(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's continuous coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021 I'm Lisa Martin. This is our third day here on set We've got two live sets, two remote studios, over a hundred guests on the program and a lot going on with AWS and its ecosystem of partners am pleased to welcome back one of our Cube alumni, Buddy Brewer, the GVP & GM of product partnerships at New Relic. Welcome back, Buddy. Good to have you. >> Thanks it's great to be here >> Great to be in an in-person event isn't? >> No kidding it's really amazing to see everybody out here and after spending so much time on zoom calls, we had a lot of really great moments among the team and the booth playing the game of seeing if people's height matched up with >> (laughs) >> What your expectation was because so many of the people we work with >> Never mind. >> We've only known over zoom. >> Yes ,and zoom has been a savior for all of us we've been doing so much recording on zoom at the same time it's great to be here in person and seeing what a safe job AWS has done with getting I from hearing upwards of 30,000 people in here that are here in person. So talk to me about you lead the technology partnerships at New Relic. Talk to me about your role, and then we'll get into the partnership with AWS. >> Yeah, absolutely. Well, you know, the point about zoom, it's fascinating. Like you said, that just having the ability to communicate with people has been such a key enabler of being able to make progress and to continue to lead our personal and our professional lives despite the pandemic I mean, imagine what it would have been like if this had happened 10 years ago, even, but certainly 50 years ago >> Right. or something like that, right? Like everything would have ground to a halt and technology took on such an amazing, you know, critical role in allowing us to do all of these things and so at New Relic, we're all about helping people make sure that all of this software works correctly. And so observability helps people understand the detail level about everything from the front end, the end user experience to every single piece that happens along the path of delivering that experience all the way down to the infrastructure into the network. But my role at New Relic is also to help all of the other tools that software developers use every day to create those experiences that they connect into their observability platform so that they can understand all of those details and make sure that people are able to continue doing things that have become really so basic to life like ordering groceries or getting food, or, you know, communicating with a loved one over something like zoom. >> Yeah the things that to your point, if this had happened, you know, five, 10 years ago, it would have been a completely different story. We've been able to function really well and one of the things too, that, you know, I noticed yesterday and today, you probably did as well with the plethora, typical AWS the plethora of announcements, the amount of innovation that's going on, the customer flywheel that we've just seen this acceleration of technology and what it's enabling, but the observability portion is really key you talk about, you know, the developers need to the whole SDLC they need to be able to understand exactly what's going on because at the end of the day, whether it's a consumer or an enterprise of the other end of the spectrum, we need to know exactly what's going on because people's patience is far thinner these days the pandemic showed is that there is really no having access to real-time data. Isn't a luxury anymore it's really a necessity. >> Right, yeah, absolutely. >> Talk to me about some of these so a lot of announcements coming up from AWS, you guys talk to me about the partnership, what you guys are doing there. And some of the things that are exciting on that front. >> Yeah, AWS is a really key partner for us. We're big users of AWS ourselves for our observability platform and all of our infrastructure and, you know, we've had our own journey as a 13 year old business that started out pre cloud and moving our own infrastructure to the cloud. And then along that journey, we've worked closely with AWS and we've built a lot of joint solutions to help people who are moving to the cloud themselves or who are cloud native to understand all of the details about what's happening in that software so we have over 60 different integrations to all of the different tools with Amazon that you can use on the cloud from data storage, to EKS on Fargate and all of that stuff. And then we recently announced a five-year strategic agreement with Amazon to make it even easier for customers to adopt New Relic if they're building in Amazon AWS and so you know, we're in their marketplace, we have an offering for startups, for people who are just getting started that, you know, provides really simple and fast on-ramps with discounts and things like that. That's all designed to help people, software developers in particular, focus on what matters most to them, which is building great experiences for their customers. You know, you mentioned that the SDLC and this is one of the things that, you know, our mission at New Relic is to make observability a daily data-driven habit for developers across all phases of the software delivery life cycle. The problem with observability and how