Over the past few years, New Relic and the business and technology landscape have rapidly evolved to embrace modern software. Digital transformation has resulted in customers seeking software solutions that support fast and successful migration to a cloud environment as well as developing new applications in the cloud. Applications are being modernized to run on containers, Kubernetes, and serverless technologies. End-user experiences need to be optimized on any device. APM, infrastructure, logging, and end-user monitoring are no longer a set of optional, disparate tools.
In response, businesses now require an observability platform like New Relic One that sees all data and data types across the IT landscape, and can deliver that information in context of all the various digital initiatives in play.
This is also why it’s critical New Relic develop and embrace a partner ecosystem that includes cloud providers, solution providers, and technology partners. The industry’s shift to cloud has created a need for partners that can deliver many types of solutions and business models to enable customers to rapidly take advantage of the promised cloud benefits of agility, cost containment, cycle-time improvements, and end-customer experience.
Plus, born-in-the cloud system integrators (SIs) and managed service providers (MSPs), as well as traditional resellers and MSPs, are actively investing in cloud-based business models to deliver services that enable every part of the cloud journey—including migration, building, modernizing, and optimizing.
All of which is why, today, we’re announcing an enhanced partner program called the New Relic Partner Network (NRPN). Designed for ease of engagement and flexible business models, NRPN was built for partners to leverage the New Relic observability platform as they go to market with a solutions approach to deliver predictable and expected outcomes.
Within NRPN, New Relic is also launching its first-ever Technology Partner Program. This program will enable hundreds of existing integration partners to participate in go-to-market benefits and create New Relic One applications with the platform’s programmability features. It will also allow these partners to integrate their best of breed business data and create seamless workflows on the New Relic platform. NRPN now expands and tailors program benefits for channel partners that may have multiple business models spanning solution providers, consulting partners, and MSPs.
We asked Todd Osborne, GVP Alliances & Channels at New Relic, some questions to get a deeper dive on the strategic importance of the NRPN as the company delivers New Relic One around the globe to both new and existing customers and partners alike.
New Relic: How do you envision New Relic customers benefiting from partner services as those customers move to the cloud?
Todd Osborne: As companies decide to shift their business to the cloud, it’s typically a C-level decision that’s approved by their board of directors. It begins a multi-year journey with commitments including the amount of spend the company will make with the cloud provider. Since it’s a newer technology strategy and usually involves limited experienced staff, companies often use consultants to help with the decision process and this includes the global systems integrators (GSIs), SIs, MSPs, and the professional service groups at the cloud providers. They then often use some of the same partners to execute the cloud journey.
The most important aspect of our strategy is to show partners the value of using New Relic as early as possible in their cloud journey. Instead of only thinking of New Relic when a problem comes up, we have proven to dozens of customers that the value of the platform and the success of digital initiatives increases dramatically when we are used from the beginning.
A recent Forrester Total Economic Impact™ study showed that using New Relic One accelerates the migration to the cloud by 20%, makes deploying applications up to 90% faster, and optimizes the cost of public cloud by as much as 50%. So, it is a great opportunity for partners in our ecosystem to use our observability platform in their engagements as early as possible in any cloud journey or application modernization projects or initiatives. It’s better for the partner and better for the end customer.
New Relic: There are a few cloud ecosystems—AWS, GCP, Azure, VMware/Pivotal, IBM/Red Hat, for example—dominating the cloud market. How does New Relic collaborate in these ecosystems and what does this mean for your partner strategy?
Todd: New users often get started with New Relic by connecting their cloud accounts and leveraging native integrations with the cloud providers to quickly gain visibility into their infrastructure.
New Relic has built a robust portfolio of integrations with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure and GCP, as well as strong support for the cloud native ecosystems around IBM Openshift, VMware Tanzu, and the broader Kubernetes ecosystem.
In addition, New Relic provides open instrumentation with Telemetry SDKs to support various open-source tools as part of broader OpenTelemetry Initiatives. New Relic has also partnered with key technical ISV partners to enable business critical use cases across migration, DevOps, digital customer experience, and AIOps.
Together, all of these integrations deliver a fully open, connected, and programmable observability platform to accelerate the customer cloud journey. And our new technology partner program aims to deepen our relationship with these partners and provide more opportunities for customers to get more value from the New Relic platform.
So, as the industry moves to the cloud, the cloud ecosystem partners are critical to success, and this includes the technology partners and the consulting partners, SIs, and MSPs in each cloud ecosystem. And, as New Relic shifts from point solutions to a platform, being part of the cloud ecosystems and expanding our own ecosystem is critical to success. We are calling our ecosystem the New Relic Partner Network.
New Relic: Do you include the public cloud providers as part of your go-to-market (GTM) strategy and what role do marketplaces play?
Todd: As customers make their commitments to public cloud, it often involves a multi-year commitment and cloud providers typically provide an extra discount for greater and longer commitments. As an example, AWS typically provides the customer an Enterprise Discount Program (EDP). Marketplaces come into play here as customers can also purchase third-party solutions, like New Relic, as part of their contract commitments if the third-party solutions are purchased on their marketplace. For customers, the marketplaces can simplify a company’s procurement process by providing close to a “one stop shopping” model and combined spend can create additional savings.
In addition to the customer benefits, marketplaces help the New Relic GTM strategy because it aligns the interests of New Relic’s sales teams with the field teams of the cloud providers because the cloud provider sales teams usually have a financial incentive for marketplace transactions.
