New Stack 3Q26 Preview – Round 1: While More Expensive, Infra Demand Stays Strong

Infrastructure software has gotten more expensive, but we don't see evidence that growth has slowed in Q3. The majority of our infrastructure software coverage is up double-digits over the last 3 months, which suggests the bar is higher heading into Q3 results. That said, we were unable to find evidence of a slowdown in our field checks – if anything, the demand environment looked slightly stronger in aggregate versus Q2, tracking our recent 3Q26 CIO Survey, which saw 2026 software budget growth expectations improve to 4.4% from 4.3%. Cloudflare, Datadog and JFrog stood out as the fastest growing in Q3 according to partners, while Dynatrace conversations were also solid, though a tough QoQ compare and the DPS renewal catalyst skewed to 2H suggest a more attractive setup for the December quarter. Appian down-ticked slightly but we still see a path to 20%+ cc cloud growth, and we like the setup for DigitalOcean as growth should improve further with potential upside to its 50%+ 2027 growt