New Relic announced the promotion of Bill Staples to CEO effective July 1, 2021.
Staples will succeed Founder & CEO Lew Cirne who will transition to Executive Chairman of the Board at the same time. Cirne will continue his lifelong legacy and passion for his love of software as an inventor, technologist and strategist, further driving transformational innovation for the company, its customers and the tech community at large. Current Chair of the Board Hope Cochran will continue on as Vice Chair of the Board and Lead Independent Director for New Relic.
“When we recruited Bill into the company, we thought that he would be the natural successor to me as CEO at the right time,” said Lew Cirne, Founder & CEO at New Relic. “With his immediate and profound impact on our platform and our Product organization, and now more broadly across the company with his inspiring vision, strategy and passion for our customers and their success, Bill has exceeded our highest expectations as a strategic thinker and operational leader, making now the right time to make this transition.”
“Bill’s transformational impact on New Relic has positioned the company for long-term success,” said Hope Cochran, New Relic Board Chair. “With the foundation that Lew built and Bill’s leadership, New Relic has a very bright future ahead and a clear path to accelerate growth as the leader in observability.”
Staples joined New Relic as CPO in early 2020 and was later promoted to President & CPO. During his tenure, he has aligned the company around a compelling vision focused on customers and their success, and developed and launched a strategic plan to accelerate the company’s growth. He defined the core strategy for New Relic One including a simpler go to market for the company’s observability platform, fundamentally changing its packaging and pricing around the value delivered to customers and the developer community. Additionally, he has been a champion for the company’s embrace of open source and open telemetry, and was instrumental in the company’s recent acquisition of Pixie Labs. As a result, New Relic has seen early evidence of strong market and customer momentum behind its new consumption-based business model as noted in the company’s fiscal year 2021 results.
Long-time technology executive Staples worked previously at both Microsoft and Adobe, where he successfully led transformative product, cultural and technical innovation, helping both companies expand their multi-billion dollar cloud portfolios with developers and IT as the customer. His experience running large engineering organizations, serving developers as his primary customer for decades and incubating brand new cloud services while nurturing multi-billion dollar businesses all helped lay the groundwork for a rapid and dramatic impact on New Relic.
“I am incredibly humbled and grateful for the confidence of the New Relic Board and leadership team in trusting me with the opportunity to lead New Relic into the future,” said Bill Staples, CEO-elect at New Relic. “It’s an honor and a privilege to work among such an incredibly talented and genuine team–I’m inspired every day by our culture of innovation and each and every Relic’s passion for delivering value to our customers every day.”
Lew Cirne has been a prolific inventor and innovator for more than 23 years. Early in his career, he held senior technical positions at Apple and Hummingbird Communications. With a passion for innovation and desire to have a broader impact on the world, business and technology, Cirne founded Wily Technology. There as Founder and CEO, he invented the bytecode instrumentation agent that served as the foundation for today’s Application Performance Management (APM) market and led to both his creation of the APM category and successful sale of Wily Technology to CA Technologies.
As Founder and CEO of New Relic, Cirne invented APM-as-a-Service, as well as its Telemetry Data Platform, the multi-tenant telemetry Platform-as-a-Service offering built to ingest telemetry at massive cloud scale with incredible economics. Cirne and Staples collaborated to bring New Relic One to life as a programmable observability platform and the foundation for the creation of the observability category that New Relic leads today. Throughout his career, Cirne has been the sole inventor or co-inventor of more than 20 U.S. patents.
“From the first time I met Lew, his love and passion for innovation and technology were nothing short of inspiring,” commented Cochran. “Lew has spent his career bringing joy and delight to others through code, transformational technology and category creation...”
“My passion is technology innovation...positively impacting the business and tech communities for many years to come,” noted Cirne. “I have a deep love for and belief in New Relic, and that’s why it was so important to find the right successor. Most important was a core values match, and Bill has demonstrated time and again through his leadership and actions that he is a values-driven leader. In short order, Bill conceived, articulated and drove the cross-functional execution of a transformational strategy that will deliver remarkable impact and growth at New Relic for years to come.”
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