Q&A: New Relic Talks About APM SaaS

Pete Goldin
APMdigest
Learn more about New Relic

In APMdigest's exclusive interview, Patrick Moran, Vice President of Marketing for New Relic, discusses APM SaaS (Software-as-a-Service), one of the hottest topics in Application Performance Management right now.

APM: Why is SaaS becoming such an important issue in APM this year?

PM: It really boils down to the era that we live in. Companies with a significant online and mobile presence are keeping up with customer demands by building new features and deploying apps faster than ever before. Their relationship with their customers is more immediate and much more interactive. These organizations find that SaaS tools like APM, Network Management, Version Control systems, project management, etc, better support their efforts because they are flexible enough to work at the same pace.

APM: What are the top advantages to using SaaS APM vs. a conventional APM tool?

PM: SaaS APM tools are implemented more quickly, easier to use, and more effective than their on-premise counterparts. Their low cost of acquisition and the short time to value quickly become an attractive proposition when you have a web or mobile project coming up that is expected to support the business by bringing hundreds of thousands of users to your app and guess what -- you have just weeks to deliver it. You can't afford to wait two months or more for price negotiations and procurement, consulting services, custom implementation, training for admins, etc. With SaaS management tools, we're talking about being up and running and seeing actionable performance data in minutes, not months.

APM: New Relic was one of the first vendors to provide a full APM SaaS solution. Why?

PM: Our founder and CEO Lew Cirne has been on both sides of this issue. He pioneered on-premise production app monitoring for enterprise Java applications. That tool quickly came to the front of the pack and became a standard implementation for monitoring mission critical apps. And just as we have described, the cost of the tools was high because they had to compensate for a very expensive sales process that involved flying people people back and forth all around the world for weeks at a time to prove the value of the product, install it and teach how to use it. Hardly a customer friendly experience. And that's what was always nagging Lew - the value they were getting out of the tool was not proportional to the cost of the software (and hardware).

So, from the very beginning, his vision and strategy was to put the customer first, provide tremendous customer value at a reasonable cost, measure customer success in real time, and iterate constantly with new features and improvements to ensure you're always meeting customer needs. Not just signing a deal, sicking the consultants on the customer and moving on to the next sale. SaaS APM then became the obvious for delivery.

APM: What is the secret to delivering an APM SaaS solution?

PM: Many traditional on-premise vendors have tried to build SaaS versions of their toolsets and they quickly and inevitably run into issues.

First of all, building a tool and an accompanying architecture/environment that operates 24x7x52, and which can handle millions of metrics a day for thousands of customers is not a walk in the park. Then you'll have to contend with your enterprise sales force. How is a SaaS version of your tool going to be sold alongside a slower, heavier, much more expensive version that has the same functionality?

To answer your question, the secret sauce in my opinion is this: build your tool from the ground up, build it for customers (all your customers, not just the ones with deep pockets), and stick to your vision.

APM: Even though more and more vendors are providing APM SaaS options, the technology is still relatively new. What major challenges are still faced with SaaS technology?

PM: It's interesting because even though many of the new APM tools are standards-compliant (PCI, SOC 2, Hippa, etc.) you still get people who have concerns about sending performance data "over the Internet"

"Do you use SFDC?" you ask them. "Yes," comes the reply. Well they seem to have zero compunction about sending their sensitive customer data over the net. What is it about sending metrics, charts, and graphs that's got them worried?

There will always be people who just cannot bring themselves to accept a SaaS implementation of any tool. As a SaaS vendor, you accept that and move on, knowing that you are likely to have a sales conversation with them again in the not-too-distant future.

APM: How will APM SaaS evolve in 2013?

PM: It's safe to say that the centrality of applications and software deployed on alternate platforms (anyone playing a game on their tablet right now?), means that SaaS APM is here to stay. But as with any tool that wishes to remain relevant, it must constantly evolve to meet the needs of customers and their end users. So, monitor multiple languages and platforms and work just as elegantly in the Cloud as you do in the physical world.

Lastly, with so much software and so many applications running just about everything in the world, and so many SaaS tools collecting mounds and mounds of data, SaaS vendors have a unique opportunity to band together to help the world make sense of it all. Yes, Big Data, but start to make sense of it with actionable analytics. Now you are taking APM and systems management to the next level for your customers, the folks who are building the software we all rely on. With the right set of metrics and analytics aggregated across all their systems, they can start measuring not just app transaction performance, but application success as it relates directly to your business.

ABOUT Patrick Moran

Patrick Moran is Vice President of Marketing for New Relic. Before New Relic, he was Chief Marketing Officer of Fuze Box, a leading SaaS provider of mobile and web collaboration solutions, where he focused on customer acquisition and product strategy. Earlier, Moran served in marketing leadership roles at various SaaS companies including social enterprise application company Mzinga, as well as Cisco, WebEx and Intranets.com. Early in his career, Moran co-founded Essential.com, a leading online communications and energy marketplace.

