Web software monitoring company New Relic is filing for an initial public offering. According to paperwork filed with the Security Exchange Commission, the company plans to trade under the ticker symbol NEWR and hopes to raise $100 million.
New Relic offers a service that monitors websites and online applications for outages, performance issues or other problems. By offering a free service, and then charging for premium tools, New Relic was able to bypass traditional information technology department managers and put its products directly into the hands of the programmers and system administrators who actually use them.
Founded in 2008, the company was one of the first wave of these “business-to-developer” companies, along with code collaboration giant GitHub and cloud computing service Heroku, which was acquired by Salesforce.com in 2010. These companies inspired an entire movement within the enterprise software market—where developers and admins can directly take hold of their own tools—and New Relic is among the first to go public.
New Relic is also representative of growing movement towards a new breed of data analytics. Unlike companies such as Hortonworks, which also just filed the necessary paperwork to go public, or MongoDB, New Relic doesn’t sell tools for collecting and analyzing raw data. It sells a service that gathers and analyzes data for you. That puts it more in line with companies like data analytics company Keen, IT infrastructure analysis company Splunk, which IPOed in 2012, and data visualization company Tableau, which IPOed last year.
New Relic competes with other monitoring and analytics companies, such as Tracelytics and Boundary, but it’s surely the best known company in its market. Tech workers have a hard time not hearing about New Relic. The company’s advertises heavily on tech-centric websites, and its ads are ubiquitous around the San Francisco area.
Although developers can frequently be found grumbling on sites like Hacker News about New Relic’s heavy handed marketing, the company’s advertising seems to be paying off. According to its S-1, the company had $63.2 million million in revenue in previous fiscal year. Despite this healthy revenue, the company still lost $40.2 million, meaning it still has a way to go before it can declare victory in the application monitoring market.
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