At first glance, the New Relic FutureStack 2016 customer conference kicks off Wednesday in San Francisco. But take a closer look and you'll notice New Relic hosted a partner gathering today. It's an important step for MSPs, digital agencies and IT consulting firms that are striving to master application performance monitoring (APM).
APM tools have been around for more than a decade. Early offerings targeted client-server systems. But the latest options from AppDynamics, Datadog, New Relic and other rivals specifically target cloud-scale applications. MSPs can potentially leverage APM to inspect and optimize customers' application code.
In theory, that means better application performance (on premises or in the cloud) and improve end-user experiences. Still not sure of APM's value? New Relic CEO Lew Cirne described the APM market in this video.
New Relic Partner Program
Both New Relic and AppDynamics (AppSphere 2016) are hosting their respective customer conferences this week. Channel partners also are on hand. Many APM vendors are just starting to accelerate their partner programs. That's true for New Relic, which hired Oracle veteran John Gray to build its partner program in February 2015.
We're set to meet Gray and multiple New Relic partners on Wednesday. In the meantime, the company is already putting the spotlight on multiple partners. Among the examples to note, New Relic says:
- 2nd Watch: The well-known, cloud-centric MSP leverages New Relic’s real-time cloud monitoring and analytics capabilities to maintain customer applications.
- Atea: The European IT infrastructure provider resells New Relic to its customer base across the Nordic and Baltic regions.
- Blue Medora: The analytics specialist wrote plugins that give enterprise customers deeper information from virtualization, server, storage, compute, network and databases.
- Google Cloud Platform: A New Relic integration allows developers to more effectively build, test and deploy applications on Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
- Pivotal: An ongoing relationship helps enterprise customers to monitor and analyze enterprise-level, cloud-based, agile development environments.
- Slalom Consulting: The national consulting firm leverages New Relic for enterprise-class application monitoring and analytics.
- SoftwareONE: The global company is now a New Relic reseller.
APM Next Moves
So where do we go from here? We'll be searching for answers during New Relic FutureStack 2016 while also checking in with sources at AppDynamics AppSphere 2016. There may also be a few updates from CA World 2016, where CA Technologies continues to update its own APM offerings.
Our schedule on Wednesday includes meetings with New Relic's executive team, channel leaders and partner ecosystem. Yes, APM is a fast-growing industry. But we'll strike to figure out what's real, what's hype -- and how partners are building business practices around APM.
Stay tuned for more.
