New Relic is a

San Francisco, California San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17t ...

-based technology company which develops

cloud In meteorology, a cloud is an aerosol consisting of a visible mass of miniature liquid droplets, frozen crystals, or other particles suspended in the atmosphere of a planetary body or similar space. Water or various other chemicals may ...

-based software to help website and application owners track the performance of their services.

History

Foundation and early years

Lew Cirne Lew Cirne is a Canadian-American Silicon Valley-based technologist and entrepreneur who promotes software analytics technology. He was the founder and CEO of Wily Technology, which was acquired by CA, Inc. in March 2006. Cirne founded the compa ...

founded New Relic in 2008 and became the company's CEO. The name "New Relic" is an

anagram An anagram is a word or phrase formed by rearranging the letters of a different word or phrase, typically using all the original letters exactly once. For example, the word ''anagram'' itself can be rearranged into ''nag a ram'', also the word ...

of founder Lew Cirne's name. In 2008, NetworkWorld Magazine named the company as one of its 10 management startups to watch. In January 2010, tech publication CRN named New Relic as one of its Top 20 Coolest Cloud Infrastructure Vendors. On November 5, 2012,

CA Technologies CA Technologies, formerly known as CA, Inc. and Computer Associates International, Inc., is an American multinational corporation headquartered in New York City. It is primarily known for its business-to-business (B2B) software with a product po ...

filed a lawsuit claiming that New Relic violated three patents that came into CA Technologies' possession through the acquisition of

Wily Technology CA Wily Technology, formerly Wily Technology, Inc., is a software company based in California. Founded in 1998, it was purchased by CA, Inc. in March 2006, and CA Wily Technology is now a division of CA's Service Assurance business unit. Histor ...

(a company also founded by Lew Cirne). In February 2013, New Relic raised $80 million from investors including Insight Venture Partners,

T. Rowe Price T. Rowe Price Group, Inc. is an American publicly owned global investment management firm that offers funds, subadvisory services, separate account management, and retirement plans and services for individuals, institutions, and financial inter ...

Benchmark Capital Benchmark is a venture capital firm based in San Francisco that provides seed money to startups. History The firm's most successful investment was a 1997 investment of $6.7 million in eBay for 22.1% of the company. In 2011, it invested $12 mil ...

Allen & Company Allen & Company LLC is an American privately held boutique investment bank based at 711 Fifth Avenue, New York. The firm specializes in real estate, technology, media and entertainment. History Founded in 1922 by Charles Robert Allen, Jr., he ...

, Trinity Ventures, Passport Capital, Dragoneer, and

Tenaya Capital Tenaya Capital is a venture capital firm with offices in Portola Valley, California, and Wellesley, Massachusetts. Founded in 1995 as Lehman Brothers Venture Partners, Tenaya spun out to become an independent firm in 2009 following Lehman's bankr ...

at a valuation of $750 million. The funding round helped New Relic extend its software analytics platform to include Android and iOS native mobile apps. In October 2013, the company announced that it was converting its software analytics product into a

SaaS Software as a service (SaaS ) is a software licensing and delivery model in which software is licensed on a subscription basis and is centrally hosted. SaaS is also known as "on-demand software" and Web-based/Web-hosted software. SaaS is co ...

model, code named Rubicon. In April 2014, New Relic raised another $100 million in funding led by

BlackRock, Inc. BlackRock, Inc. is an American multi-national investment company based in New York City. Founded in 1988, initially as a risk management and fixed income institutional asset manager, BlackRock is the world's largest asset manager, with trill ...

, and Passport Capital, with participation from T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc. and

Wellington Management Wellington Management Company is a private, independent investment management firm with client assets under management totaling over US$1 trillion based in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. The firm serves as an investment advisor to over 2 ...

. The company went public on December 12, 2014.

