Channel technologies

Live Blog: New Relic FutureStack

How can channel partners potentially profit from Application Performance Management (APM)? ChannelE2E is searching for answers today at New Relic's FutureStack conference in New York.

New Relic is one of the fastest-growing players in the APM industry. APM software allows IT service providers, DevOps professionals and corporate IT departments to rapidly troubleshoot and optimize applications -- essentially improving the overall customer experience (CX).

Live Blog: New Relic FutureStack 16 New York

New Relic CEO Lew Cirne's keynote has just started. Here's a minute-by-minute update...

  • Cirne originally launched New Relic nearly a decade ago to be an application monitoring platform for Ruby on Rails code and applications.
  • The company rapidly extended to additional programming platforms -- PHP, Python, Java, .Net and m0re -- because the "future of writing code" would be heterogeneous.
  • Quote of the day: "In the era of the cloud, IT management has to start at the application."
  • More minute-by-minute updates coming.
  • The New Relic platform now supports 21 million requests and 200 million events -- per minute.
  • "Software is eating the world -- Marc Andreessen said it five years ago. Software is still hungry. It's not done eating the world."
  • Side note: Cirne describe the digital experience using Dunkin' Donuts' mobile app -- and the rather amazing outcomes. Too much info to share here but if you ever run into Cirne ask him about it.
  • New Today: New Relic Browser Single Page Application Monitoring. "It's the visibility you need to deliver a great customer experience."
  • New Today: New Relic introduces support for the Go! programming language.

New Relic Infrastructure and Change Management

After making those announcements, Cirne redirected the conversation back to the bigger theme. Overseeing change management, configuration management and new releases across on-premises, hybrid cloud, public cloud and containers has become a "super important" problem. If you can't manage those changes "you're playing with fire."

To address those items, the company has launched New Relic Infrastructure. In addition to tracking infrastructure areas (for instance, CPU stats) it also tracks when and where changes to the system are made. During a demo, New Relic showed how specific changes triggered specific workload spikes on specific hosts -- dragging down performance and harming the end-user experience. Service providers can beta test New Relic Infrastructure here.

New Relic Infrastructure is "an important step to our long-term goal of providing visibility where ever you need it in your production environment," said Cirne.

New Relic Cloud Pricing Option

The company unveiled it today. Cirne claims it's simple, transparent and cloud friendly. The company will unveil pricing for every instance type for any major cloud provider later today. It sounds like the pricing will debut as part of a major website upgrade today.

New Relic Channel Momentum

Next up is Channel Chief John Gray, who joined the company about 18 months ago. He was sold on Cirne's vision for scalable monitoring. Today, the company has 500,000 developers using New Relic in a various scenarios.

Datadog’s John Gray
John Gray

"The strong brand heavily attracted me to the company," Gray says. "Cloud is where he puck has been going and when I was deciding to join it was no longer about just monitoring. It was about software analytics."

Yes, VARs and MSPs are in the New Relic ecosystem, Gray asserted. Systems integrators, in particular, are evolving to offer New Relic-type services he adds. Traditional SIs continue to offer the management consulting piece to help customers decide on best-of-breed cloud architecture solutions. But the bigger piece involves all managed services. "The MSPs are springing up everyone here," Gray said.

Resellers are also key to the conversation for new market entry and into key verticals like the federal government. The biggest use case in federal government has involved troubleshooting major platforms like Healthcare.gov. The channel strategy is global, he adds.

True believers include Rackspace, which leverages New Relic as part of its fanatical support strategy for AWS and Azure and other clouds.

In terms of priorities for the channel over the next six months, the company wants to aggressively go to market with the primary cloud platform providers -- Azure, AWS and Google, for instance. For instance, New Relic is at the major AWS conference this week in New York.  The other key priority is to make sure customers are comfortable deploying more and more applications on public cloud -- and New Relic's tools allow that.

Key partners to watch include the AWS business unit a Accenture, CloudReach, 2ndWatch and other cloud-centric MSPs, he added.

Another key area to watch: New Relic's OEM business. SaaS companies, in particular, will increasingly embed New Relic's analytics and business intelligence capabilities directly into their platforms -- eliminating the need for SaaS providers to write such services from scratch, Gray said.

Stay tuned for more updates and channel-centric interviews from New Relic's conference.

Joe Panettieri

Joe Panettieri is co-founder & editorial director of MSSP Alert and ChannelE2E, the two leading news & analysis sites for managed service providers in the cybersecurity market.