Fierce competition between AppDynamics and New Relic will be on full-display in November -- when the application performance management (APM) rivals host partner and customer conferences the same week in separate cities.
Indeed, the AppDynamics user conference -- dubbed AppSphere 2016 -- is set for Nov. 14-17 in Las Vegas. Meanwhile, New Relic's customer conference -- called FutureStack16 -- is scheduled for Nov. 16-17 in San Francisco. Moreover, a closely related New Relic Partner Day is set for Nov. 15. Customers and partners that are striving to choose between the two APM platforms could find themselves stretched thin that week.
APM platforms from AppDynamics and New Relic allow customers to troubleshoot and optimize applications. Demand for cloud-scale APM has grown in recent years as customers embraced the DevOps wave. Indeed, continual software delivery requires careful management and monitoring to ensure applications don't suffer or collapse during incremental rollouts.
AppDynamics, New Relic Channel Partner Strategies
The roots for the current APM software market stretch back to classic client-server tools. AppDynamics Founder Jyoti Bansal and New Relic CEO Lew Cirne are Wily Technology veterans. In fact, Cirne founded and led Wily, which CA Technologies acquired in 2006. Fast forward to present day, and New Relic (NYSE: NEWR) is publicly held while AppDynamics apparently is gearing up for an IPO.
Both AppDynamics and New Relic have also been building and expanding their respective channel partner programs. Oracle veteran John Gray is now senior VP of alliances and channels at New Relic -- where he says global systems integrators are transforming into MSPs that offer APM. On a somewhat related note, AppDynamics VP of Worldwide Alliances and Business Development Matthew Polly has been engaging a range of partner types.
In recent months, the APM market has evolved in multiple ways. For instance, New Relic is extending down from APM into infrastructure monitoring, while emerging rival Datadog is stepping up from infrastructure monitoring into the APM sector.
APM Meets RMM?
Meanwhile, there are signs that APM will converge with remote monitoring and management (RMM) software, which MSPs popularized for server and PC management.
Among the names to watch: SolarWinds owns APM technology, and also has a SolarWinds MSP arm that supports roughly 20,000 MSPs. Somewhat similarly but on a smaller scale, CA Technologies has APM tools and also promotes Unified Infrastructure Management (UIM) to MSPs.
Still, the spotlight will shift to AppDynamics and New Relic in mid-November 2016. Thousands of customers and a growing ecosystem of partners will attend each company's conference. Even if the two software companies don't mention each other by name, their scheduling decisions reveal an intensifying rivalry.
