New Relic CEO Explains Application Performance Monitoring's (APM) Value -

Application performance monitoring (APM) has been one the fast-growth stories in Silicon Valley in recent years. Names like AppDynamics and New Relic are leading the charge. But what exactly is APM, and where does it fit into the IT service provider ecosystem? New Relic Founder and CEO Lew Cirne provided some answers on CNBC yesterday.

Here's a look at what he said. (Disclaimer: Jump right to 1:56 in the video to avoid Jim Cramer's usual cheerleading intro).

Cirne uses a familiar anecdote -- launching into how Dunkin' Donuts leverages New Relic to deliver a great application experience. "Customers without New Relic aren't measuring their customer experience," Cirne asserts.

Overall, New Relic helps customers to do three things, he says:

Make sure they're open for business: Is the mobile app or web site online?

Measure the customer experience.

Then deliver better business results based on understanding the digital customer.

Cirne also described how New Relic Infrastructure -- a new product -- will extend the company from APM to overall infrastructure monitoring and management. APM is about 70 percent of the company's business right now. The company has pushed beyond server application monitoring (on-premises and cloud apps) to monitor Web browsers and mobile apps as well.

Channel Partners, Service Providers and Rivalries

New Relic also is building a channel partner program, led by Oracle veteran John Gray. The program includes IT consulting firms that resell the product into corporate accounts, or run New Relic to monitor customer applications. The nature of New Relic's software therefore helps to transform IT consulting firms into managed services providers, Gray told ChannelE2E in August 2016.

Gray will reinforce that point during a New Relic Partner Day set for November 2016. A major customer conference is set for that same week.

Still, competition looms around every corner. Rival AppDynamics is hosting a customer and partner conference the same week as New Relic's gatherings (I don't know which company scheduled the events first). And Datadog, another startup, is extending from infrastructure monitoring to APM, that company recently announced.