So, New Relic aims to get the support of cloud sales teams as early as possible in the cloud journey for two reasons. First, we can prove that New Relic helps accelerate the cloud journey, which benefits the cloud provider. Second, if the customer decides to purchase on the cloud marketplace, then the financial incentives are aligned.
At New Relic we’ve spent two years investing in the go-to-market strategy with AWS and it’s proving very successful. Helping customers consume cloud faster, ensuring success by using New Relic, and procuring the technology on the marketplace creates a win-win-win.
New Relic: What type of partners do you target?
Todd: The partners in our growing ecosystem are actively working with customers in digital transformation, cloud journey (migration, modernization, optimization), cloud native, DevOps, and overall application modernization. These are typically systems integrators that were “born in the cloud,” or legacy MSPs and resellers who are actively shifting their business model from legacy to cloud and SaaS technologies.
In our early days, New Relic was most successful with startups building new applications in the cloud. We now have a larger percentage of customers running on AWS than other ecosystems. However, New Relic also has a higher percentage of enterprise customers who are taking a multi-cloud or hybrid cloud approach, and Kubernetes and other cloud orchestration solutions make this an effective strategy. As more customers deploy multi/hybrid cloud, the partner ecosystem is also expanding to include Azure, GCP, and other cloud providers, and New Relic’s partner ecosystem will also likely diversify.
The partners we work with typically have business models built around services, and if we work with a traditional reseller we typically engage first with the services team. They’re helping customers with their biggest problem in digital transformation: the shortage of skilled resources in all aspects of the cloud journey and application modernization.
These partners typically lead with consulting and professional services, with an increasing amount of their business shifting to managed services. As SIs are successfully migrating customers’ applications and operations to the cloud, they are often successful in convincing the customer to buy ongoing managed services after the cloud migration is complete. Just as moving to the cloud is, in part, to reduce staffing and infrastructure costs, managed services can offer the same benefit to companies.
New Relic: Can you share some specific examples of the types of partners that New Relic works with and the ways New Relic helps them deliver value to customers?
Todd: We have many great stories to tell and we plan to share some success stories in more detail in the next few weeks on this blog. The blog series will also provide the opportunity to hear directly from our partners on the value New Relic is providing them. For now, I’ll just list some of the partners we are having success with.
For consulting partners. I’d highlight the GSI’s including Accenture, Cognizant, Tata Consulting Services, and TechMahindra.
For regional SIs and solution providers, these include 2ndWatch, 729 Solutions, Claranet, Cloudreach, Computacenter, Digitas, ECS, Kinect Consulting, KCOM, Sentia, Softcat, Solista, Slalom Consulting, Softchoice, Taos Consulting, and TIVIT.
We are also pleased to have closed new business with MSPs in the past year, including 2nd Watch, Acquia, Automattic, Alkami, Bespin Global, Blazeclan, Episerver, Everis, Megazone, Mission, NextLink, Pantheon, Rackspace, Tacit Knowledge, Ultra Commerce, and WP Engine.
Plus, our Tech Partner Program is launching with these 16 awesome partners: Blameless, Cequence, CloudChomp, Fastly, Flexera, FullStory, GitHub, Gremlin, Harness, HashiCorp, mParticle, Micro Focus, MongoDB, PagerDuty, ThousandEyes, Turbonomic, and xMatters.
New Relic: Where can partners go for more information?
Todd Osborne: Our New Relic partners turn to us to provide them with the training, tools, technical information, marketing programs, and materials they need to be successful. In response, we’ve created our New Relic Partner Portal, a self-service hub that partners can access anytime to get access to:
- Training and curriculum paths leading to certification, including online, instructor-led training while we work from home due to COVID-19
- Technical information on New Relic One
- GTM marketing programs like our event-in-a-box and campaign-in-a-box that offer prescriptive, scalable, repeatable programs for revenue growth
- Marketing and sales tools including white papers, ebooks, presentations, videos, and more
- Third-party analysis and perspectives such as a Total Economic Impact™ study conducted by Forrester Consulting in 2019 that details the value in development cycle time, cost optimization, and overall success in the cloud using New Relic
- DevOps and cloud journey solutions, and best practices
- Comprehensive on-demand resources and tools to build apps on New Relic One
We also have an exceptional team of Partner Sales Managers covering all regions of the world, and they work with our top partners in each region to develop local sales and marketing activities, map accounts between sales teams, build pipeline, and help achieve sales objectives.
New Relic: As you think about New Relic’s future, how do partners fit in and what are you most excited about?
Todd: New Relic’s early success came from being an easy to download and easy to deploy solution that delivered immediate value to a person or a small team that was looking for a point solution.
Those were early days in the cloud with companies that were just starting out and betting on New Relic.
As more and more enterprise companies move much of their technology from on-premises to the cloud, the complexity of building and managing modern software continues to accelerate with new requirements and opportunities.
Cutting through this complexity with both speed and precision are essential to success. Businesses around the globe need the observability that New Relic can provide. With so much on every team’s project list, partners have an expanding opportunity to grow their businesses and make their customers’ big bets pay off. It’s a growing opportunity for all of us in the modern software value chain, and one that has a big payoff for each of us.
If you’re interested in joining the New Relic Partner Network, visit our Partner Portal. Alternatively, you can also:
- Contact your partner sales manager with business development ideas
- If you have an opportunity, register a deal in the Partner Portal
- If you have any questions or ideas for the NRPN, reach out to your partner sales manager, or send inquiry to partners@newrelic.com
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