it's used today is that it's only used in the run phase by most people they use it when the software is on fire to put the fire out we believe that, that telemetry has tremendous strategic value in the plan, build and deploy phases of software development as well. And so partnerships like AWS allow us to unlock the accessibility of that data across all of those different phases for people who software developers are as a result in many ways that the things that we were talking about earlier with the expectations that the pandemic has placed on how software has to work, it's not an option they're busier, they're under more pressure than they've ever been before and so we want to help them relieve that pressure with tools that help them do their jobs better. >> Relieving that pressure is key there is so much pressure on developers I mean, these days from observability to security and that sort of thing, but it sounds like one of the things that you're also fundamentally doing is really shifting that observability left and helping them from a cultural perspective, it seems like almost a shift, but you're trying to make things easier for them giving them more tools and to unlock what they're not seeing right now. >> That's right and you know, the interesting thing about it is everyone realizes that observability is critical to, you know, successful software businesses so for example, we did a survey recently of 1300 software developers and IT decision makers and executives, and found that among the C-level executives that were surveyed 80% of them expected to increase their observability budget and 20% of those expected to increase it significantly. However, that same survey found that a very small percentage of those who we actually surveyed feel that they have a mature observability practice today. And when we unpack the reasons why in the survey, we found that most of them reduce down to basically this issue of they just don't have enough time to instrument all of the software, especially in a world where the shift to the cloud has driven a change in architecture where monoliths have been torn down and replaced by hundreds, or may be even thousands of microservices. >> Right. >> And we're in an era now where if observability isn't really, really easy and incredibly fast and simple to execute on then software developers can no longer instrument fast enough to keep up with the pace of the software that they're delivering and so what that leads to is visibility gaps, visibility gaps lead to poor customer experiences. And so what we're trying to do, and we've been on this massive simplification of our own platform to make it, you know, incredibly cost-effective at just 25 cents a gigabyte for ingestion and really simple licensing seat based licensing, where you get access to all of our tools to make it really simple and to take simply minutes to get observability on all those different pieces. >> If simplicity is a word that we throw around a lot, but it's really critical element and it's interesting to understand how do you actually facilitate that? You talked about, you know, kind of the 80 20 rule there. >> Yeah. >> A lot of the organization's not on that maturity curve with observability, how does New Relic and its ecosystem of partners like AWS how do you help have those conversations within organizations in any industry tell them, understand how you can actually simplify that and unlock that visibility, knowing that it's not only a matter of software development, but it's a competitive differentiator. It's also something that can damage a brand if they're not top of it. >> Yeah, we launched a re-imagined version of our partner ecosystem really our entire integration ecosystem about six weeks ago on October 13th called New Relic Instant Observability. And one of the central goals of New Relic IO, which we call it for short is to make it take just like five minutes for people to instrument something. So in the old way, what people had to do is if they wanted observability, they had to go learn about an observability vendor then they had to go install it, figure out how all that works and then they could get to solving their problem, which might've just been simply instrumenting a Kafka you know and so what we want to do is just keep people in that mode if all you wanted to do is instrument Kafka, then go find the Kafka instrumentation tile on New Relic and observability and then there's a guided install process that takes you through that and at the end you've instrumented Kafka and if you want to add something else like EKS Fargate from Amazon, or if you want to add something else like a Java service, you can simply click more of those guidance installs and add within minutes in an incremental way without having to stop and do a whole vendor evaluation to do so in fact, one of the other things that we launched recently is a free tier that's free forever. So there's no trial process or anything you don't have to put in a credit card if all you want to do is instrument this one thing right now, you can go through this process provision a free account you get access to all of our functionality for one user and ingest up to a hundred gigabytes of telemetry data for free within minutes. And so what we're trying to do is take all of that adoption friction out so that people aren't fighting with their instrumentation so much, and again, they can get back to doing what they