 From New York City, it's theCUBE, covering New Relic Future Stack 2019, brought to you by New Relic. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and we're here at New Relic's Future Stack 2019 in the middle of Manhattan, right next door to Grand Central Station at the Grand Hyatt. Happy to welcome to the program, first-time guest, Nadia Duke Boone, who's the Vice President and General Manager of Application Monitoring here at New Relic. Thanks so much for joining us. You're welcome, it's great to be here. All right, so a lot of announcements this morning. Of course, observability, front and center, Lou talking about how that fits into this space. You have handled really kind of the APM product inside New Relic, so I'm hoping you can help us understand kind of the journey that New Relic's going on and I've heard in the marketplace there's AI ops and there's observability and all of these things and APM was the old world for the monoliths, so how does New Relic help live across all of these environments that customers are living in today and undergoing so much change and new things? So as Lou talked about this morning, we think to be an observability platform like New Relic One, you've got to be open, connected and programmable. But as we think about that within the application monitoring space, we really think it comes down to the issue of what are the questions that you need to ask and that really depends on what stacks you need to see and what are the questions that you need to ask and so I think it's a false dichotomy to try to say you need to pick a side and observability or monitoring. I think it's really a yes hand. You don't have to pick a side and I think with New Relic what we're able to do, whether you're using our agents and all the rich data they give you, whether you're using our open platform, the important thing is we're able to bring it all together in one place so you can get all your questions answered. Yeah, so I spent lots of time in my career trying to help break down silos. In the traditional infrastructure world, the networking and storage and compute teams, virtualization help pull some things together. Software tends to be a unifying factor but when I look at the people that own application and the developers, I mean you've got monoliths, you've got this containerization and microservices coming, you've got the new serverless environments here, you've got a lot of fragmentation inside the customers. How does that impact your business today and are we going to see those pulled together over time? Yeah, what we hear from customers is that they're going to be running heterogeneous environments for a long time. If you're over a year old company, you're not running a single tech stack. You've made choices for your business needs and you need to be able to see across your whole estate and where New Relic's adding value for our customers is by bringing this all together and connecting it so you can actually see let's say from a Lambda function in our Lambda agents all the way back through to your Java monolith and down to the server, whether it's running containers or on bare metal, you can see all the way down and then you can connect that out to your front end as well and I think it's that ability to see across is where we're playing. All right, can you bring us inside your customers? What are some of the challenges they're facing and how do you help them along those transformations that they're undergoing? Because as you've said, they're going to have this heterogeneous environment for quite a long time. Well, I think one of the things they're saying is that they're trying to move faster and one of the ways they're moving faster is by changing the process by which they build software. So we've been talking about DevOps for years, we've been talking about Agile for much longer than years but those changes bring about new needs also for observability because now you've got a team that maybe wants to see very deeply with the things that they're on call for but software refuses to break neatly at team boundaries. It just won't, it's going to break wherever it wants to break. So you need to be able to quickly assess across your whole enterprise what's going on and help those teams talk to you. So that's definitely a problem that we're solving for our customers now and if I were to pick one more that I'm hearing, well I'll pick one from this morning and that's cost management, right? As people move to the cloud, it's so powerful and easy to be able to start up new services in the cloud but then do you know what you have, do you know what it costs, do you know how to optimize? We announced 12 new applications this morning, one of them is addressing exactly that point. Yeah, what are some of the challenges that customers have really monitoring across these different environments that I think cost it's, well the promise of cloud is to help me understand and control my cost quite a bit but I understand my data center costs in general much more than I do what I have in the cloud. So you mean trying to understand what in their software? So I guess just if they have these different environments they need to span from a monitoring standpoint, what are some of the challenges that customers have and the differences and how does New Relic pull those together for them? Well I think some of it is bringing their teams together. If you've got folks that have a dev accent and an ops accent they may have different points of view about monitoring, right? And so a dev team might be saying let's go all in on this method or this tool and an ops team might be saying something else and then as you introduce new technologies and maybe now people don't want to always run an agent they want to have complete visibility over their software and so with New Relic we're giving them those choices, we're giving them like hey you can run an agent, you can, if you've already got stuff with Zipkin because maybe internally you've got like a great Zipkin champion, like great we're going to be there with you on that too. So we want to be able to help these teams come together rather than forcing them to sort of live in silos. All right, Lou put a real emphasis talking about platform and he said platform with a capital P, help us understand a little bit about that and the impact that's going to have on it for your customers. Yeah absolutely, I think you know anyone can say hey I've got more than one product therefore I have a platform. I think when we talk about a platform you know we think of software engineers we're like what do I need a platform something I can build on, right? And so I think a capital P platform is the ability to build apps to be able to extend it, to be able to add data because you're open and then the power that we bring you know to put on my, I gotta put in my plug is by connecting it all together. But I think the power of the platform has been really showing off in the work that we've been doing with our customers to build these new applications. All right, you mentioned open which was one of the three features of the platform itself. There's open and with APIs and then there's open source. Can you help us tease through a little bit because there's the openness and then there's some open source pieces. How do those go together and I guess more importantly what does it mean for the customers? Thanks for asking because I do think those words kind of got sometimes get tumbled up. So let's first