Recent history

In January 2020, the company announced that Bill Staples was joining the company as Chief Product Officer on February 14, 2020. According to the announcement, he was to lead the product management, engineering and design functions, as well as drive the company's platform strategy. In March, the company inked a 10-year deal to move its Atlanta team out of co-working space into the 20th floor of a 28-story office tower off 12th Street in Midtown. In June, the company combined two teams in its Portland engineering office and reportedly laid off less than 20 employees with overlapping positions. Also in June, amidst internal disagreements about how the company should respond to systemic racism in society, former CEO Lew Cirne sent a memo stating that Black Lives Matter discussions were "off-the-table". In July, New Relic announced it was replacing all of its legacy products with a full stack platform, priced by user rather than by server, with the goal of simplifying things for its customers. The new platform was called New Relic One. In October, the Oregonian reported unhappiness within the company's employees, stemming from ongoing concerns about the company's response to the ongoing racial justice movement, and also due to controversial donations made by Cirne to an anti-gay Christian school and an anti-Jewish evangelist. In December, the company acquired Pixie Labs, a service for monitoring cloud-native workloads running on Kubernetes clusters. In April 2021, New Relic reportedly laid off nearly 160 employees, as part of a restructuring plan to move away from its software subscription sales model to a consumption based model. In May, Bill Staples was promoted to CEO, and Cirne transitioned to executive chairman. In October, the company acquired CodeStream, a developer collaboration tool. In February 2022, the company released infrastructure monitoring software to help

DevOps DevOps is a set of practices that combines software development (''Dev'') and IT operations (''Ops''). It aims to shorten the systems development life cycle and provide continuous delivery with high software quality. DevOps is complementary to ...

, site reliability engineering (SRE) and

ITOps Data center management is the collection of tasks performed by those responsible for managing ongoing operation of a data center This includes ''Business service management'' and planning for the future. Historically, ''data center management'' wa ...

teams monitor issues across public, private and hybrid cloud environments. In May, the company launched a vulnerability management tool for security, DevOps, security operations (SecOps) and SRE teams.

Products

New Relic's technology, delivered in a

software as a service Software as a service (SaaS ) is a software licensing and delivery model in which software is licensed on a subscription basis and is centrally hosted. SaaS is also known as "on-demand software" and Web-based/Web-hosted software. SaaS is co ...

(SaaS) model, monitors Web and mobile applications in real-time with support for custom-built plugins to collect arbitrary data.

Operations

New Relic is headquartered in San Francisco. Its CEO as of May 2021 is Bill Staples, and Lew Cirne is the company's executive chairman. As of March 2022, the company reported 2,217 employees. The company partners with companies including IBM

Bluemix IBM Cloud, (formerly known as Bluemix) is a set of cloud computing services for business offered by the information technology company IBM. Services As of 2021, IBM Cloud contains more than 170 services including compute, storage, networ ...

Amazon Web Services Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) is a subsidiary of Amazon that provides on-demand cloud computing platforms and APIs to individuals, companies, and governments, on a metered pay-as-you-go basis. These cloud computing web services provide d ...

CloudBees CloudBees is an enterprise software delivery company. Sacha Labourey and Francois Dechery co-founded the company in early 2010, and investors include Matrix Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, HSBC, Verizon Ventures, Golub Capital, Goldman Sa ...

, Engine Yard,

Heroku Heroku is a cloud platform as a service (PaaS) supporting several programming languages. One of the first cloud platforms, Heroku has been in development since June 2007, when it supported only the Ruby programming language, but now supports Jav ...

Joyent Joyent Inc. was a software and services company based in San Francisco, California. Specializing in cloud computing, it marketed infrastructure-as-a-service. On June 15, 2016, the company was acquired by Samsung Electronics. Services Triton, Joye ...

, Rackspace Hosting, and

Microsoft Azure Microsoft Azure, often referred to as Azure ( , ), is a cloud computing platform operated by Microsoft for application management via around the world-distributed data centers. Microsoft Azure has multiple capabilities such as software as a ...

as well as mobile application backend service providers

Appcelerator Appcelerator is a privately held mobile technology company based in San Jose, California. Its main products are Titanium, an open-source software development kit for cross-platform mobile development, and the Appcelerator Platform. Founded ...

, Parse, and StackMob. In 2012 and 2013, the ''

San Francisco Business Times American City Business Journals, Inc. (ACBJ) is an American newspaper publisher based in Charlotte, North Carolina. ACBJ publishes The Business Journals, which contains local business news for 44 markets in the United States, Hemmings Motor News ...

'' profiled New Relic as a best place to work in the Bay Area.

References

External links

New Relic
{{Authority control Software companies established in 2008 Software companies based in the San Francisco Bay Area Companies based in San Francisco Website monitoring software Cloud applications Companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange 2014 initial public offerings American companies established in 2008 Software companies of the United States