Dynatrace CEO Rick McConnell on CNBC Europe’s Squawk Box

Thriving in ‘Europe’s Silicon Valley’ and helping customers achieve business resiliency in the wake of major IT outages

In a broadcast interview with CNBC Europe’s Squawk Box, Dynatrace CEO Rick McConnell discussed how the company’s roots in Central Europe have been critical to its success and ability to deliver industry-leading innovation. McConnell also shared his insights on the recent CrowdStrike outage, including how Dynatrace helped its impacted customers minimize disruption to end users. The interview delves into the consequences of major IT outages and the lessons organizations should glean to be better prepared.

Here are a few key takeaways from the interview.

Rooted in “the Silicon Valley of Europe”

McConnell spoke to the value of having deep roots in Central Europe as an Austrian-founded company, highlighting that “over 95% of Dynatrace’s R&D and innovation efforts occur in Europe.” With access to world-class universities and new technology talent, Dynatrace has built a core group of engineers in Europe that McConnell emphasized as a key differentiator for the company. “In many ways, we view Central Europe as the Silicon Valley of Europe,” he said, noting the region as a hub for global tech strategy, which has given Dynatrace a competitive advantage and enabled the company to focus on its mission to deliver software that works perfectly.

Business resilience through the CrowdStrike outage

McConnell also discussed how the global CrowdStrike outage became a prime example of why it’s so important that software works as intended. He spoke about the criticality of investments in technology solutions that eliminate blind spots and reduce manual intervention. He also noted how the company’s unique ‘power of 3’ approach to AI delivers these capabilities to its customers to enable business resiliency.

“It’s about preparation and making sure you have sophisticated, automated systems, to be able to constantly monitor your solutions,” McConnell explains. “At Dynatrace, we use a power of three AI approach, which uses causal, predictive, and generative AI all bundled together to be constantly analyzing billions of data points so that organizations can aggregate, evaluate, and then respond to those data points in near-real time.”

It’s this approach that allows organizations to observe their environments cohesively and resolve issues as quickly as possible. Whether operating on-prem or in a diverse multicloud environment, customers with end-to-end deployments of the Dynatrace platform were back up in hours, while other companies took days to recover.