New Stack 2Q26 Preview – Round 1: Elevated Bar But Demand Environment Stays Healthy

Research evidence excerpt

New Stack 2Q26 Preview – Round 1: Elevated Bar But Demand Environment Stays Healthy

Idea

July 28, 2026 10:26 AM GMT

Morgan Stanley & Co. LLCMSoftware | North America Sanjit K Singh

Equity Analyst

New Stack 2Q26 Preview – Sanjit.Singh@morganstanley.comAdam Wood +1 415 576-2060

Adam.Wood@morganstanley.com +1 212 761-3656

Round 1: Elevated Bar But Jamie Reynolds

Research Associate

Jamie.Reynolds@morganstanley.com +1 212 761-2087

Demand Environment Stays Jonathan Eisenson

Jonathan.Eisenson@morganstanley.com +1 212 761-2808

Healthy Ryan Lountzis

Ryan.Lountzis@morganstanley.com +1 212 761-3189

What’s Changed Abhishek S Murli

Datadog, Inc. (DDOG.O) From To Research Associate

Abhishek.S.Murli@morganstanley.com +1 212 761-7388

Price Target $225.00 $300.00

Software

North America

Industry View Attractive

Risk/Reward Skews Less Positive Vs. 1Q But Demand Environment in Infra is

Encouraging. Q1 results proved to be a major catalyst for returns with strong share

performance for Datadog, JFrog, Atlassian, Dynatrace, and Akamai over the past 3

months. While this does imply that the bar for Q2 is higher than it was heading into

Q1, we are encouraged by the fact that the demand environment remains generally

healthy as evidenced by stable software budget growth expectations (see our 2Q26

CIO Survey ) and what is proving to be the strongest public cloud spend

environment in several years. On the whole, our partner conversations improved

versus Q1 (which were also generally positive). Given the recent results from IBM

and Pega, we were unable to find evidence that IT budgets were being reallocated

away from software in favor of hardware/AI infra+structure (at least not for cloud

infrastructure). From a vendor standpoint, Datadog and Palantir stood out as the