MAY 13, 2021 – New Relic, Inc. (NYSE: NEWR), the observability company, announced the promotion of Bill Staples to CEO effective July 1, 2021. Staples will succeed Founder & CEO Lew Cirne who will transition to Executive Chairman of the Board at the same time. Cirne will continue his lifelong legacy and passion for his love of software as an inventor, technologist and strategist, further driving transformational innovation for the company, its customers and the tech community at large. Current Chair of the Board Hope Cochran will continue on as Vice Chair of the Board and Lead Independent Director for New Relic.

“When we recruited Bill into the company, we thought that he would be the natural successor to me as CEO at the right time,” said Lew Cirne, founder & CEO at New Relic. “With his immediate and profound impact on our platform and our Product organization, and now more broadly across the company with his inspiring vision, strategy and passion for our customers and their success, Bill has exceeded our highest expectations as a strategic thinker and operational leader, making now the right time to make this transition.”

“Bill’s transformational impact on New Relic has positioned the company for long-term success,” said Hope Cochran, New Relic Board Chair. “With the foundation that Lew built and Bill’s leadership, New Relic has a very bright future ahead and a clear path to accelerate growth as the leader in observability.”

Bill Staples champions renewed focus on customer value and success across New Relic

Staples joined New Relic as chief product officer in early 2020 and was later promoted to president & CPO. During his tenure, he has aligned the company around a compelling vision focused on customers and their success, and developed and launched a strategic plan to accelerate the company’s growth. He defined the core strategy for New Relic One including a simpler go to market for the company’s observability platform, fundamentally changing its packaging and pricing around the value delivered to customers and the developer community. Additionally, he has been a champion for the company’s embrace of open source and open telemetry, and was instrumental in the company’s recent acquisition of Pixie Labs. As a result, New Relic has seen early evidence of strong market and customer momentum behind its new consumption-based business model as noted in the company’s fiscal year 2021 results released today. 

Long-time technology executive and innovation leader Staples worked previously at both Microsoft and Adobe, where he successfully led transformative product, cultural and technical innovation, helping both companies expand their multi-billion dollar cloud portfolios with developers and IT as the customer. His experience running large engineering organizations, serving developers as his primary customer for decades and incubating brand new cloud services while nurturing multi-billion dollar businesses all helped lay the groundwork for a rapid and dramatic impact on New Relic. 

“I am incredibly humbled and grateful for the confidence of the New Relic Board and leadership team in trusting me with the opportunity to lead New Relic into the future,” said Bill Staples, CEO-elect at New Relic. “It’s an honor and a privilege to work among such an incredibly talented and genuine team–I’m inspired every day by our culture of innovation and each and every Relic’s passion for delivering value to our customers every day.” 

Lew Cirne to continue legacy as inventor, technologist and strategist

Lew Cirne has been a prolific inventor and innovator for more than twenty-three years. Early in his career, he held senior technical positions at Apple and Hummingbird Communications. With a passion for innovation and desire to have a broader impact on the world, business and technology, Cirne founded Wily Technology. There as founder and CEO, he invented the first bytecode instrumentation agent that served as the foundation for today’s Application Performance Management (APM) market and led to both his creation of the APM category and successful sale of Wily Technology to CA Technologies. 

As founder and CEO of New Relic, Cirne invented APM-as-a-Service, as well as its Telemetry Data Platform, the world’s first and most powerful multi-tenant telemetry Platform-as-a-Service offering built to ingest telemetry at massive cloud scale with incredible economics. Cirne and Staples collaborated to bring New Relic One to life as the world’s first programmable observability platform and the foundation for the creation of the observability category that New Relic leads today. Throughout his career, Cirne has been the sole inventor or co-inventor of more than 20 U.S. patents. 

“From the first time I met Lew, his love and passion for innovation and technology were nothing short of inspiring,” commented Cochran. “Lew has spent his career bringing joy and delight to others through code, transformational technology and category creation. I look forward to seeing his continued profound impact on the world, on business and on technology as he refocuses his attention back on being an inventor.”

“My passion is technology innovation and I’m excited to focus on that again to help ensure New Relic continues to thrive, positively impacting the business and tech communities for many years to come,” noted Cirne. “I have a deep love for and belief in New Relic, and that’s why it was so important to find the right successor. Most important was a core values match, and Bill has demonstrated time and again through his leadership and actions that he is a values-driven leader. In short order, Bill conceived, articulated and drove the cross-functional execution of a transformational strategy that will deliver remarkable impact and growth at New Relic for years to come.”

Hear from Founder and CEO Lew Cirne, CEO-elect Bill Staples at New Relic’s and other industry luminaries at FutureStack, May 25-27, 2021. The company’s annual technical conference will bring together thousands of engineers from the largest global enterprises to hypergrowth digital startups to explore the future of observability. Attendees of FutureStack will gain insights, hear best practices and get hands-on training to level up their skills in planning, building and running mission-critical software that delivers world-class digital experiences. 

For more information on New Relic, visit www.newrelic.com. For more information and to register for FutureStack, visit www.futurestack.com. 

Additional Resources:

• New Relic executive leadership team and bios: https://newrelic.com/about/leadership 

Forward-looking statements

This press release contains “forward-looking” statements, as that term is defined under the federal securities laws, including but not limited to statements regarding the promotion of Bill Staples to CEO, transition of Lew Cirne to Executive Chairman, the appointment of Hope Cochran as Vice Chair of the Board and Lead Independent Director, New Relic’s path to double-digit growth as the leader in observability, Lew’s continued impact on the business and tech communities, New Relic’s future growth as a result of its transformational strategy, and details around New Relic’s FutureStack conference, including speakers and event details. The achievement or success of the matters covered by such forward-looking statements are based on New Relic’s current assumptions, expectations, and beliefs and are subject to substantial risks, uncertainties, assumptions, and changes in circumstances that may cause New Relic’s actual results, performance, or achievements to differ materially from those expressed or implied in any forward-looking statement. Further information on factors that could affect New Relic’s financial and other results and the forward-looking statements in this press release is included in the filings New Relic makes with the SEC from time to time, including in New Relic’s most recent Form 10-Q, particularly under the captions “Risk Factors” and “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations.” Copies of these documents may be obtained by visiting New Relic’s Investor Relations website at http://ir.newrelic.com or the SEC's website at www.sec.gov. New Relic assumes no obligation and does not intend to update these forward-looking statements, except as required by law.