Stewart Cochrane (New Relic)
New Relic has debuted its new integration partnership with Microsoft Azure, a move that will remove Amazon Web Services' (AWS) exclusivity as the default cloud provider for its platform.
The new deal will allow Microsoft Azure customers and partners to use New Relic as their default observability platform natively inside Azure Portal. This will give customers more choice over which cloud to run New Relic observability solutions, as this was historically only allocated to AWS.
New Relic claims the deal will help enterprises accelerate cloud migration and multi-cloud initiatives. Alongside the integration, customers and partners will now also be able to allocate their multi-year committed Azure spend to leverage New Relic.
"This makes it significantly easier for customers to allocate budgets for observability," New Relic said in a statement. "This partnership also aligns Azure and New Relic sales teams to deliver greater value to enterprise customers."
Speaking to ARN, New Relic APJ senior director of channels and alliances Stewart Cochrane said the deal will "open up and scale" the partner ecosystem, especially among born-in-the-cloud players and developer specialists.
"We have been partnered with Microsoft for more than 10 years but this integration with the Azure platform is really important and is part of our focus on the developer," he explained.
"Our partners all likely have multi-cloud businesses just like we do. Most are helping customers on that multi-cloud journey so being part of the Microsoft ecosystem is important for that. From an adoption perspective, it gives that really tight commercial integration."
In addition, Cochrane noted Azure partners should see greater ease in their budgeting for New Relic's platform.
"Most customers would budget observability in their cloud spend, so this [integration] should make procurement easier and takes any friction out of it," he said. "It means a single engagement and a still bill."
New Relic did not disclose its regional partner numbers or its proportion of channel sales to ARN. However, Cochrane said a lot of demand for the Azure integration had been driven from Australia and New Zealand, especially with regards to public sector and enterprise clients.
Meanwhile, New Relic CEO Bill Staples said the vendor was "seeing a growing trend" of customers working across multiple clouds.
“With this partnership, we are strengthening our cloud strategy and accelerating our mission to inspire millions of developers to take a daily, data-driven approach to software engineering with a future where decisions are fueled by data – not opinion," he said.
Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) at Microsoft said there was increasing demand for "great observability tools".
"Our partnership with New Relic will allow us to bring production telemetry tools and insights to the millions of developers building apps with Microsoft Azure and make it easier to get started with Azure for customers already using New Relic,” he added.
