Charles Lyons-Burt
By his own admission, sales leader Brian Mikkelsen got into technology at the right time. A combination of timing, talent and shrewd decision-making has enabled him to work with “prominent companies during their peaks.” This included IBM—where he sold computers—at the very beginning of his career and Red Hat for two decades during the meat of his career. He’s now happily pursuing a new challenge at Datadog, a tech company offering cloud-scale observability and security products.
In his two and a half years at the company—where he is vice president and general manager of its U.S. public sector business—Mikkelsen says they’ve achieved a lot of success, but they’re only just getting started. With more government authorizations and certifications planned, the sky is truly the limit for their expansion.
Mikkelsen sat for a thorough interview with ExecutiveBiz, where he illustrated how Datadog’s unique culture and offerings—which he described as providing a “single source of truth”—are powering its progress.
ExecutiveBiz: Introduce our audience to what Datadog is and the problems you’re trying to solve as an organization.
Brian Mikkelsen: I typically frame this from the perspective of government IT challenges, which are becoming more complex at a rapid pace. When I start with this, it’s almost universally understood—there’s little debate.
The complexity spans on-prem systems and cloud environments, leading to what we now call hybrid architecture. Datadog offers a single platform for full-stack observability and security in these hybrid environments, greatly simplifying what has become inherently complex. We provide customers and prospects with a unified view of the health and security of their infrastructure and systems, enabling cross-functional teams to work from the same data. This full-stack capability spans everything from network systems, operating systems, containers, microservices and serverless architectures to back-end databases and the front-end user experience. For example, we empower digital service leaders in the government to understand how users navigate their applications, where they get stuck and where they drop off.
EBiz: Tell me about Datadog’s culture. What aspects of the company do you think are contributing most to its success while helping to attract and retain top-level talent?
Mikkelsen: When it comes to Datadog’s culture, it’s very straightforward and defined. We’re still founder-led, with both the chief technology officer and CEO still active and involved in daily operations. We’re both an engineering-led and product-led company, focused on identifying and addressing customer challenges as rapidly as possible.
With 26 percent year-over-year revenue growth, Datadog is a fast-growing -observability and security company. More important than our size, though, is our focus on innovation. We reinvest a significant amount of revenue into research and development—about 30 percent—enabling hundreds of agile engineering teams to bring new capabilities to market at an unprecedented pace. During 2024, we delivered hundreds of new features and capabilities to help our customers as they migrate to the cloud and adopt new technologies like next-gen AI. This agile, innovative culture, combined with our unified observability and security platform, helps us meet and exceed customer demand in ways that truly differentiate us.
EBiz: Let’s get specific. What tech solutions are in rotation currently and what can we look forward to in the future?
Mikkelsen: When we approach customers, we simplify our conversation, despite Datadog offering hundreds of features. Our focus is on solving core challenges in specific areas, which helps customers see value in our core offerings before exploring additional services.
Traditionally, when we talk about observability, we focus on the three pillars: infrastructure monitoring and metrics, application traces for performance insights, and logs, which I often refer to as the ‘exhaust of the IT industry.’ Every interaction generates logs, and these form a record that allows our customers to connect the dots between infrastructure, applications and user experiences, from backend systems to front-end usability.
Modern observability platforms, like Datadog, build upon these pillars by automatically tagging metrics, traces and logs, creating a unified context. This automatic tagging enables simplistic correlation between events and systems, drastically reducing the time and effort required to troubleshoot issues and understand the complex relationships within distributed environments.
This unified context is also critical for addressing the growing importance of security within the observability discussion. While the government may not have a specific observability mandate, it does prioritize related areas like cybersecurity (including zero trust initiatives), IT modernization, customer experience and cloud adoption.
Datadog supports these goals by connecting the dots. While we’re not primarily a zero trust company, we offer more than 850 integrations that help our customers observe and secure their systems by automatically correlating insights between identity, infrastructure, applications and data—key pillars of a robust zero trust architecture.
This comprehensive visibility is crucial for zero trust initiatives, providing the context needed to verify every access request and enforce least privilege. Visibility is a core tenant of zero trust, and Datadog provides a single view for everyone—from developers and operators to security engineers and executives—to monitor operational health and performance.
Our current strengths are full stack, hybrid architecture observability and security, and we’re expanding with offerings that meet government-specific requirements. For federal clients, we offer Datadog for Government, delivered through AWS GovCloud, and we’re committed to reaching higher FedRAMP® and DOD IL5 authorizations. These efforts ensure that we can serve higher-level federal needs, including Department of Defense requirements.
A timely feature I’ve been discussing lately is cloud cost management, especially given budget constraints across state, local and federal governments. Moving to the cloud creates pressure to act quickly, which can lead to inefficiencies. Many organizations ‘lift and shift’ existing systems to the cloud without restructuring, which can carry existing issues into the new environment. Our cloud cost management offering is designed to address these challenges by providing real-time visibility into cloud spending and efficiency.
This capability connects financial and operational teams, offering a unified view so they can see how decisions impact costs in real-time. The process is simple: we ingest a cloud service provider’s cost and usage reports, activate a recommendation engine that identifies cost-saving opportunities and help manage idle resources. This is especially beneficial for government programs because it allows them to see where they can optimize cloud costs and eliminate idle resources that may be draining funds unknowingly.
Unlike many companies, Datadog doesn’t charge per user, which allows all relevant teams to access the tool without siloing data. This ‘single source of truth’ allows everyone—developers, operators, security and finance teams—to work from the same unified perspective, enhancing collaboration and decision-making across departments.
EBiz: In wrapping up, let’s cut to the heart of the matter. What does all of this boil down to for Datadog in terms of mission and execution?
Mikkelsen: It is not principally about IT software operations or networks; they serve an IT purpose, but they are fundamentally about delivering capability. This connects directly to the citizen experience initiative. Are we creating experiences and delivering new capabilities at the right speed to meet customer demand? In this case, the customers are citizens and employees. It’s about helping the government get capabilities to market more quickly and ensuring they are available when needed. There are some interesting and unique use cases.
Here’s a real-world example: We work with a federal emergency response agency that is currently managing a double disaster and needs assurance that its systems remain operational. This includes everything from data entry systems to handheld mobile devices that connect to backend applications. Observability is key—if these systems fail, it directly impacts the government’s ability to deliver critical services to citizens in urgent need.
Public service, funded by taxpayer dollars, is the US government’s core mission. The conversation around unified platforms, full-stack observability and security extends beyond IT—it’s about enhancing government capabilities, delivering services more efficiently, and leveraging the best technologies to make these processes seamless and scalable.
