 Welcome back to theCUBE's continuous coverage of AWS re-invent 2021. I'm Lisa Martin. This is our third day here on set. We've got two live sets, two remote studios, over a hundred guests on the program and a lot going on with AWS and its ecosystem of partners. I'm pleased to welcome back one of our CUBE alumni, Buddy Brewer, the GVP and GM of product partnerships at New Relic. Welcome back Buddy, good to have you. Thanks, it's great to be here. Great to be in an in-person event again, isn't it? No kidding, it's really amazing to see everybody out here and after spending so much time on Zoom calls, we had a lot of really great moments among the team in the booth, playing the game of seeing if people's height matched up with what your expectation was because so many of the people we work with, we've only known over Zoom. Yes, yes, and Zoom has been a savior for all of us. We've been doing so much recording on Zoom at the same time, it's great to be here in person and seeing what a safe job AWS has done with getting, I'm hearing upwards of 30,000 people in here that are here in person. So talk to me about, you lead the technology partnerships at New Relic, talk to me about that, about your role, and then we'll get into the partnership with AWS. Yeah, absolutely, well the point about Zoom, it's fascinating, like you said, that just having the ability to communicate with people has been such a key enabler of being able to make progress and to continue to lead our personal and our professional lives despite the pandemic. I mean, imagine what it would have been like if this had happened 10 years ago, even but certainly 50 years ago or something like that, right? Like everything would have ground to a halt and technology took on such an amazing, you know, critical role in allowing us to do all of these things. And so at New Relic, we're all about helping people make sure that all of this software works correctly. And so observability helps people understand the detail level about everything from the front end, the end user experience to every single piece that happens along the path of delivering that experience all the way down to the infrastructure and to the network. But my role in New Relic is also to help all of the other tools that software developers use every day to create those experiences, that they connect into their observability platform so that they can understand all those details and make sure that people are able to continue doing things that have become really so basic to life like ordering groceries or getting food or, you know, communicating with a loved one over something like that. Yeah, the things that we, to your point, if this had happened, you know, five, 10 years ago, it would have been a completely different story. We've been able to function really well. And one of the things too that, you know, I noticed yesterday and today, you probably did as well with the Plethora, typical AWS, right, the Plethora of announcements, the amount of innovation that's going on, the customer flywheel that we've just seen this acceleration of technology and what it's enabling. But the observability portion is really key. You talk about, you know, the developers need to, that whole SDLC, they need to be able to understand exactly what's going on because at the end of the day, whether it's a consumer or an enterprise of the other end of the spectrum, we need to know exactly what's going on because people's patience is far thinner these days. The pandemic showed us that there is really no, having access to real-time data isn't a luxury anymore. It's really a necessity. That's right, yeah, absolutely. Talk to me about some of these. So a lot of announcements coming out from AWS. You guys, talk to me about the partnership that you guys are doing there and some of the things that are exciting on that front. Yeah, AWS is a really key partner for us. We're big users of AWS ourselves for our observability platform and all of our infrastructure. And we've had our own journey as a 13-year-old business that started out pre-cloud and moving our own infrastructure to the cloud. And then along that journey, we've worked closely with AWS and we've built a lot of joint solutions to help people who are moving to the cloud themselves or who are cloud native to understand all of the details about what's happening in that software. So we have over 60 different integrations to all of the different tools with Amazon that you can use on the cloud from data storage to EKS on Fargate and all of that stuff. And then we recently announced a five-year strategic agreement with Amazon to make it even easier for customers to adopt New Relic if they're building in Amazon AWS. And so we're in their marketplace. We have an offering for startups, for people who are just getting started that provides really simple and fast on-ramps with discounts and things like that that's all designed to help people, software developers in particular, focus on what matters most to them which is building great experiences for their customers. You mentioned the SDLC and that's one of the things that, our mission at New Relic is to make observability a daily data-driven habit for developers across all phases of the software delivery life cycle. The problem with observability and how it's used today is that it's only used in the run phase by most people. They use it when the software's on fire to put the fire out. We believe that that telemetry has tremendous strategic value in the plan, build, and deploy phases of software development as well. And so partnerships like AWS allow us to unlock the accessibility of that data across all of those different phases for people who, you know, software developers are, as a result, in many ways of the things that we were talking about earlier with the expectations that the pandemic has placed on how software has to work. It's not an option. They're busier, they're under more pressure than they've ever been before. And so we want to help them relieve that pressure with tools to help them do their jobs better. That relieving that pressure is key. There is so much pressure on developers. I mean, these days from observability to security and that sort of thing. But it sounds like one of the things that you're also fundamentally doing is really shifting that observability left and helping them from a cultural perspective. It seems like almost a shift, but you're trying to make things easier for them giving them more tools and to unlock what they're not seeing right now. That's right, that's right. And, you know, the interesting thing about it is everyone realizes that observability is critical to, you know, successful software businesses. So for example, we did a survey recently of 1,300 software developers and IT decision makers and executives and found that among the C-level executives that were surveyed, 80% of them expected to increase their observability budget and 20% of those expected to increase it significantly. However, that same survey found that a very small percentage of those who we actually surveyed feel that they have a mature observability practice today. And when we unpack the reasons why in the survey, we found that most of them reduced down to basically this issue of they just don't have enough time to instrument all of the software, especially in a world where the shift to the cloud has driven a change in architecture where monoliths have been torn down and replaced by hundreds or maybe even thousands of microservices. And we're in an era now where if observability isn't really, really easy and incredibly fast and simple to execute on, then software developers can no longer instrument fast enough to keep up with the pace of the software that they're delivering. And so what that leads to is visibility gaps. Visibility