The executive that replaced Gary Steele as CEO at Proofpoint when Steele left for Splunk has now followed Steele's path from cybersecurity to the helm of an observability company.
Ashan Willy was appointed CEO at New Relic in December, a month after the completion of a $6.5 billion deal to take the company private by Francisco Partners and TPG. That was also a month after New Relic released an early access version of an application performance monitoring tool for AI. Under Willy's leadership, that product - New Relic Monitoring for AI - became generally available in April with features such as response tracing, real-time user feedback and model comparison for AI applications.
This week, New Relic launched a partnership with Nvidia to integrate it with the GPU giant's NIM microservices orchestration framework.
TechTarget Editorial sat down with Willy between this year's product updates to get a sense of his long-term strategy for the company, and to set the record straight on speculation in the industry about the company's hiring strategy and a rumored combination with Sumo Logic.
Ashan Willy: When I took over Proofpoint as CEO, it was a similar size to New Relic, and I was able to double revenue in years by focusing on product and the customer experience of the product.
New Relic's in a bit of the same place - there's a lot of experiences I can bring in from that standpoint.
The security market is a fragmented market, which is similar to the observability market.
Observability is more fragmented than security, which I could hardly believe when I first came here.
Private equity is often known for cost efficiencies and cost cutting, and I've been told that some of the growth and innovation units at New Relic were let go during the transition to a private company.
New Relic shares a private equity partner with Sumo Logic, and that's led to speculation the two companies will be combined.
In the early years, it was one of the largest cloud enterprise companies in the market.
New Relic [was in] the cloud very early on, in 2008.
Then New Relic moved to a single platform, and the engineering work has been good.
Now if we can use AI intelligently, we can drive some better outcomes, whether it's fast response times, predictive observability or cost controls.
New Relic was very practitioner-focused, which meant it built great technology.
Now that we're private, it allows me to take a bit longer-term view on building New Relic.
New Relic and its competitors have been talking about AI the longest of any of the markets that I cover in IT ops.
Willy: The first thing customers tell me is, 'Look, you have built a platform, [but] you have to let us know how you get to an observability maturity story with your platform.
That's a complicated market - a tough market - and it's changing a lot.
Beth Pariseau, senior news writer for TechTarget Editorial, is an award-winning veteran of IT journalism covering DevOps.
This Cyber News was published on www.techtarget.com. Publication date: Thu, 27 Jun 2024 20:43:06 +0000