 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS ReInvent 2020, sponsored by Intel, AWS, and our community partners. Hello, and welcome to theCUBE virtual here with coverage of AWS ReInvent 2020. I'm your host, Justin Warren. And today I'm joined by Jay Snyder, who is the chief customer officer at New Relic J, welcome to theCUBE. It is fantastic to be back with theCUBE. One of my favorite things to do has been for years, so appreciate you having me. Yes, a bit of a CUBE veteran, been on many times, so it's great to have you with us here again. So you've got some news about New Relic and Amazon, or AWS, a strategic collaboration agreement, I believe. So maybe tell us a bit more about what that actually is and what it means. Yeah, so we've been partners with AWS for years, but most recently in the last two weeks, we've just announced a five-year strategic partnership that really expands on the relationship that we already had. We had a number of integrations and competencies already in place, but this is a big deal to us and we believe a big deal to AWS as well. So really takes all the work we've done to what I'll call the next level, it's joint technology development, where we're initially gonna be embedding New Relic One right into the AWS Management Console for ease of use and really agility for anyone who's developing and implementing a cloud strategy. Big news as well from an adoption relative to purchase power, so you can purchase straight through the AWS Marketplace and leverage your existing AWS spend. And then we're gonna really be able to tap into the AWS Premier Partner Ecosystem, so we get more skills, more scale as we look to drive consulting and skills development and any implementation for faster value realization and overall success in the cloud. So that's the high level, happy to get into a more detailed level if you're interested around what I think it means to companies, but just setting the stage, we're really excited about it as a company. In fact, I just left a call with AWS to join this call as we start to build out the execution plan for what the next five years look like. Fantastic, so for those who might be new to New Relic and aren't particularly across the field of observability, could you just give us a quick overview of what New Relic does and then maybe talk about what the strategic partnership means for the nature of New Relic's business? Yeah, so when I think about observability and what it means to us as opposed to the market at large, I would say our vision around observability is around one word and that word is simplification. So I talk to a lot of customers, that's what I do all the time. And every time I do, I would say that there's three themes that come up over and over. It's the need to deliver a customer experience with improved uptime and ever-improving improvements. It's the need to move more quickly to public cloud to embrace the scale and efficiency public cloud services have to offer. And then it's the need to improve the efficiency and speed of their own engineering teams so they can deliver innovation through software more quickly. And if you think about all those challenges and what observability is, it's the one common thread that cuts across all those, right? It's taking all of the operational data that your system emits and helps you measure and improve the customer experience. Your ability to move to public cloud and compare that experience before you start to after you get there, the effectiveness of your team before you deploy to after you get there. And it's all the processes around that, right? It helps you be almost able to be there before you're there there. I mean, if that makes sense, right? You'll be able to troubleshoot before the event actually happens or occurs. So our vision for this is like I talked about earlier is all about simplification and we've broken this down into literally three piece parts, right? Three products, that's all we are. The first is about having as much data as you possibly can. I talked about emitting that transactional and telemetry data. So we've created a telemetry data platform which rides on the world's most powerful database. And we believe that if we can take all of that data, all that infrastructure and application data and bring it into that database, including open source data and allow you to query it, analyze it and take action against it, that's incredibly powerful. But that's only part one. Further, we have a really strong point of view that anybody who has the ability to break production should have the ability to fix production. And for us, that's giving them full stack observability. So it's the ability to action against all of that data that sits in the data platform. And then finally, we believe that you need to have applied intelligence because there's so many things that are happening in these complex environments. You wanna be able to cut through the noise and reduce it to find those insights and take action in a way that leverages machine learning. And that for us is AI ops. So really for us, observability, when I talked about simplification, we've simplified what is a pretty large market with a whole bunch of products just down to three simple things. A data platform, the ability to operationalize and action against that data and then layer on top in the third layer that cake machine learning. So it can be smarter than you can be so it sees problems before they occur. And that's what I would say observability is to us. And it's the ability to do that horizontally and vertically across your entire infrastructure and your entire stack. I hope that makes sense. Yeah, there's a lot to dig into there. So let's start with some of that operational side of things because I've long been a big believer in the idea of cloud as being a state of mind rather than a particular location. And a lot of people have been embracing cloud. We know that for about 10 or so years and the size of reinvent has proven out what how popular cloud can be. So some of those operational aspects that you were talking about there about the ability to react. I particularly liked that you were saying that anyone who can break production should be able to fix production. That's a very different way of working than what many organizations would be used to. So how is New Relic helping customers to understand what they need to change about how they operate their business as they adopt some of these methods? Well, it's a great question. There's a couple of things we do. So we have an observability maturity framework by which we deploy