New Relic, the SaaS based Application Performance Management (APM) solutions provider, today announced that they have raised $10 Million in Series C funding and they also announced that they now support .NET and PHP applications. They are now positioning themselves to be a strong player in the cloud era with support for diverse platforms.
First the funding news
Today, New Relic announced that they have closed $10 million in Series C venture financing led by Tenaya Capital and joined by Allen & Co., with participation from existing investors Benchmark Capital and Trinity Ventures. The company was started in the summer of 2008 and they have experienced 200% growth rate every year. They currently have more than 5500 customers and this funding will help them scale much higher. The fact that they allow announced support for two new platforms today increases their market opportunity manyfold and they can tap into this round of funding to further scale their operations. As more and more organizations move into cloud, the opportunity for low cost SaaS based APM solution increases, putting New Relic at an advantage.
New Relic now supports .NET and PHP Web Applications
New Relic today made another announcement about their support for .NET and PHP based web applications. Earlier they had supported only Java and Ruby based apps and now ops and dev teams can monitor, troubleshoot and tune web applications built on .NET, PHP, Java and Ruby platforms. With Microsoft pushing their Azure platform in full throttle and PHP being the platform of choice for web developers for a long time, this move is expected as it opens up a big opportunity for the players.
What is New Relic, BTW?
Like AppDynamics which I covered recently, New Relic is a performance management solution for web applications residing in virtual, physical or hybrid computing environments. Unlike many external monitoring solutions which sits outside and monitors by querying the website, APM solutions like AppDynamics and New Relic put a “low impact” agent inside the servers, VMs and cloud and monitor, identify and troubleshoot problems at a much deeper level.
Without researching deeply, and with the disclaimer that this is not a systematic comparison, I could see some differences between New Relic and AppDynamics. New Relic is a SaaS only offering whereas AppDynamic is available as SaaS and on-premise (catering to the paranoid organizations). Unlike AppDynamics which supports only Java Applications, New Relic supports Java, Ruby, .NET and PHP. Both AppDynamics and New Relic offer a free version as their marketing tool and it gives organizations an opportunity to test out these solutions before they invest on them. Hopefully, I could come back and do a detailed comparison some day in the future.
Conclusion
New Relic, with a funding boost and support for .NET and PHP, is well positioned to target businesses of all sizes (from small businesses to big enterprises) in this cloud era. Their partnership with Rightscale and Microsoft puts them at an advantage with customers looking to move their solutions to the cloud. As organizations move more and more into the cloud, application performance monitoring is very crucial as a bad performance at an inopportune time can easily break a business. For those who want to observe the industry trend towards the cloud, this is one segment which could turn out to be hot in the near future.
Related articles
- New Relic Gets Another $10M, Proves SaaS Profitability (cloud.gigaom.com)
- New Relic raises $10M to sniff out underperforming cloud computing apps (venturebeat.com)
- New Relic Raises $10M to Sniff Out Underperforming Cloud Computing Apps (nytimes.com)
- AppDynamics Prepares For The Cloud Era (cloudave.com)