Hot Topic
The Latest
The Latest 10

The Latest

The SRE Report 2026: Reliability Is Being Redefined

Reliability is no longer proven by uptime alone, according to the The SRE Report 2026 from LogicMonitor. In the AI era, it is experienced through speed, consistency, and user trust, and increasingly judged by business impact. As digital services grow more complex and AI systems move into production, traditional monitoring approaches are struggling to keep pace, increasing the need for AI-first observability that spans applications, infrastructure, and the Internet ...

The Hidden Data Engineering Work Required to Make Enterprise AI Viable

If AI is the engine of a modern organization, then data engineering is the road system beneath it. You can build the most powerful engine in the world, but without paved roads, traffic signals, and bridges that can support its weight, it will stall. In many enterprises, the engine is ready. The roads are not ...

Why AI Is the Differentiator for Operationally Resilient Organizations

In the world of digital-first business, there is no tolerance for service outages. Businesses know that outages are the quickest way to lose money and customers. For smaller organizations, unplanned downtime could even force the business to close ... A new study from PagerDuty, The State of AI-First Operations, reveals that companies actively incorporating AI into operations now view operational resilience as a growth driver rather than a cost center. But how are they achieving it? ...

Escaping Pilot Purgatory: How AI Becomes an Operational Advantage

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 ...

Closing the Gap in Modern Tech and the Tools Meant to Monitor Them

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 ...

MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Podcast - Episode 23: NetOps Labor Shortage

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 23, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses the NetOps labor shortage ... 

Why FinOps Rewrote Its Mission and What It Signals for Technology Management

Technology management is evolving, and in turn, so is the scope of FinOps. The FinOps Foundation recently updated their mission statement from "advancing the people who manage the value of cloud" to "advancing the people who manage the value of technology." This seemingly small change solidifies a larger evolution: FinOps practitioners have organically expanded to be focused on more than just cloud cost optimization. Today, FinOps teams are largely — and quickly — expanding their job descriptions, evolving into a critical function for managing the full value of technology ...

Clearing the Path to AI: Why Vendor Consolidation Matters Now

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 ...

Cold Data, Hot Problem: Why AI Is Rewriting Enterprise Storage Strategy

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 ...

Observability at a Crossroads: AI, Economics, Complexity and the Enduring Power of Open Source

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 ...

Q&A: New Relic Talks About APM SaaS

Pete Goldin
APMdigest
Learn more about New Relic

In APMdigest's exclusive interview, Patrick Moran, Vice President of Marketing for New Relic, discusses APM SaaS (Software-as-a-Service), one of the hottest topics in Application Performance Management right now.

APM: Why is SaaS becoming such an important issue in APM this year?

PM: It really boils down to the era that we live in. Companies with a significant online and mobile presence are keeping up with customer demands by building new features and deploying apps faster than ever before. Their relationship with their customers is more immediate and much more interactive. These organizations find that SaaS tools like APM, Network Management, Version Control systems, project management, etc, better support their efforts because they are flexible enough to work at the same pace.

APM: What are the top advantages to using SaaS APM vs. a conventional APM tool?

PM: SaaS APM tools are implemented more quickly, easier to use, and more effective than their on-premise counterparts. Their low cost of acquisition and the short time to value quickly become an attractive proposition when you have a web or mobile project coming up that is expected to support the business by bringing hundreds of thousands of users to your app and guess what -- you have just weeks to deliver it. You can't afford to wait two months or more for price negotiations and procurement, consulting services, custom implementation, training for admins, etc. With SaaS management tools, we're talking about being up and running and seeing actionable performance data in minutes, not months.

APM: New Relic was one of the first vendors to provide a full APM SaaS solution. Why?

PM: Our founder and CEO Lew Cirne has been on both sides of this issue. He pioneered on-premise production app monitoring for enterprise Java applications. That tool quickly came to the front of the pack and became a standard implementation for monitoring mission critical apps. And just as we have described, the cost of the tools was high because they had to compensate for a very expensive sales process that involved flying people people back and forth all around the world for weeks at a time to prove the value of the product, install it and teach how to use it. Hardly a customer friendly experience. And that's what was always nagging Lew - the value they were getting out of the tool was not proportional to the cost of the software (and hardware).

So, from the very beginning, his vision and strategy was to put the customer first, provide tremendous customer value at a reasonable cost, measure customer success in real time, and iterate constantly with new features and improvements to ensure you're always meeting customer needs. Not just signing a deal, sicking the consultants on the customer and moving on to the next sale. SaaS APM then became the obvious for delivery.

APM: What is the secret to delivering an APM SaaS solution?

PM: Many traditional on-premise vendors have tried to build SaaS versions of their toolsets and they quickly and inevitably run into issues.

