New Relic

New Relic, Inc.
Company typePrivate
NYSE: NEWR (2014–23)
IndustryApplication performance management
Founded2008; 16 years ago (2008)
FounderLew Cirne
Headquarters
San Francisco, California
,
U.S.
Key people
ProductsNew Relic APM, New Relic Mobile, New Relic Browser, New Relic Synthetics, New Relic Servers, New Relic Insights
RevenueIncrease US$926 million (2023)[2]
Owners
Number of employees
2,663 (2023)[2]
Websitenewrelic.com

New Relic, Inc. is an American web tracking and analytics company based in San Francisco. The company's cloud-based software allows websites and mobile apps to track user interactions and service operators' software and hardware performance.

In November 2023, private equity firms Francisco Partners and TPG Inc. completed their acquisition of New Relic for approximately $6.5 billion.[3]

History

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Foundation and early years

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Lew Cirne founded New Relic in 2008 and became the company's CEO.[4] The name "New Relic" is an anagram of founder Lew Cirne's name.[5]

On November 5, 2012, CA Technologies filed a lawsuit claiming that New Relic violated three patents that came into CA Technologies' possession through the acquisition of Wily Technology (a company also founded by Lew Cirne).[6]

In February 2013, New Relic raised $80 million from investors including Insight Venture Partners, T. Rowe Price, Benchmark Capital, Allen & Company, Trinity Ventures, Passport Capital, Dragoneer, and Tenaya Capital at a valuation of $750 million.[7][8] The funding round helped New Relic extend its software analytics platform to include Android and iOS native mobile apps.[9][7] In October 2013, the company announced that it was converting its software analytics product into a SaaS model, code named Rubicon.[10]

In April 2014, New Relic raised another $100 million in funding led by BlackRock, Inc., and Passport Capital, with participation from T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc. and Wellington Management.[11] The company went public on December 12, 2014.[12]

2020 to present

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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.[13] In March, the company signed 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.[14] In June, the company combined two teams in its Portland engineering office and reportedly laid off less than 20 employees with overlapping positions.[15] Also in June, amid 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".[16] 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.[17] The new platform was called New Relic One.[18] 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.[19] In December, the company acquired Pixie Labs, a service for monitoring cloud-native workloads running on Kubernetes clusters.[20]

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.[21][22] In May, Bill Staples was promoted to CEO, and Cirne transitioned to executive chairman.[4] In October, the company acquired CodeStream, a developer collaboration tool.[23]

In February 2022, the company released infrastructure monitoring software to help DevOps, site reliability engineering (SRE) and ITOps teams monitor issues across public, private and hybrid cloud environments.[18] In May, the company launched a vulnerability management tool for security, DevOps, security operations (SecOps) and SRE teams.[24]

In June 2023, following a $55 million operational loss in the preceding fiscal year, New Relic laid off 155 employees in the US and up to 57 abroad.[25] In July 2023, the company agreed to be acquired by private equity firms Francisco Partners and TPG Inc. in an all-cash deal valued at $6.5 billion.[26] The acquisition was finalized in November and New Relic was delisted from the New York Stock Exchange. In December, the company listed half of its San Francisco headquarters space, as available for sub-leasing.[27]

In December 2023, the company announced former Proofpoint, Inc. CEO Ashan Willy as its new CEO.[1]

Products

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New Relic's technology, delivered in a software as a service (SaaS) model, monitors Web and mobile applications in real-time[28][29][9][30] with support for custom-built plugins to collect arbitrary data.[31]

Operations

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New Relic is headquartered in San Francisco. Its CEO as of January 2024 is Ashan Willy.[1]

The company partners with companies including IBM Bluemix, Amazon Web Services, CloudBees, Engine Yard, Heroku, Joyent, Rackspace Hosting, and Microsoft Azure as well as mobile application backend service providers Appcelerator, Parse, and StackMob.[30][32][33][34]

