‘We’re keen to capture our unfair share of the market’: Dynatrace regional UKI VP

Martin Bradbury discusses leadership changes, the AI fear factor and the rising importance of sovereignty

Following CRN**’s conversation with Dynatrace VP of worldwide partners Michael Allen**, coverage of the vendor’s Innovate Roadshow continues with a closer look at its UK business.

While Allen outlined Dynatrace’s global partner strategy, evolving portfolio and ambitions for growth, regional VP for UKI Martin Bradbury offered a view from closer to home.

Promoted to the role last August, Bradbury has since overseen changes to the vendor’s UK leadership team, a sharper focus on strategic partners and rising demand for observability as AI workloads move into production.

Speaking with CRN at the Emirates Stadium, London, Bradbury discusses Dynatrace’s evolving UK channel strategy, its approach to partner momentum and why AI is putting observability back in the boardroom conversation.

You were promoted to regional VP of UK&I in August. What has changed since you took over?

“We’ve sought to optimise the UK organisation around the focus areas that we believe are going to drive the business forward.

“There’s the focus on the logs business, observability for AI workloads and driving that whole end-to-end autonomous operations message.

“I don’t think there’s been a radical change since I stepped into the role, but there has been a more focused approach as a sales organisation, while continuing the investment we’ve made with our key strategic partners as well.

“I would frame it as evolution rather than revolution. We were primarily doing the right things before.”

Have you made any changes to your team, either at leadership level or across the wider organisation, since you took over?

“We’ve brought in some new regional directors.

“I had to backfill my own position because I was promoted from leading our strategic business.

“We’ve brought in a new public sector leader, Paula Lender-Swain, as well as Rob Baxter to lead our acquisition business.

“We’ve also brought in Craig Woodward from ServiceNow to backfill my previous role leading the strategic business.

“We’ve tried to hire people who are experienced in the ecosystem in which we want to play.

“Dynatrace is definitely an ecosystem partner, if you like, within our customers’ environments, and bringing in people from other parts of that ecosystem has proved really helpful.

“It’s accelerated our relationship with ServiceNow locally and accelerated momentum in the public sector, for example.”

Why do you think organisations still struggle to trust AI today?

“I’d look at it in two ways.

“In observability, organisations still struggle with fragmentation, and that’s as much an organisational problem as it is a technology problem.

“The way technology organisations are typically set up promotes people having their pet tools within their own areas to look at their specific areas of responsibility.

“Organisations that are forward-thinking in this space, like the customers you heard speak today, Nationwide being an example, have looked at how they can break down those silos as the foundational step.

“What that then means is that you have one point of accountability and one point of data against which to run your AI efforts.

“That gives you a deterministic answer, an answer rather than a guess, from an observability point of view.

“What we’re also seeing is that when AI workloads go into production, observability isn’t always the first thing customers think about when they deploy those workloads.

“It then becomes a bit of a blind spot because AI changes the way organisations need to observe things.

“If you think about an ecommerce journey today, getting a quote and buying insurance, for example, that’s relatively easy to observe. Is it performing? Does it respond? Does it do what the user needs when they click the button?

“With an AI workload, it’s much more about what the input was, what the output was, how that output drifts over time and what the cost is.

“Cost is a huge issue in that space.

“There’s a fear factor around cost, inputs, outputs, drift and all of these different issues.

“And let’s be really clear: everyone is tooling themselves up in real time. As individuals, we’re all learning day by day.

“I don’t think organisations are particularly well equipped with the right skills, so they’re learning as they go.

“There are some very, very big-budget companies hiring AI skills in the major metropolitan areas, and a lot of businesses can’t compete with that.

“So the question becomes: how do we grow those skills internally? How do we enable people?

“I think there’s a skills and enablement issue as well.”

How many partners do you work with in the UK?

“Around 50.

What we’ve sought to do over probably the last two years is refine that number.

“We want higher-quality relationships with a smaller number of partners.

“We’ve really looked to identify our tier-one focus partners where we can meet the market in terms of where they’re looking to build practices around what we do and where that’s complementary to the other technologies they work with, ServiceNow being a great example.”

What does your partner mix currently look like?

“We’ve seen great traction across GSIs, MSPs and boutique firms and we see them addressing slightly different parts of the market too.

“MSPs have a significant business presence for us, and we continue to focus on the managed service provider world.

“Straightforward resellers are also a strong part of the business. We’ve got some great velocity in our commercial business in that space.

“Boutique partners have risen a little bit, perhaps over the last year, because there are some really great boutique partners with niche skills around certain technologies that are complementary to what we do.”

How does the UK compare with other European markets in terms of importance to Dynatrace and market share?

“The core markets for us in EMEA are France, Germany and the UK.

“I would say we punch at about the weight you would expect us to from a UK perspective.

“The UK certainly gets a lot of time and attention from our executives, as you would imagine, because it’s a big market.

“We see it as a growth market.

“Particularly with the rise of AI skills in the UK, AI start-ups in the UK and the broader ambition for the UK to become a significant player on the world stage, we definitely see an opportunity.

“We’re keen to capture our unfair share of that market.”

What percentage of your UK sales go through the channel?

“We made a decision to be partner-first.

“All of our new business is now transacted through partners, and that’s been the case for a number of years.

“We see partners as critical to our business. We’ve mandated it.

“Increasingly, those transactions also involve the hyperscalers.

“A significant part of our business today involves multi-party transactions with a reseller and a hyperscaler marketplace.

“We see huge value in that from the customer’s perspective because they can combine their cloud economics and existing cloud agreements with their Dynatrace spend.”

Speaking of your direct sales, what sectors do you work with directly in the UK?

“We work with all sectors.

“We sell directly in the sense that we interact with our customers directly, but we do that with partners.

“That’s our model.”

Do you have one global partner programme?

“There’s still one global programme

“In fact, our investment in it is increasing every year as we build it out and as it matures.

“There’s always localisation.

“We have some partners that are global, some that are regional across EMEA and some that are very specific to markets such as the UK.

“Localisation is important.

“Dynatrace is very progressive in the way it looks at that.

“We have a lot of freedom to do what’s right for our business locally, but the core partner programme is absolutely still set globally.

“It’s a huge area of investment for us.”

Have you seen growing demand around sovereignty among partner and have you adapted your offering in response?

“Yes, definitely, although probably not as much in the UK.

“Our European markets have more data sovereignty discussions with their customers, and it’s higher on the agenda there.

“In the UK, it’s there, but it’s perhaps not as much of a top priority as it is in those European countries.

“We’ve always provided optionality around where Dynatrace stores customer data and what data is stored within the platform.

“I think we have a strong answer for UK customers today.

“We can host it within the UK hyperscaler presence.”