At the beginning of our last fiscal year, we set a number of objectives for the company (as you do). Some were metrics-based and some were more qualitative, but all were focused on making a much greater impact of our solution for our customers. As we leave the year behind, it’s really satisfying to see the tremendous progress made on that front: we saw record bookings and 130 percent bookings growth, and more than doubled our customer base. Most satisfying, is the fact that our customers continue to be our strongest pillar, not only validating our solution, but also pushing the limits of what they want to do with it, and pushing us as a team to do even more than we’ve done before. So I would like to thank all of our customers for being an instrumental part of our growth. I look forward to continuing to push the limits together.
With the success we saw in the market, we also closed a new round of investment to further grow ThousandEyes and move us closer to our vision to provide network intelligence for every network and connected device. Here are some highlights on our progress.
Customer Adoption
We continue to land incredible customers ranging from some of the fastest growing and most well-known technology companies, such as Slack, to an increasingly impressive list of Fortune 100 companies. The common theme among all of these companies is that they are trying to turn today’s chaotic hybrid networks to their advantage. Our existing customers also continued to grow their use of ThousandEyes, often starting with using ThousandEyes in one group, but then expanding to more teams and use cases. This is the advantage of a flexible solution such as ThousandEyes that can grow with customer needs, and we are seeing the market echo this preference for a subscription-based technology over an appliance-based perpetual license approach.
Intelligence, Not Monitoring
Without getting too pedantic, we’ve seen customers treat monitoring as simply a representation of the current state of their environment (e.g. servers are up, traffic volumes, etc.). This is where legacy vendors operate. The impetus for creating ThousandEyes was based on customers wanting more than what the many ‘monitoring’ solutions provided—they wanted insights, analytics and intelligence to help make better decisions. In the past year, we’ve made phenomenal progress in extending ThousandEyes to be more insights and intelligence driven. Now our customers can use ThousandEyes to see what things will look like before going live with cloud applications or making production changes to their internal or external environments.
Collaborative Ecosystem
Solving network or application performance issues in today's world involves collaborating with people outside your organization. This is why our approach focuses on creating an ecosystem that facilitates seamless collaboration and provides value to all entities. To that extent, we have taken our partnerships with leading cloud companies such as Salesforce and Microsoft to the next level, enabling more seamless and effective collaboration between these companies and their customers.
Welcome to New Investors Tenaya Capital and GV
With terrific momentum on the customer side, raising an investment round to continue scaling and growing the company made a lot of sense. As a business, we’ve always been focused on having strong fundamentals and unit economics. It was therefore really gratifying to see investors react with surprise (and sometimes shock) at how capital efficient we were, and at the fact that the investment was for scaling the business, not survival! The two investors that aligned perfectly with our vision and long-term objectives were Brian Paul from Tenaya Capital and Dave Munichiello from GV (formerly Google Ventures). Over the last six months, I have thoroughly enjoyed getting to know both Brian and Dave, and was very impressed by their understanding of the state of networks today, and the need for change as well as their grasp of what we at ThousandEyes are all about. Every CEO has a different way to figure out which investors are the best fit, and the way I prefer to go about this is to really understand the crux of why they are interested in ThousandEyes. Both Brian and Dave had the best thesis on the market we serve, its current state and the size of the impact we can make. I’m looking forward to working closely with them to take the company through its next phase of growth.
So What's Cooking?
Our Product and Engineering team has been busy working on some very exciting technology that will begin rolling out over the year. I couldn’t be more proud of our engineering team, which doesn’t restrict itself to what’s already out in the market, and instead challenges the status quo to build something truly groundbreaking. At the core of ThousandEyes is high-quality data—data that we generate—which is a key difference between us and most legacy solutions that are based on packet sniffing. Overlaying the data is a layer of intelligence that gets a lot more out of the data than humans can. Finally, we work hard to make this intelligence accessible and available such that users can interact with it to quickly get the insights they need, and this is where our interaction and collaboration layer comes in. Expect major additions to each of these layers throughout the year!
I’d like to congratulate and thank everyone who’s been involved with ThousandEyes, including our internal team, our customers and our investors, for helping us get to where we are today. Our philosophy is not to simply sell products, but to solve the toughest networking challenges in an intuitive and elegant way. Our company, our product, our team and our future efforts are predicated on that philosophy—we live and breathe it. To that end, I look forward to helping make your lives as operators, engineers and architects in the infrastructure world easier, more fun and more impactful!