☁️ Move $FSLY... And Partner with Google
[Week 41 | +8.3% vs. +3.9%]: Cloud stocks again dominated the market for the week ending 10/9, increasing 8.3% vs. +3.9% for the broader index. The sheer breadth of investor inflows was impressive as only 2 stocks declined and $ZM, the poster child of COVID-driven growth, finished the week as one of the worst performers "only" increasing +2.1%. Let's begin with general sentiment...
Why are investors so trigger happy?
New partnerships (particularly $FSLY/$GOOGL), a string of SaaS upgrades and positive initiations (more below), general excitement around 3Q earnings following a number of positive pre-announcements ($TWLO 10/1 & $AYX 10/5), and M&A ($TWLO buying Segment).
Datadog Style: Fastly & Google form strategic partnership
$FSLY up +32.8% on tighter integration with GCP. As the world moves remote first, Fastly enables developers to build fast, scalable, and reliable cloud applications. Case study? TikTok (represents ~12% of Fastly revenues). As our collective attention spans shrink to the length of a terrible dance video, users demand faster and more seamless experiences (moving to the next terrible dance video). Unfamiliar with TikTok? Ok, boomer, edge computing also enables companies like Shopify to serve you lighting fast checkouts on your mobile device.
Investors love easier onboarding. Fastly's #1 priority is signing new customers... and fastly. Integrating with the GCP Marketplace provides enterprises a more streamlined opportunity to launch on Fastly. Benefits: 1) no need to seek budget approval for a new third-party tool, 2) consolidated billing arrangements, and 3) might count towards GCP minimums. The outcome? More customers (hopefully).
Fastly has recently announced our availability on the GCP Marketplace. This can help eliminate the need for separate billing arrangements and might also count toward GCP committed spend if you have a GCP spend agreement, making it easier than ever to combine the power of Fastly and Google Cloud
Seeking Arrangements. The Fastly/Google partnership comes the week after Datadog announced a strategic partnership with Microsoft's Azure, similarly highlighting the benefits of fewer sticking points during the onboarding process. Chetan Puttagunta, software investor at Benchmark, also took to twitter to note his approval.
With blessings of high NRR and low Churn,
Thomas