First, a clarification. New Relic positions itself as a software analytics company. But take a closer look and you'll begin to see the RMM connection. New Relic is a multi-tenant SaaS platform that "helps companies securely monitor their production software in virtually any environment, without having to build or maintain dedicated infrastructure." Basically, New Relic is for application performance monitoring (APM) and management... and more. A recent acquisition (involving Opsmatic) pushes the company into infrastructure monitoring for DevOps teams.
But does New Relic's software work? By coincidence, a CTO at a major IT security company and I were recently talking about cloud monitoring. That's when he mentioned his company's use of New Relic. The CTO told me New Relic's SaaS platform can pinpoint application performance issues down to a single line of poorly written code. He's impressed.
New Relic Partner Program
John GrayJohn Gray, senior VP of business development, leads the New Relic Partner Program, which launched in recent days.
Gray is a seasoned channel executive. He previously drove partner programs and strategic alliances for LivePerson, Oracle, BEA System and Lotus Development.
The New Relic Partner Program effort includes a mix of strategic alliances, cloud platform partners, independent software vendors (ISVs),managed service providers (MSPs), resellers and ecosystem partners.
The company has key relationships in place with DigitasLBi, Amazon, Cloud Foundry, Pivotal Software and Salesforce.com. On the channel partner front, reseller relationships are in place with SHI International Corp., SoftChoice and Magento. In terms of technology partnerships, integrations with Red Hat OpenShift, Docker monitoring and HipChat are coming into focus.
Overall, the partner program aims at "recruiting, enabling and supporting the world’s leading technology and service providers to advance and engage with software analytics." New Relic has also bolstered its online training and education tools for partners.
So, why did so many MSP-centric channel partners miss this partner program announcement? More than 2,000 of them were busy attending IT Nation last week... while New Relic was hosting its partner and customer conference in San Francisco (called FutureStack). No doubt, IT Nation had plenty of great content for MSPs. But New Relic is yet another born-in-the-cloud offering that channel partners need to watch.
Fast Growth, Growing Customer Base
New Relic is growing. Fast. The company recently said fiscal Q2 2016 revenue jumped 69 percent to $42.9 million. Still, the company is losing money -- like so many other young startups that are still finding their way in public markets.
As of September 30, 2015, the company had 12,840 paid customers -- though I don't know how many MSPs or service providers are on the platform. Moreover, I don't see a clear line between New Relic's offerings for service providers vs. end customers. We're pinging the company now for more information on the partner strategy.
PS: Keep an eye on LogicMonitor and AppDynamics, too. Also, I'm not suggesting that application performance monitoring will fully disrupt traditional RMM. For instance, many companies are running LogicMonitor and LabTech Software in tandem. More thoughts on those realities soon.
