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New Relic Names New President

New Relic announced that current board member Michael Christenson will join the company as President and COO, a newly created position, on October 1.

CTO Jim Gochee and Chief Revenue Officer, Erica Schultz, have resigned.

Christenson joins from his role at Allen & Company, and will report to Lew Cirne, CEO and founder of New Relic. In this role, he will oversee Go-To-Market and business operations across the company. He will remain on the New Relic Board of Directors.

Cirne will continue to work closely with the product general managers on key initiatives and will expand his oversight of the platform. The company expects to announce new innovations across its observability platform at its FutureStack event on September 19 in New York City.

“I have confidence that these management changes will result in improved execution across the entire company,” said Cirne. “Mike is a seasoned executive with the knowhow and experience to instill the day-to-day operational rigor required for the next phase of New Relic’s growth."

"This is an incredible opportunity to take on a leadership role within New Relic and advance our mission of helping our global customers create more perfect software, experiences and businesses,” said Christenson. “I look forward to working with the team to drive operational excellence throughout the business and build on our market leadership."

Christenson has served as a managing director at Allen & Company LLC, a private investment banking firm, since 2010. He has been a member of the board of directors of LogMeIn, Inc. since 2010. LogMeIn, Inc. provides cloud-based communications, collaboration, identity management, and customer support software. From 2006 to 2010, he was the president and chief operating officer of CA, Inc., having previously served as executive vice president of strategy and corporate development. CA, Inc. was a leading enterprise systems management and security software company.

Cirne added: "My sincere thanks to Erica and Jim for their contributions to our company and our customers. Each has helped build the foundation upon which New Relic enters our next chapter."

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New Relic Names New President

New Relic announced that current board member Michael Christenson will join the company as President and COO, a newly created position, on October 1.

CTO Jim Gochee and Chief Revenue Officer, Erica Schultz, have resigned.

Christenson joins from his role at Allen & Company, and will report to Lew Cirne, CEO and founder of New Relic. In this role, he will oversee Go-To-Market and business operations across the company. He will remain on the New Relic Board of Directors.

Cirne will continue to work closely with the product general managers on key initiatives and will expand his oversight of the platform. The company expects to announce new innovations across its observability platform at its FutureStack event on September 19 in New York City.

“I have confidence that these management changes will result in improved execution across the entire company,” said Cirne. “Mike is a seasoned executive with the knowhow and experience to instill the day-to-day operational rigor required for the next phase of New Relic’s growth."

"This is an incredible opportunity to take on a leadership role within New Relic and advance our mission of helping our global customers create more perfect software, experiences and businesses,” said Christenson. “I look forward to working with the team to drive operational excellence throughout the business and build on our market leadership."

Christenson has served as a managing director at Allen & Company LLC, a private investment banking firm, since 2010. He has been a member of the board of directors of LogMeIn, Inc. since 2010. LogMeIn, Inc. provides cloud-based communications, collaboration, identity management, and customer support software. From 2006 to 2010, he was the president and chief operating officer of CA, Inc., having previously served as executive vice president of strategy and corporate development. CA, Inc. was a leading enterprise systems management and security software company.

Cirne added: "My sincere thanks to Erica and Jim for their contributions to our company and our customers. Each has helped build the foundation upon which New Relic enters our next chapter."

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In live financial environments, capital markets software cannot pause for rebuilds. New capabilities are introduced as stacked technology layers to meet evolving demands while systems remain active, data keeps moving, and controls stay intact. AI is no exception, and its opportunities are significant: accelerated decision cycles, compressed manual workflows, and more effective operations across complex environments. The constraint isn't the models themselves, but the architectural environments they enter ...

Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...

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Enterprises are under pressure to scale AI quickly. Yet despite considerable investment, adoption continues to stall. One of the most overlooked reasons is vendor sprawl ... In reality, no organization deliberately sets out to create sprawling vendor ecosystems. More often, complexity accumulates over time through well-intentioned initiatives, such as enterprise-wide digital transformation efforts, point solutions, or decentralized sourcing strategies ...

Nearly every conversation about AI eventually circles back to compute. GPUs dominate the headlines while cloud platforms compete for workloads and model benchmarks drive investment decisions. But underneath that noise, a quieter infrastructure challenge is taking shape. The real bottleneck in enterprise AI is not processing power, it is the ability to store, manage and retrieve the relentless volumes of data that AI systems generate, consume and multiply ...

The 2026 Observability Survey from Grafana Labs paints a vivid picture of an industry maturing fast, where AI is welcomed with careful conditions, SaaS economics are reshaping spending decisions, complexity remains a defining challenge, and open standards continue to underpin it all ...

The observability industry has an evolving relationship with AI. We're not skeptics, but it's clear that trust in AI must be earned ... In Grafana Labs' annual Observability Survey, 92% said they see real value in AI surfacing anomalies before they cause downtime. Another 91% endorsed AI for forecasting and root cause analysis. So while the demand is there, customers need it to be trustworthy, as the survey also found that the practitioners most enthusiastic about AI are also the most insistent on explainability ...

In the modern enterprise, the conversation around AI has moved past skepticism toward a stage of active adoption. According to our 2026 State of IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous AI, nearly 90% of IT professionals view AI as a net positive, and this optimism is well-founded. We are seeing agentic AI move beyond simple automation to actively streamlining complex data insights and eliminating the manual toil that has long hindered innovation. However, as we integrate these autonomous agents into our ecosystems, the fundamental DNA of the IT role is evolving ...