New Relic Looks To Expand Market Reach With Microsoft Azure Alliance

Channel chief Riya Shanmugam believes that within four years the leading cloud marketplaces will account for up to 85 percent of software procurement.

New Relic’s deal to provide its observability platform as a native service through the Microsoft Azure Marketplace could “unlock hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue,” according to New Relic’s channel chief.

The general availability of the Azure Native New Relic Service in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace will benefit developers and DevOps professionals who can access New Relic through the Azure portal, said Riya Shanmugam, group vice president, global alliances and channels at New Relic, in an interview with CRN.

“With our mission to put observability in the hands of every developer on the planet, and with Microsoft‘s deeply developer-centric culture and the platform they have built around it, we think there is a natural synergy in capturing the mindshare, both technically and from a cultural perspective, of every Azure developer out there,” Shanmugam (pictured) said.

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New Relic, based in San Francisco, unveiled the general availability of the Azure Native New Relic Service on Jan. 24, marking the first time the New Relic observability software has been available on the Azure cloud. New Relic has a long-time partnership with Amazon Web Services: The New Relic software is available through the AWS Marketplace and Shanmugam said that generates a significant amount of revenue for the company.

“We do think this partnership will unlock hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue for us,” Shanmugam said of the Microsoft Azure alliance. “Given what our missions are between both companies being very developer centric and wanting to make the life of the developer more efficient, more productive.”

The availability of New Relic on Azure is expected to help businesses accelerate their cloud migration and multi-cloud initiatives. The observability platform provides visibility into an organization’s entire application stack including underlying cloud infrastructure, application code and user experiences.

Subscribers to the New Relic service can collect telemetry data for IT infrastructure and applications and store that data in Azure, according to New Relic. That data can be used to identify and troubleshoot performance issues and optimize multi-cloud resources.

Azure customers will benefit from the New Relic service on Azure in that they can allocate their multi-year committed spending when they subscribe to the New Relic service, Shanmugam said. “The ability [to] buy New Relic from cloud provider marketplaces and have the ability to retire the [spending] commitment is huge, especially in a macro economic environment like this.”

The channel chief also noted that many customers are looking to work with a smaller number of trusted vendors and one way to help achieve that status is to streamline the IT procurement process. And online marketplaces are part of that.

“Enterprises don‘t necessarily want to work with 200 different software vendors that [each] have a different buying process. So in about four years time … I strongly believe that 80 to 85 percent of all buying will happen through one, two or three marketplaces,” Shanmugam said, citing four or five years as a timeframe.

New Relic works with more than 1,000 partners including resellers, referral and fulfillment partners, managed service providers, cloud service providers, global systems integrators and technology partners. In June 2022 the company debuted the New Relic Partner Stack program, a major revamp of its channel program spurred by the growing number and breadth of partners in its channel ecosystem.

Channel partners will especially benefit from the availability of the New Relic observability platform on Azure when Microsoft adds multi-party private offer capabilities to the Microsoft Azure Marketplace, Shanmugam said. That capability, which will allow service partners to create personalized offers with customized payouts for customers through the marketplace, is expected this year.

“That’s certainly part of our strategy in customer acquisition through our resellers and by buying through the Azure Marketplace,” the channel chief said of the Azure private offer opportunity. “New Relic is certainly going to be part of working with resellers as a four-way transaction.”