and I don't want to bore the audience here, but needless to say it's been built over the last year, year and a half by using hundreds of customers as a test case to determine effectively that there is a process that most companies go through to get to benefits realization. And we break those benefit categories into two different areas. One around operational efficiency and agility. The other is around innovation and digital experience. So you were talking about operational efficiency. And in there, we have effectively three or four different ways and what I call boxes on how we would double click and triple click into a set of actions that would lead you to an operational outcome. So we have learned over time and applied a methodology and approach to measure that. So depending on what you're trying to do, whether it's meantime to recover or meantime to detect or if you've got hundreds of developers and you're finding that they're ineffective or inefficient and you want to figure out how to deploy those resources to different parts of the environment so you can get them to better use their time. It all depends on what your business outcome and business objective is. We have a way to measure that current state your effectiveness, apply rigor to it and then design a process by using New Relic One to fill in those gaps. And it can take on the burden of a lot of those people. I hate to say it because I'm not looking to replace any individual. It's really about freeing up their time to allow them to go do something in a more effective and more efficient manner. So I don't know if that's answering the question perfectly but... I don't think there is a perfect answer to it. Every customer is a bit different. So this is exactly why we developed the methodology because every customer is a little different. The rationale though is... Common themes... Yeah, so the rationale... There's a lot of common... I was going to say there's a lot of common themes. So what we've been able to develop over time with this framework is that we've built a catalog of use cases and experiences that we can apply against you. So depending on what your business objectives are and what you're trying to achieve we're able to determine and really auger in there and assess you what is your maturity level being able to deliver against these. Are you even using the platform to the level of maturity that would allow you to gain this benefit realization? And that's where we're adding a massive amount of value. And we see that every single day with our customers who are actually quite surprised by the power of the platform. I mean, if you think traditionally back not too far two or even three years people thought of New Relic as an APM company. And I think with the launch this summer, this past July with New Relic One we've really pivoted to a platform company. So while a lot of companies love New Relic for APM, they're now starting to see the power of the platform and what we can do for them by operationalizing those use cases around agility and effectiveness to drive cost and make people be more useful and purposeful with their time so they can create better software. Yeah, I think that's something that people are realizing a lot more lately than they were previously. I think there was a lot of TCO analysis that was done on a replacement of FTA basis. But I think many organizations have realized that well, actually that doesn't mean that those people go away. They get re-tasked to do new things. So any of these efficiency, you start with efficiency and it turns out actually being about business agility about doing new things with the same people that you have who now don't have to do some of these more manual and fairly boring tasks. Yeah, and Justin, if this cube interview thing doesn't work out for you, we're hiring some value engineers right now. It sounds like you've got the talk track down perfectly because that's exactly what we're seeing in the marketplace. So I agree. So give us some examples if you can of maybe one or two of things that you've seen that customers have used New Relic where they've stripped out some of that make work or the things that they don't really need to be doing. And then they're turning that into new agility and have created something new, something more innovative. Have you got an example you could share with us? You know, it's funny. I just finished doing our global customer advisory boards, which is rough and tough, about a hundred customers around the world. So we break it into the three theaters. And we were just talking with a particular customer. I don't want to give their name, but the session was called, we broke the sessions into two different buckets. And I think every customer buys products like New Relic for two reasons. One is to either help them save money or to help them make money. So we actually split the sessions into those two areas. And I think you're talking about, how do we help them save money? And this particular company that was in the media industry talked at great length about the fact that they are a massive news conglomerate. They have a whole bunch of individual business units. They were decentralized and non-standardized as it related to understanding how their software was getting created, how they were defining and determining meantime to recover, performance metrics, all these things were happening around them in a highly complex environment. Just like we see with a lot of our customers, right? The complexity of the environments today are really driving the need for observability. So one of the things we did with them is we came in and we apply the same type of approach that we just discussed. We did a maturity assessment for them. And we found a variety of areas where they were very immature in using capabilities that existed within the platform. So we're able to light up a variety of things around insights. We're able to take more data in from a logging perspective. And again, I'm probably getting a little bit into the weeds for this particular session, but needless to say, we looked at the full gamut of metrics, events, logs and traces, which wasn't really being done in an observability strategy manner and deploy that across the entire enterprise. So created a standard platform for all the data in this particular environment. Across 14 different business units. And as a byproduct, they were able to do a variety of things. One, the uptime for a lot of their customer facing media applications improved greatly. We actually started to pivot from actually driving cost to showing how they