New Relic Revamps Channel Program, Counts On Partners For Agentic AI Drive

The observability tech developer is stepping up its channel efforts under Larissa Crandall, who took over as the company’s channel chief in September, with an expanded partner team, simplified program tiers, new training and certifications, and opportunities for improved partner profitability.

Observability tech developer New Relic is rolling out its overhauled channel program, offering partners a simpler two-tier structure, more financial incentives and increased margins, expanded training opportunities, and new technical and sales certifications.

New Relic is also providing additional partner resources, including more regional and sub-regional partner sales managers – part of a four-fold increase in partner organization staff over the last six months.

The moves, being announced today, are the follow-through of channel veteran Larissa Crandall, who was hired as New Relic’s channel chief in September.

Crandall (pictured), in an exclusive interview with CRN, said the changes to the New Relic Partner Program stem from conversations she had with many of company’s channel partners, including VARs and solution providers, managed service providers, strategic service providers, systems integrators and the cloud hyperscalers.

“I think one of the things that is stood out to me is, yes, they wanted the increase in profitability, as every partner requests. But they also wanted something simplified. One of the big things that I kept hearing was, ‘Don't make it over complicated. Simplify your program,’” said Crandall, who’s official title is global vice president of channels and alliances. “There's a lot of vendors out there that are over-complicating their programs.

“’Tell me how I can make money. Tell me how to best serve my customers and educate me on how to hunt for more opportunities,’” Crandall said she heard from partners. “So again, it kept going back to ‘Just be easy to work with.’”

New Relic, headquartered in San Francisco, competes in the crowded observability space with its New Relic Intelligent Observability Platform. In July 2023 then-public New relic struck a deal to be acquired by private equity firm Francisco Partners and asset management firm TPG for $6.5 billion. (The deal was completed in November 2023.)

That was quickly followed by the hiring of Proofpoint CEO Ashan Willy as New Relic’s new CEO in December 2023. He succeeded Bill Staples who had served as CEO since mid-2021.

Willy, also in an exclusive interview with CRN, said New Relic has focused on growth since the acquisition and he has increased research and development spending to about 25 percent of revenue.

Observability For AI

A big part of that is developing observability capabilities within the New Relic platform to help monitor and manage the performance of the growing number of AI systems and applications – and the large language models (LLMs) that power them – that are rapidly being deployed by businesses and organizations.

In one example, Willy noted that generative AI is increasingly being used to generate software code outside of traditional development operations, but fewer people understand the workings of the automatically generated code.

“AI is going to increase the need for observability,” Willy said. “What we do is we look at the entire application and we're able to tell how AI is performing in the context of your overall application, everything from costs, from hallucinations it may have, from the performance angle, all of that, so people get an end-to-end view of the application and all of the AI.”

“So observability is going to become more important. That’s why this space is exploding,” the CEO said.

At the same time New Relic is moving quickly to add AI capabilities to its own observability platform to improve its effectiveness in such tasks as detecting system anomalies and predicting system problems and failures.

In February the company announced more than 20 AI innovations that “infuse intelligence” across the New Relic Intelligent Observability Platform that can “predict and prevent business-impacting issues by surfacing the right insights,” the company said at the time.

Platform additions included new response intelligence and prediction capabilities, the Transaction 360 intelligent observability tool for monitoring transactions, the Streaming Video & Ads Intelligence tool, and new cost optimization capabilities including pipeline control and service architecture intelligence. New Relic also provides agentic integrations with ServiceNow, Amazon Q Business, Google Gemini and GitHub Copilot for Microsoft Azure.

Partner Expertise

Partners have a major role to play as New Relic ramps up its AI initiatives. “I think from the partner perspective there’s a wonderful opportunity for partners to help educate” potential customers about the value of AI and the efficiencies it can provide, Willy said. “We feel that partners are a huge part of our future.”

Partners “are closest to the customer. That’s where the trust is a lot of times,” Crandall said. “Customers are coming to them to be educated” on such topics as AI and observability.

That resonates with partners like NTT Data. “Our customers aim to leverage AIOps to optimize IT operations, enhance efficiency, and proactively mitigate disruptions. However, they face challenges in identifying the most impactful tools and strategies to maximize their observability investments,” said Juan Carlos Martínez, NTT DATA senior director, in a statement.

“Having the opportunity to deliver our customers the New Relic Intelligent Observability Platform gives us an edge as it solves these challenges. I’m confident that New Relic, its enhanced partner team and program resources, will set us up to be valuable AI partners to current and future customers,” Martínez said.

Willy said New Relic is in the process of developing an agentic framework within the company’s observability platform that will allow partners to build their own agentic integrations for their customers. The first capabilities expected to be available this summer.

“That will be a rich form of revenue [for partners] and it moves them up the stack,” the CEO said of the value partners can provide. “I think it makes them much stickier in the account and much more valuable to customers.”

Partner Program Overhaul

All this has driven the increased investments New Relic has been making to its partner program under Crandall’s watch. A major change is the program’s reduction from four tiers to just two and the addition of what Crandall called “stronger” financial incentives offered to provide partners with increased margins and improved profitability.

“It was complicated, it was not meaningful and wasn't providing a lot of value in the various tiers,” Crandall said of the old program. “So we went from a four-tier program to two [and] simplified it with increased benefits around profitability.”

The channel chief said New Relic has increased the size of its channel team fourfold, including hiring partner sales managers – some dedicated to specific partners and others to certain geographical regions and sub-regions – as well as adding technical support staff.

The New Relic Partner Program offers four new technical certifications and two new sales certifications that Crandall said are designed to provide partners with a solid foundation around intelligent observability, including value proposition, use cases and business outcomes. “The certification content changed dramatically,” she said.

The revamped partner program offers expanded training opportunities for partner seller and technical teams across such areas as AI, observability and cloud. Partners can also align their go-to-market strategies with new partner program tracks focused on such areas as agentic AI and co-selling with New Relic’s leading technical partners including ServiceNow, Microsoft and Amazon Web Services.

New Relic also invested in new partner support IT, including partner resource management and configure, price and quote systems.