let's let me like just kind of tease it apart a little bit. So first part of open and you sort of already mentioned this is like we're open to all data. So metrics, events, logs, traces, you can send us that data. That's the first thing. You don't have to be running a New Relic agent to use New Relic. The second part though is that we are actually building and contributing to the open source community, software development kits and exporters so that our customer to make it easy for our customers. And so we've we've shipped, we're shipping open census and drop wizard and micrometer and exporters and Prometheus scrapers so that these are open source tools that our customers can get, can extend if they need to to get that data in. So we're making it easy to get the open data in by providing these open source tools and we're in there with our, with the communities contributing to the communities as well. And then finally, you know, the last one is with our new programmable platform, we're also all in on open source on that. So we're contributing to open source for folks building on New Relic and our customers are telling us that they're excited to also be able to do that and to share and exchange with each other. There's value to the customer and I guess the question is your relationship with your customers are going to change though as you know, they're building applications not just, you know, more than just a tool. When I've heard from many of the customers that use New Relic is they talk about the partnership and it really has taken that partnership to a next level. What I say is New Relic is not coming out and saying, oh, we're an open source company and we're building our company around open source. So, you know, it seems a, you know, somewhat a maturation of the model but, you know, not, you know, open source, you know, being, you know, the be all and end all of New Relic's mission. Yeah, I mean, our mission is to help customers build more perfect software. I mean, that's why we come to work is to help them do that. We think this is the right step to be able to do that. And the community around New Relic, as you said, is, you know, they're excited, they're dynamic. It's great to be here at Future Sack and hear them talking to each other and hear the buzz. I was at our customer advisory board meeting yesterday which is 11 execs from some of our biggest customers and they were talking about how excited they are to see how this is going to help them with their business because they can connect now their telemetry data to sort of higher order business problems and they're also excited to share. I think it's the right step for New Relic and for our customers. There's a lot of startups out there that attack pieces of what New Relic said, trying to deliver, you know, how does New Relic look at the landscape out there? And, you know, the challenge when you try to be a platform is, you know, are you providing good enough solutions or are, you know, are you providing, you know, best solutions across all of these environments? Yeah. I think, you know, any of our point solutions can go head to head with any of, you know, anything in the market. And, you know, the fact that the market is so dynamic is because this is a real problem space for people who are building software. So folks are going to keep innovating and coming up with new ideas and my mission is to make sure that everyone writing software is instrumenting it and able to observe it. So I think I love that more and more folks are joining this conversation. I think it's a great time to be working on monitoring and observability. Okay, we started at the top talking a little bit about observability. What should customers be looking at? How should they be thinking about that? What feedback are you getting from, you know, some of your key customers in the space in general and how New Relics looking to address it? I think it comes down to a little bit we talked about earlier, visibility and answerability. If I were talking to an exec or if I were talking to an engineer who's looking at their tools, you know, whatever level you're at and saying, what do you need to monitor? How can you get that data in? And can you answer the questions? Do you have the tools, ability to query, to connect the data, you know, to see like, hey, here's an event that happened and how did my systems change? So I think a lot of it comes down to, you know, is it visible? Can I ask the questions? And then, you know, for every stack and no matter what job I'm doing. All right. When we look at this broad term which gets over you some, but, you know, digital transformation, the comment I've made is the long pole in the tent of going through that transformation really is the application portfolio. You know, I can modernize my platform, I can go to cloud, but, you know, changing my applications, especially the ones that run my business is really tough, you know, if I'm a company that's been around 15, 20 years, you know, I probably have applications that are as old as the company, if not longer, there. You know, just broadly, how are your customers doing? Are they being able to kind of, you know, move along that modernization journey of the application better today than they might have a couple of years ago? Just kind of macro level. I think so, I think, you know, between what the cloud vendors are doing and what we're doing, folks are getting both tools and they're also getting support. I think, you know, the community that, you know, software engineering community is really leaning into this moment and talking about how to do these types of transformations. I think there's a lot of just knowledge sharing going on. There's a lot of advice and consult that you can get. And then I think the tools are lending themselves to being able to do, you know, some people move to the cloud or the lift and shift. Some people use as an excuse to re-architect. A lot of folks pick and choose because not every app is worth the same. And some apps are, you know, are, for some, for a given app, it might be a more relevant time to change it and a more relevant time to let it stay put. And you can make those choices. And I think people are approaching it with a certain rational sense. Yeah, last question for you. New Relics, a leader in, according to the analyst firms that look at the APM market. New Relics doing a lot of the things that I hear from, you know, the startups getting lots of money thrown at them. So, you know, how should customers think of New Relic today? I think, you know, we're the best in leading APM product in the market for a reason and we can never rest on our laurels. I think customers should look at us as a trusted partner who's going to continue to grow and meet them wherever they are. Our customers are going to the cloud. We want to be there first and meet them there and welcome them in the door. And that comes back to how do we help customers do digital transformation. We're a big software company. We get it. Like we are going through the same, we go through all these same questions ourselves and we talk to our customers all the time. So I think for our customers, it's like we're the right platform and the right partner because we're never going to stop. Nadia, thank you so much for sharing the updates. Congratulations on the launch today and best of luck on Ford. Thanks a bunch. All right, lots more here at New Relic FutureStack 2019. I'm Stu Miniman. Thanks for watching theCUBE.