the world work with these AI-empowered and highly automated programs. “Ten percent of our thousands of customers already use 'Preventive Operations', a system that detects problems before they occur. This is a preliminary stage to completely autonomous operations."

More than 1,600 employees work directly on the product: The aim is to have concepts for the day after tomorrow and to remain flexible and agile enough to respond to short-term market needs. The company strives to create optimal conditions for these employees. It is one of the best and most popular employers in the IT sector in Austria. "Software development is a creative process; the teams must have sufficient autonomy," explains mastermind Greifeneder. This leads to results such as the new database called Grail, a milestone. "The explosion of data and code is generating more and more data that needs to be evaluated: we have customers who now accumulate a petabyte of data per day in their IT operations. Evaluating this in real time is only possible with a specialized database. Ours is called Grail. No other database on the market can do this."

Spectacular developments such as this "Grail" are based on a stringent R&D strategy: teams that are particularly innovative and creative are rewarded with bonuses. Innovations are protected by patents, with up to 15 new ones added each year. The whole process is fertilized by research projects pursued with universities and partners from industry. The US company with Austrian power seems to have secured pole position in the Magic Quadrant for the foreseeable future.

Read more: Bernd Greifeneder talks about excessive expectations for AI projects and excessive energy consumption, and why Dynatrace CTO believes that better software architects are needed to keep AI under control and explains why senior management is interested in monitoring software.