New Relic And Hortonworks See Strong Public Debuts

http://techcrunch.com/2014/12/12/new-relics-ipo-spikes-31-in-initial-trading/

by ynotgiant • 12 years ago

39 26 12 years ago

techcrunch.com

leesalminen• 12 years ago

Congrats to the folks at New Relic. I use their service daily, and find it to be invaluable.

trjordan7• 12 years ago

There's always mixed feelings when a competitor goes public.

I work for AppNeta, and while we directly compete against New Relic, I love what they've done for the market. Their competitors were these clunky, on-premise, hard-to-use, didn't support Ruby / Python / PHP / node.js apps, and they've built a beautiful service that's legitimately easy to use. A lot of the data is available from CA or Dynatrace, but it's so much harder to set up and use.

Monitoring so commonly focuses on server metrics, or outside-in uptime, or logs, and I really do think that monitoring transactions end-to-end is an important part of the picture. Day to day, New Relic is absolutely the competition, but in the big picture, there's a lot of big companies using technology that's 15 years old because somebody like New Relic or AppNeta hadn't come along yet.

Glad to see that the market likes them as well. There's awesome stuff happening in Application Performance Monitoring (APM), and if you're not already using something like this, I strongly recommend you look at AppNeta, New Relic, ... and not really anybody else, because the rest haven't really figured it out yet.

zdrummond2• 12 years ago

I am super happy user of New Relic, but always interested in alternatives. I had never heard of AppNeta, so I checked it out.

Looks like you guys have some nice stuff, but do you mind if I give a new customer first impression?

Very confusing pricing.

First off, right off the bat. There is no central price page and I had to go hunt for what you charge.

Then when I did find Enterprise pricing for TraceView, it has some contradictory language. It says $119/host/month. Then in the bullets below it says

unlimited users

unlimited applications

unlimited hosts

Huh? Is it per host or is it per month?? That makes no sense to me.

trjordan7• 12 years ago

Hey, sorry that you find it confusing!

Part of the problem is that we have a couple different products, and they're not all directly comparable with New Relic. Hence the lack of a central pricing page.

TraceView is our offer that's 1:1, as you found, and it's priced monthly per host. The "unlimited" is meant to be "you can buy as many as you want", vs. the "Startup" plan, where you can have a max of 5 hosts. Does that make more sense? (I'd be more than happy to change it to something that makes more sense!)

tomdale• 12 years ago

and not really anybody else, because the rest haven't really figured it out yet.

I beg to differ there. ;) I work on Skylight (https://www.skylight.io) which is definitely doing some interesting stuff in the APM space.

By focusing on just Rails, we are able to provide features that other services that try to be a jack-of-all-trades frequently miss. For example, we just rolled out a feature that helps you monitor memory usage in production with extremely low overhead[1], which I don't think is something any of our competitors offer.

But yeah, definitely agree that New Relic has been a market leader here. They've validated that people are willing to spend real money on improving performance, something that wasn't obvious just a few years ago.

1: http://blog.skylight.io/announcing-memory-traces/

GrinningFool2• 12 years ago

Conversely by focusing on just rails, you effectively eliminate large swaths of the enterprise market. There's a huge opportunity there for someone who can integrate across platforms and technologies, particularly if you can ship a behind-the-firewall solution.

lingben2• 12 years ago

strange, there's no pricing info on the site, why?

trjordan7• 12 years ago

We've got a couple different products, and they're priced slightly differently.

http://appneta.com/products/traceview is what you want -- scroll down :)

phonon• 12 years ago

The link to https://support.appneta.com/cloud/traceview/instrumentation/... on the python support page is broken.

trjordan7• 12 years ago

Whoops, will get that fixed!

You probably found the right one, but better link: https://support.appneta.com/cloud/traceview/instrumentation/...

relaxatorium2• 12 years ago

Thinking about New Relic vis a vis a potential startup bubble makes me think about the old saw about the gold rush where most of the people who got rich were the ones selling pickaxes rather than gold miners.

On the other hand, in the current startup economy the pickaxe bubble is almost as big as the gold mining bubble, but I think it still probably applies more than it doesn't.

bcantrill• 12 years ago

I take it you weren't around for the Dot Com Bubble? I can't tell you how many times I heard this repeated -- and used to justify lofty valuations for infrastructure companies. CSCO, JNPR, ORCL, INTC, EMC, NTAP were all "selling pickaxes" -- none of those valuations ever recovered. And those are the companies that survived; many companies "selling pickaxes" perished through either bankruptcy or (more frequently) fire sale acquisition. There is emphatically a valuation bubble; it will burst; when it bursts, essentially all will suffer -- and life will go on.

Disclaimer: I worked for SUNW "selling pickaxes" before, during and after the Dot Com Bubble, I told myself this lie -- and vowed to never tell it to myself again.

minimax• 12 years ago

Chart of valuations the curious: https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&...

relaxatorium2• 12 years ago

I was not, and for that matter, am not really participating in this one either except as an observer.

I wonder if there's a difference based on how many of those companies were selling mostly actual hardware infrastructure, which has just gotten cheaper and more commoditized over time, versus those which had actual differentiated software.

Both still got hit hard of course, a bubble's a bubble, but I wonder who did substantially worse?

trjordan7• 12 years ago

The funny thing about working for a company like this is that you're still placing a bet on it. If you're selling pickaxes, you're fine ... but New Relic is selling a subscription to pickaxes, which will dry up and go away if the gold rush disappears.

So, yeah, pickaxes are great. "Netflix for pickaxes" is more strongly tied to the market's long-term future.

rdegges• 12 years ago

I just wanted to say that I'm a huge NewRelic fan, and really happy for everyone I know who works there.

I've met Lew Cirne before (their CEO), and he's not only an incredibly nice, down-to-earth guy, but an awesome programmer as well.

It was really inspirational (and fun!) to go to the NewRelic Futurestack conference last year -- everyone I bumped into was super awesome, friendly, and really loved their jobs.

For the past 4-years (ish), I've been using NewRelic in 100% of my personal and professional projects, and couldn't be happier. Really love everything they're doing -- it's a solid product, and a solid team.

toolz• 12 years ago

Can someone explain how deeply unprofitable companies can go public and somehow do well? I understand that companies are able to pull Mitt Romney's and do terrible things to make money with companies that were losing money every year, but how does it happen that people want to buy stock of a company that is losing so much money? Do I even want to know?

briandear• 12 years ago

With New a Relic revenue growth rates are greater than the increase in loss rates. I bought a few hundred shares of New Relic because the financials are actually very strong. There's a lot more going on than simple profit/loss statements, it has to do with rates as opposed to simple hard numbers. As successful as Amazon is, they STILL aren't profitable, yet I bet everyone here wishes they had Amazon IPO shares.

The Mitt Romney comment is rather ignorant. There are many, many major companies that were rescued by Bain. A simple minded view of that industry is to do a discredit to the companies that thrived because of Bain. Staples, Guitar Center, Dominoes Pizza, the list goes on. If it weren't for Mitt Romney, there's be dozens of companies that would have simply gone bankrupt. Business isn't around to be a public service, it's sole purpose is to make a profit; with those profits, they are able to provide people with jobs. If Apple didn't make a profit and closed down, imagine how many people in our community would be out of a job. Profit provides an incentive to operate. I don't make a living writing computer code for charity; our livihoods depend on profit, like it or not.

New Relic And Hortonworks See Strong Public Debuts

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