gaps lead to poor customer experiences. And so what we're trying to do, and we've been on this massive simplification of our own platform to make it incredibly cost effective at just 25 cents a gigabyte for ingestion and really simple licensing, seat-based licensing, where you get access to all of our tools to make it really simple and to take simply minutes to get observability on all those different pieces. That simplicity is a word that we throw around a lot that it's really critical. And it's always interesting to understand how do you actually facilitate that? You talked about the 80-20 rule there. A lot of the organization's not on that maturity curve with observability. How this new relic and its ecosystem of partners like AWS, how do you help have those conversations within organizations in any industry to help them understand how you can actually simplify that and unlock that visibility? Knowing that it's not only a matter of software development, but it's a competitive differentiator. It's also something that can damage brand if they're not on top of it. Yeah, we launched a reimagined version of our partner ecosystem, really our entire integration ecosystem, about six weeks ago on October 13th called New Relic Instant Observability. And one of the central goals of New Relic IO, which we call it for short, is to make it take just like five minutes for people to instrument something. So in the old way, what people had to do is if they wanted observability, they had to go learn about an observability vendor, then they had to go install it, figure out how all that works, and then they could get to solving a problem, which might have just been simply instrumenting a Kafka. And so what we want to do is just keep people in that mode. If all you wanted to do was instrument Kafka, then go find the Kafka instrumentation tile on New Relic Instant Observability, and then there's a guided install process that takes you through that, and at the end, you've instrumented Kafka. And if you want to add something else, like EKS Fargate from Amazon, or if you want to add something else, like a Java service, you can simply click more of those guided installs and add within minutes in an incremental way without having to stop and do a whole vendor evaluation to do so. In fact, one of the other things that we launched recently is a free tier that's free forever. So there's no trial process or anything. You don't have to put in a credit card. If all you want to do is instrument this one thing right now, you can go through this process, provision a free account, where you get access to all of our functionality for one user, and ingest up to 100 gigabytes of telemetry data for free within minutes. And so what we're trying to do is take all of that adoption friction out so that people aren't fighting with their instrumentation so much. And again, they can get back to doing what they really want to do in the first place, which is build great experiences for their end users. Great experiences for the end users, but that translates to employee experience, that translates to end user customer experience, which translates back to brand reputation. I'm just wondering, you know, you're focused on the developers and we've been hearing a lot about that the last two and a half days. A big focus on developers has observability kind of escalated up in its evolution up the stand within organizations. Is this a C-suite concern? Is this a board level concern? Where does this fit now? And what's the vision of New Relic to deliver on that? With observability? Yes. Yeah, 90% of those that we surveyed and the survey that I was talking about felt that observability was not just a tool that they needed to use, but strategically critical to their business. And, you know, this goes back to, as we know, and especially as a result of the intensity on the importance of software coming out of the pandemic, your digital business is your business these days. And so if you don't understand what's happening in that software and you can't move quickly, then, you know, you're really in trouble in terms of trying to succeed in a highly competitive environment. And that goes back to, again, one of our core beliefs is that all of this telemetry data that people have been collecting about how their software operates is so useful in contexts outside of just when there's a problem in production. Imagine if you could take that information and you could actually put it inside the IDE, which is something that we did with a recent acquisition of a company called Code Stream. We can take this telemetry data and put it inside the IDE so that as developers are writing the software, they know where those issues are. You can click straight from a stack frame, for example, inside of our, where we show all of our errors and the capability called errors inbox and shoot right into your IDE and go see where the line of code is that caused that error. Shortening that feedback loop and unlocking this really big investment that a lot of companies make in telemetry data earlier in the software life cycle, we believe is the future of observability and we want to help people get there. Well, the future of observability is really key for organizations these days because as we've been hearing, every company these days has to be a data company. And it's one thing to say that. It's a whole other thing to be able to implement it and observability is absolutely critical to that. It's being able to take that data and apply it in different contexts to really enable that business to be digital, which is absolutely table stakes these days to be successful and to deliver that customer experience because ultimately that's what it's all about. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And you know, the other thing that's really hard about this problem when I talk with our customers and we found this in the survey as well is that software developers don't just use one tool to create software. They use a lot of tools. In fact, 13% of those that we surveyed use 10 or more tools just for the observability piece. And so obviously we're always trying to expand organically what we do inside of our platform to cover more and more use cases. But an equally important part of our strategy if we really want to make observability a data-driven daily habit for people is to find all of those other really well-built, amazing tools that those developers use and find valuable ways to integrate with them. And so that's the other part of our ecosystem that we've built out is this ability to take all of the other tools that you use and wire them into New Relic. So that for example, if you're using, let's say, Lacework for security, then you can, you know, if someone's installed a Bitcoin miner onto your infrastructure somewhere, you can quickly navigate because of that integration from a poor customer experience through the infrastructure that's suffering maybe with, you know, a lot of memory pressure and a lot of CPU being used for this Bitcoin miner and then find out that through the integration where the miner was installed, how it got installed so that you can remediate those types of issues and connecting those pieces together, making software truly interoperable is another thing that's really critical to our mission at New Relic. It is critical to not only the developers but to organizations and their success as businesses these days. Buddy, thank you for joining me talking about what's going on at New Relic, what's new, how you're really empowering those developers and all of the downstream positive effects that that leads to. We appreciate your time. Thank you, thanks for having me. All right, her buddy, Brewer, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the global leader in live tech coverage.