References

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  1. ^ a b c Alspach, Kyle (December 4, 2023). "New Relic Hires Former Proofpoint Chief Exec As New CEO". CRN. Retrieved January 8, 2024.
  2. ^ a b "Form 10-K New Relic, Inc". U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. May 23, 2023.
  3. ^ Anirban Sen; Milana Vinn (August 3, 2023). "Focus: How two private equity firms negotiated New Relic deal down to $6.5 billion". Reuters. Retrieved February 2, 2024.
  4. ^ a b "New Relic to Promote Cloud Industry Veteran Bill Staples to CEO". Silicon Angle. May 13, 2021. Retrieved May 4, 2022.
  5. ^ Balise, Julie (August 26, 2015). "Stories behind Bay Area tech company names". SFGate. Retrieved August 26, 2015.
  6. ^ Morgan, Timothy. "CA Technologies sues New Relic over APM patents". The Register. Retrieved November 13, 2012.
  7. ^ a b Levy, Ari (February 5, 2013). "New Relic Reels in $80 Million to Expand Into Mobile". Bloomberg. Retrieved August 9, 2013.
  8. ^ Taulli, Tom (February 5, 2013). "New Relic Nabs $80M To Upend the Software Biz". Forbes. Retrieved August 9, 2013.
  9. ^ a b Kattau, Suzanne (March 14, 2013). "New Relic extends app-performance software to mobile". SD Times. Retrieved August 9, 2013.
  10. ^ "App Performance Monitoring Vendor New Relic Branching Out Into Big Data". CRN. October 24, 2013. Retrieved April 14, 2022.
  11. ^ Rao, Leena (April 28, 2014). "Cloud App Monitoring Company New Relic Raises $100M". TechCrunch. Retrieved June 13, 2014.
  12. ^ "New Relic IPO raises $115M, stock jumps 48% in debut". Silicon Valley Business Journal. December 10, 2014. Retrieved April 14, 2022.
  13. ^ "Bill Staples to Join New Relic as Chief Product Officer". Bloomberg.com. January 16, 2020. Archived from the original on July 31, 2023. Retrieved February 28, 2020.
  14. ^ "Cloud Software Company Sets Up East Coast Shop At 1100 Peachtree". Bisnow. Retrieved March 11, 2020.
  15. ^ "New Relic lays off staff as it combines engineering teams". Portland Business Journal. Retrieved May 4, 2022.
  16. ^ Rogoway, Mike (July 3, 2020). "New Relic CEO scolds employees in internal memo: 'We are a company with an urgent need to get back on track'". The Oregonian. Retrieved May 4, 2022.(subscription required)
  17. ^ "New Relic reinvents its products to bring observability to the mainstream". diginomica. July 30, 2020. Retrieved August 3, 2020.
  18. ^ a b "New Relic launches its new infrastructure monitoring experience". TechCrunch. February 16, 2022. Retrieved August 15, 2022.
  19. ^ Rogoway, Mike (October 11, 2020). "New Relic employees report unrest over work culture, CEO's donations". oregonlive.com. The Oregonian. Retrieved May 4, 2022.
  20. ^ "New Relic acquires Kubernetes observability platform Pixie Labs". TechCrunch. December 10, 2020. Retrieved August 19, 2022.
  21. ^ Rogoway, Mike (May 14, 2021). "New Relic will lay off up to 160 in restructuring". Oregon Live. Retrieved May 4, 2022.
  22. ^ "New Relic's business remodel will leave new CEO with work to do". TechCrunch. May 14, 2021. Retrieved May 4, 2022.
  23. ^ "New Relic acquires CodeStream to provide chat in developer environments, inks Microsoft IDE partnership". TechCrunch. October 21, 2021. Retrieved August 19, 2022.
  24. ^ "New Relic releases new vulnerability management solution". VentureBeat. May 18, 2022. Retrieved August 19, 2022.
  25. ^ "S.F. Tech layoffs: Uber, Robinhood and two other companies cut hundreds of jobs". June 27, 2023.
  26. ^ Rogoway, Mike (July 31, 2023). "New Relic, a major Portland tech employer, sells to private equity for $6.5 billion". The Oregonian.
  27. ^ Waxmann, Laura (December 12, 2023). "Exclusive: S.F. software firm makes big reduction in its downtown headquarters". San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved December 12, 2023.
  28. ^ Shinal, John (June 3, 2013). "New Relic headed for an IPO". MarketWatch. Retrieved August 9, 2013.
  29. ^ Babcock, Charles (February 5, 2013). "New Relic Garners $80 Million To Expand APM". InformationWeek. Retrieved August 9, 2013.
  30. ^ a b Clarke, Gavin (February 23, 2011). "New Relic climbs Amazon's Elastic Beanstalk". The Register. Retrieved August 9, 2013.
  31. ^ O'Dell, Jolie (June 19, 2013). "New Relic now lets you make plug-ins for any kind of data you've got". VentureBeat. Retrieved August 9, 2013.
  32. ^ Deutscher, Maria (July 19, 2013). "New Relic Supports OpenStack via Rackspace Partnership". SiliconANGLE. Retrieved August 9, 2013.
  33. ^ "Pivotal Contributes Open Source Plugins for New Relic's Pluggable Monitoring and Management Platform: RabbitMQ and Web Server". McCloud. June 19, 2013. Archived from the original on October 29, 2013. Retrieved August 9, 2013.
  34. ^ Humble, Charles (September 13, 2011). "New Relic Offers Real-time Performance Monitoring for Heroku Java users". InfoQ. Retrieved August 9, 2013.
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