could quote unquote make money because the digital experience they were creating for a lot of their customers reduced the time to glass, if you will, for clicking the button and how quickly they could see the next page to the next page or whatever online app they were looking to get dramatically. So as a byproduct of this, they were able to repurpose to the point you made, Justin, dozens of resources off of what was traditionally maintenance mode and fighting fires and a reactive capability towards building new code and driving new innovation in the marketplace. And they gave a couple of examples of new applications that they were able to bring to market without actually having to hire any net new resources. So again, I don't want to give away the name of the company, maybe it was a little too high level, but it actually plays perfectly into exactly what you're describing. That is a good example of one of those that one of the, it's always nice to have a specific concrete customer doing one of these kinds of things that you describe in generic terms, okay, no, this is being applied very specifically to one customer. So we're seeing those sorts of things more and more. Yeah, and I was going to give you, I thought about in advance of this session, what is a really good example of what's happening in the world around us today. And I thought of a particular company that we just recently worked with, which is Chegg. I don't know if you're familiar with Chegg, if you've heard of them, but they're an education technology company based in California. And they do digital and physical textbook rentals. They do online tutoring and online customer services. So Justin, if you're like me or the rest of the world and you have kids who are learning at home right now, think about the amount of pressure and strain that's now being put on this poor company Chegg to keep their platform operational 24-7, seven days a week so that students can learn at pace and keep up, right? And it's an unbelievable success story for us. And one that I love because it touches me personally because I have three kids all doing online learning in a variety of different manners right now. And we talked about it earlier, the complexity of some of the environments today. This is a company that you would never guess, but they run 500 microservices and a highly complex technical architecture, right? So we had to come in and help these folks and we were able to reduce their meantime to recover because they were having a lot of issues with their ability to provide a seamless performance experience because you can imagine the volume of folks hitting them these days and reduce that meantime to recover by five X. So it's just another example where we're able to say, it's a real world example where you're able to actually reduce the time to recover to provide a better experience and whether or not you want to say that saving money or making money, what I know for sure is it's giving an incredible experience so that folks in the next generation of great minds aren't focused on learning instead of waiting to learn, right? So very cool. That is very cool. And yes, I have gone through the whole teaching kids at the end which is, it was disruptive not necessarily in a good way but we adapted and learned how to do it in a new way which is, you know, it was a lot easier towards the end than it was at the beginning. I'd say we're still getting there at the Snyder household Justin, we're still getting there. Practice makes perfect. Yeah, thank you. So for organizations like Chegg that might be looking at Chegg and thinking, hmm, that sounds like a bit of a success story. I want to learn more about how New Relic might be able to help me. How should they start? Well, there's a lot of ways they can start. I mean, one of the most exciting things about our launch in July was that we have a new free tier. So for anybody who's interested in understanding the power of observability, you can go right to our website and you can sign up for free and you can start to play with New Relic One. I think once you start playing for it, we're gonna find the same thing that happens to most of the folks that do that. They're gonna play more and more and more and they're gonna start to really embrace the power. And there's an incredible New Relic University that has fantastic training online. So as you start to dabble in that free tier, start to see what the power and the potential is, you'll probably sign up for some classes. Next thing you know, you're off and running. So that is one of the easiest ways to get exposed to it. So certainly check us out at our website and you can find out all about that free tier and what observability could potentially mean to you or your business. And as part of the AWS re-invent experience, are they able to engage with you in some way? They can definitely come by our booth, check us out virtually, see what we have to say. We'd love to talk to them and we'd be happy to talk to you about all the powerful things we're doing with AWS in the marketplace to help meet you wherever you are in your cloud journey, whether it's pre-migration, during migration, post-migration or even optimization. We've got some incredible statistics on how we can help you maximize and leverage your investment in AWS. And we're really excited to be a strategic partner with them. And you know, it's funny for me to see how observability, this platform can really touch every single facet of that cloud migration journey. And you know, I was thinking originally as I got exposed to this, it would be really useful for identity met, entity relationship management at the pre-migration phase and then possibly at the post-migration phase as you try to baseline and measure results. But what I've come to learn through our own process of moving our own business to the AWS cloud, that there's tremendous value everywhere along that journey, that's incredibly exciting. So not only are we a great partner, but I'm excited that we will be what I call first and best customer of AWS ourselves, New Relic, as we make our own journey to the cloud. Well, fantastic. And I encourage any customers who might be interested in New Relic to definitely go and check you out as part of the show. Thank you, Jay, Jay Snyder from New Relic. You've been watching theCUBE virtual and our coverage of AWS re-invent 2020. Make sure that you check out all the rest of theCUBE coverage of AWS re-invent on your desktop, laptop, your phone, wherever you are. I've been your host, Justin Warren, and I look forward to seeing you again soon.