Datadog plans to sit and stay in Australia

Data sovereignty and a $147B opportunity drive plans for a local data centre.

Datadog, a leading global provider of cloud-based application monitoring services, has flagged Australia as a major priority for its future growth – and it’s planning to open its first local data centre to make it happen.

The New York-based business, founded in 2010, commands some 69 per cent of the global data centre management market, according to Gartner, and is a significant player in related fields such as big data and data analytics.

It has over 100 employees in Australia (with plans to hire more) through offices in Sydney and a recently opened expansion in Melbourne, as well as an extensive (and growing) multi-tiered network of channel partners. It operates data centres in North America, Asia, and Europe, but not Australia – yet.

Its 1000+ customers in Australia and New Zealand work across sectors as diverse as e-commerce and retail, SaaS and tech, with some even in financial services and finance.

However, the lack of a local data centre is a limiting factor particularly for those last two – regulators have become increasingly strict in recent years about data sovereignty, meaning customers’ information isn’t allowed to leave the country.

A local presence, therefore, opens up huge opportunities for the platform and its channel partners to offer a fuller range of services to customers in these sectors. It will also mean the platform will be able to meet local requirements for privacy and security.

Rob Thorne, VP APAC at Datadog pointed to the Australian government’s stated ambition to become a top-three digital government as a factor in prioritising the region. He claimed that the platform has “experienced surging demand” in Australia, and cited Gartner forecasts of local businesses investing as much as $147 billion in IT in the year ahead – particularly in cybersecurity, generative AI and cloud services.

Thorne predicted Datadog is “poised to support this appetite for advanced digital capabilities across the private sector” as well as pushing into government-dominated areas like healthcare and higher education, where compliance with regulation and policy is essential.

Yanbing Li, Chief Product Officer at Datadog, noted that “for businesses in highly regulated industries like healthcare and financial services, hosting data locally is critical” and that’s a need she promised the Aussie data centre is poised to meet.

The data centre will offer the full range of Datadog’s products on racks rented from AWS Cloud, and is expected to be operational sometime around the middle of the year.