Yadi Narayana returns to Datadog as APJ field CTO

Datadog has hired Yadi Narayana as its Asia Pacific and Japan field CTO, bringing him back to the company after leaving nearly two years ago.

In the newly-created role based in Sydney, Narayana will advise on and deliver tailored solutions for midmarket organisations and enterprises, identifying opportunities and offering best practices to help users across cloud migration, cyber security and AI projects.

He reports to the company’s vice president of product solutions architecture and field CTO teams, Eugene Kovnatsky.

Narayana comes back to the vendor after close to a year spent at LaunchDarkly, where he was also its field CTO, and spent three years previously at Datadog as its APJ head of post sales from August 2020 to August 2023.

He also held roles at Splunk, AppDynamics, and Unified Messaging Systems, along with several telecom providers across Europe and Asia, bringing over 20 years of experience in the IT industry.

“Yadi has extensive experience in observability at large as well as deep understanding of Datadog and our platform,” Kovnatsky said.

“His technology and advisory leadership will be pivotal in delivering value, enhancing performance, and driving growth for our customers in APJ.”

On his appointment, Narayana said he has spent the last 12 years focused on observability strategy, architecture and sales, with Datadog standing out as one of “the best product in the market”.

“It’s organic, seamless under the hood and unified, allowing it to solve the vast breadth and depth of company challenges in ways that a pointed approach simply can’t. This gives me the opportunity to take an ‘outside-in’ approach to delivering the right solutions to our customers,” he added.

According to Datadog, Narayana’s appointment is the latest milestone in its APJ expansion and comes a month after it announced its plans to launch its first Australia data centre instance later this year.

His hire also is part of Datadog’s efforts to expand its headcount across technical, sales and marketing roles in Australia and New Zealand (A/NZ), ASEAN, India, Japan and Korea.

“We are seeing demand for strategic thought leadership from our customers,” said APJ vice president Rob Thorne. “Adding Yadi’s deep expertise in observability and security to our team is paramount to helping those organisations navigate complex challenges and tackle new opportunities.”