First of all, building a tool and an accompanying architecture/environment that operates 24x7x52, and which can handle millions of metrics a day for thousands of customers is not a walk in the park. Then you'll have to contend with your enterprise sales force. How is a SaaS version of your tool going to be sold alongside a slower, heavier, much more expensive version that has the same functionality?

To answer your question, the secret sauce in my opinion is this: build your tool from the ground up, build it for customers (all your customers, not just the ones with deep pockets), and stick to your vision.

APM: Even though more and more vendors are providing APM SaaS options, the technology is still relatively new. What major challenges are still faced with SaaS technology?

PM: It's interesting because even though many of the new APM tools are standards-compliant (PCI, SOC 2, Hippa, etc.) you still get people who have concerns about sending performance data "over the Internet"

"Do you use SFDC?" you ask them. "Yes," comes the reply. Well they seem to have zero compunction about sending their sensitive customer data over the net. What is it about sending metrics, charts, and graphs that's got them worried?

There will always be people who just cannot bring themselves to accept a SaaS implementation of any tool. As a SaaS vendor, you accept that and move on, knowing that you are likely to have a sales conversation with them again in the not-too-distant future.

APM: How will APM SaaS evolve in 2013?

PM: It's safe to say that the centrality of applications and software deployed on alternate platforms (anyone playing a game on their tablet right now?), means that SaaS APM is here to stay. But as with any tool that wishes to remain relevant, it must constantly evolve to meet the needs of customers and their end users. So, monitor multiple languages and platforms and work just as elegantly in the Cloud as you do in the physical world.

Lastly, with so much software and so many applications running just about everything in the world, and so many SaaS tools collecting mounds and mounds of data, SaaS vendors have a unique opportunity to band together to help the world make sense of it all. Yes, Big Data, but start to make sense of it with actionable analytics. Now you are taking APM and systems management to the next level for your customers, the folks who are building the software we all rely on. With the right set of metrics and analytics aggregated across all their systems, they can start measuring not just app transaction performance, but application success as it relates directly to your business.

ABOUT Patrick Moran

Patrick Moran is Vice President of Marketing for New Relic. Before New Relic, he was Chief Marketing Officer of Fuze Box, a leading SaaS provider of mobile and web collaboration solutions, where he focused on customer acquisition and product strategy. Earlier, Moran served in marketing leadership roles at various SaaS companies including social enterprise application company Mzinga, as well as Cisco, WebEx and Intranets.com. Early in his career, Moran co-founded Essential.com, a leading online communications and energy marketplace.

Hot Topic
The Latest
The Latest 10

The Latest

The SRE Report 2026: Reliability Is Being Redefined

Reliability is no longer proven by uptime alone, according to the The SRE Report 2026 from LogicMonitor. In the AI era, it is experienced through speed, consistency, and user trust, and increasingly judged by business impact. As digital services grow more complex and AI systems move into production, traditional monitoring approaches are struggling to keep pace, increasing the need for AI-first observability that spans applications, infrastructure, and the Internet ...

The Hidden Data Engineering Work Required to Make Enterprise AI Viable

If AI is the engine of a modern organization, then data engineering is the road system beneath it. You can build the most powerful engine in the world, but without paved roads, traffic signals, and bridges that can support its weight, it will stall. In many enterprises, the engine is ready. The roads are not ...

Why AI Is the Differentiator for Operationally Resilient Organizations

In the world of digital-first business, there is no tolerance for service outages. Businesses know that outages are the quickest way to lose money and customers. For smaller organizations, unplanned downtime could even force the business to close ... A new study from PagerDuty, The State of AI-First Operations, reveals that companies actively incorporating AI into operations now view operational resilience as a growth driver rather than a cost center. But how are they achieving it? ...

Escaping Pilot Purgatory: How AI Becomes an Operational Advantage

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 ...

Closing the Gap in Modern Tech and the Tools Meant to Monitor Them

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 ...

MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Podcast - Episode 23: NetOps Labor Shortage

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 23, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses the NetOps labor shortage ... 

Why FinOps Rewrote Its Mission and What It Signals for Technology Management

Technology management is evolving, and in turn, so is the scope of FinOps. The FinOps Foundation recently updated their mission statement from "advancing the people who manage the value of cloud" to "advancing the people who manage the value of technology." This seemingly small change solidifies a larger evolution: FinOps practitioners have organically expanded to be focused on more than just cloud cost optimization. Today, FinOps teams are largely — and quickly — expanding their job descriptions, evolving into a critical function for managing the full value of technology ...

Clearing the Path to AI: Why Vendor Consolidation Matters Now

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 ...

Cold Data, Hot Problem: Why AI Is Rewriting Enterprise Storage Strategy

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 ...

Observability at a Crossroads: AI, Economics, Complexity and the Enduring Power of Open Source

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 ...