New Relic: AI enhanced observability tools provide better visibility for organizations

“Organizations are adopting cloud optimization and FinOps practices to reduce spend, and the practice of intelligent observability plays a big role in helping organizations take control of cloud spend with intelligent insights,” says Simon Lee, SVP & MD, APJ, New Relic.

New Relic announced more than 20 AI platform innovations, including Agentic AI innovations and new ecosystem partnerships at its Now+ conference recently. The intelligent observability company is hoping to make an impact in the industry, especially with AI playing a bigger role in enterprises.

As businesses adopt more technologies, being able to track and observe how these solutions can impact productivity is essential. Among the new AI platform innovations announced include Cloud Cost Intelligence, which delivers detailed views into multi-cloud cost trends, drivers, and impacts so that business teams can be strategic about current and future cloud investment.

Apart from that, New Relic also unveiled Pipeline Control, which gives enterprises a powerful rules engine and rich data visualizations to maximize the value of data ingestion.

Simon Lee, SVP and MD for APJ at New Relic speaks to CRN Asia on how these AI platform innovations can help businesses in this region. He also discusses how New Relic’s channel partners are key to their growth and presence here as well.

How can enterprises in Asia Pacific deal with the challenges in cloud cost and visibility today?

Organizations are adopting cloud optimization and FinOps practices to reduce spend, and the practice of intelligent observability plays a big role in helping organizations take control of cloud spend with intelligent insights.

New Relic’s platform provides detailed views into multi-cloud cost trends, drivers, and impacts so organizations can monitor real-time costs and changes in their cloud environments.

Additionally, it intelligently maximizes the quality and value of telemetry data to control data, manage costs, ensure security and compliance, and understand ROI. Organizations benefit from understanding the cost impact before they deploy and adjust as needed. The New Relic platform also allows organizations to attribute infrastructure costs by products, teams, and services to create accountability and optimization of their cloud infrastructure.

Cloud cost intelligence on New Relic’s platform encourages collaboration and alignment between teams by breaking the silos between development and FinOps teams. The visibility of cost breakdowns creates shared ownership and accountability with technical and FinOps teams to own cloud cost optimization.

Can you share with us your growth plans for the year and how is New Relic working with customers in their journey?

Businesses in Asia Pacific are continuing to invest heavily in cloud-based software, data analytics tools, and AI platforms to optimize operations, enhance customer experiences and gain valuable insights. According to IBM, more than half (54%) of APAC organisations expect AI to deliver longer-term benefits for their business in areas such as innovation or revenue generation.

The rapid AI adoption journey brings new challenges to APAC organizations, in monitoring the performance and reliability of AI systems. The increased volume of data generated increases the need to monitor and observe large, complex datasets. This is why we are excited about New Relic’s AI-strengthened innovations across the platform. These innovations enable our customers to tap into real intelligence and the ability to surface the right insights at the right time to drive value for their business.

A key engine of growth in the region is our continued investment in our R&D capability in India. The Indian business today is a robust 650+ strong team in product development, engineering, customer adoption, marketing, pre-sales, sales and field technology. We intend to leverage our innovation centres in India to host tailored customer briefing sessions for customers across APAC.

These sessions give our customers direct access to New Relic executives in the product and engineering space and are designed to help our customers best leverage our technology to achieve their business goals. We also plan to deepen our partnerships across the region through further expansion in our key verticals of e-commerce, media and entertainment, retail, financial services, and healthcare.

How important is Agentic AI solutions today for businesses and how is New Relic helping enterprises in the region with this?

Organizations are adopting AI-powered applications at a rapid pace, creating complexity across their IT stack and driving up costs. Observability is essential in helping them to manage this complexity.

New Relic Intelligent Observability is strengthened by our sophisticated AI Intelligence Engine that predicts potential issues before they arise, assesses impacts, and makes intelligent recommendations to help prevent costly problems and outages. Our AI Intelligence Engine combines two leading approaches: compound AI and agentic AI. Our compound AI system uses multiple AI models, agents, and tools to tackle many types of complicated tasks. Meanwhile, agentic AI reduces the toil on developers by completing tasks and automating workflows, even with external tools.

Agentic integrations deliver AI insights, recommendations, and task automation right within the tools (ITSM, SLDC, etc.) and GenAI experiences that users rely on. By unifying data sources and processes into an AI powered platform, New Relic's Agentic Integration enables AI agent to AI agent integrations to bring New Relic’s critical observability data and intelligent recommendations across the business and tech ecosystem. New agentic AI integrations with ServiceNow and Google Gemini will build upon New Relic’s expanding AI integration ecosystem that includes GitHub Copilot and Amazon Q Business.

The platform drives business growth and developer velocity by integrating across workflows and enabling insights wherever customers operate. We are positioned to power the ecosystem because its platform is extensible and strengthened by a sophisticated AI engine, paired with its platform approach to packaging and pricing.

Integrations and platformizations are becoming an integral part for businesses when investing in solutions today. How is New Relic dealing with this?

Modern technology stacks are complex and with the proliferation of AI, the level of complexity is continuing to skyrocket. New Relic is the only unified data platform for all events, metrics, logs, and traces, meaning that engineers can achieve clear visibility across the entire stack, while reducing toil associated with tool sprawl and context switching. With New Relic, engineering teams get all their data in one place, with context.

This unified approach also extends to our technology partner integration ecosystem. Last year, New Relic expanded New Relic Instant Observability, an open source ecosystem of nearly 800 quickstarts and integrations that help engineers instrument, dashboard, and alert their entire stack.

Furthermore, New Relic also formed the Secure Developer Alliance with FOSSA, Gigamon, and Lacework to help secure cloud infrastructure and close the gap between security and engineering teams when shipping code. By bringing everything into the one platform–including external tools–New Relic eliminates silos for data, tools, and teams, and provides clear visibility across the tech stack.

Can you share the role partners, and the channel ecosystem plays in ensuring customers get the best experience with New Relic?

In a region as culturally diverse as Asia-Pacific, developing strong relationships with channel partners is absolutely essential. From delivering product enablement in local language, to logistical details like billing in foreign currencies, channel partners support some of the most important, and fundamental aspects of doing business in Asia-Pacific.

To ensure that customers acquired through the channel get the best possible experience with New Relic, our partners deliver tailored training sessions, ongoing enablement, and support. We also engage in various initiatives with our channel partners including event sponsorship, roundtables, and hackathons, as well as additional co-marketing activities to ensure that our customers are across our latest product innovations that drive real value for their business. We aim to be best in class at supporting our partners at every step of the journey, from customer acquisition to renewal, so we can deliver the best possible experience to our partners and customers.

How does New Relic ensure its working with the right partners in the region?

There is a thorough vetting process in place for channel partners to ensure the right strategic fit for New Relic. We are in the business of developing long-term, strategic partnerships that provide real value for our partners, customers, and us. The relationships with our partners are built on trust and performance, and they have proven to be exceptionally successful to date in the Asia-Pacific region and beyond.

While I can’t share specific numbers or percentages, I can share that the amount of business being driven through our channel partners in the wider Asia-Pacific region is significant and continues to increase year-on-year. In fact, some of our largest regional customers have been acquired via our partner network which is a testament to the calibre of the partners that we have engaged.