really want to do in the first place, which has built great experiences for their end users. >> Great experiences for the end users but that translates to employee experience that translates to an end user customer experience, which translates back to brand reputation. I'm just wondering, you know, you're focused on the developers and we've been hearing a lot about the last two and a half days, a big focus on developers has observability kind of escalated up and its evolution up the stack within organizations is this a C-suite concern? Is this a board level concern? where does this fit now? and what's the vision of New Relic to deliver on that? >> With observability? >> Yes. >> Yeah, 90% of those in the survey that I was talking about felt that observability was not just a tool that they needed to use, but strategically critical to their business and, you know, this goes back to, as we know, and especially as a result of the intensity on the importance of software coming out of the pandemic, your digital business is your business these days. And so if you don't understand what's happening in that software and you can't move quickly, then you know you're really in trouble in terms of trying to succeed in a highly competitive environment and that goes back to again, one of our core beliefs is that all of this telemetry data that people have been collecting about how their software operates is so useful in contexts outside of just when there's a problem in production. Imagine if you could take that information and you could actually put it inside the IDE, which is something that we did with a recent acquisition of a company called CodeStream. We can take this telemetry data and put it inside the IDE so that as developers are writing the software, they know where those issues are. You can click straight from a stack frame, for example, inside of our, where we show all of our errors in a capability called Error's inbox and shoot right into your IDE and go see where the line of code is that caused that error, shortening that feedback loop and unlocking this really big investment that a lot of companies make in telemetry data earlier in the software life cycle, we believe is the future of observability and we want to help people get there. >> Well, the observability is really key for organizations these days because we've been hearing every company these days has to be a data company. >> Yeah. >> And it's one thing to say that it's a whole other thing to be able to implement it and observability is absolutely critical to that as being able to take that data and apply it in different contexts to really enable that business to be digital which is absolutely table-stakes these days to be successful and to deliver that customer experience ultimately. >> Yeah. >> That's what it all do. >> Yeah, absolutely. And you know, the other thing is really hard about this problem when I talk with our customers and we found this in the survey as well, is that, you know, software developers, don't just use one tool to create software they use a lot of tools in fact, 13% of those that we surveyed use 10 or more tools. >> Whoa. >> Just for the observability piece. And so, you know, obviously we're always trying to expand organically what we do inside of our platform to cover more and more use cases, but an equally important part of our strategy, if we really want to make observability a data-driven daily habit for people is to find all of those other, you know, really well-built amazing tools that those developers use and find valuable ways to integrate with them. And so that's the other part of our ecosystem that we've built out is this ability to take all of the other tools that you use and wire them into New Relic so that, for example, if you're using, let's say Lacework for security then you can, you know, if someone's installed a Bitcoin miner on your infrastructure somewhere, you can quickly navigate because of that integration from a poor customer experience through the infrastructure that's suffering may be with, you know, a lot of memory pressure, and a lot of CPU being used for this Bitcoin miner and then find out that, you know, through the integration where the miner was installed, how it got installed so that you can remediate those types of issues and connecting those pieces together, making software truly interoperable is another thing that's really critical to our mission at New Relic. >> It is critical to not only to the developers, but to the organizations and their success as businesses these days Buddy thank you for joining me, talking about what's going on at New Relic What's new, how you're really empowering those developers and all of the downstream positive effects that, that leads to we appreciate your time. >> Thank you ,thanks for having me. >> All right, you are Buddy Brewer I'm Lisa Martin you're watching theCUBE, the global leader in live tech coverage. 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>> From New York City It's theCUBE covering, New Relic FutureStack 2019 brought to you by New Relic. >> Hi I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of FutureStack 2019. Happy to welcome to the program, first time guest, Buddy Brewer, who's the GVP and GM of client side monitoring with New Relic, going to talk about customer experience and especially the digital customer experience. Buddy, maybe explain for audience who may not know client side monitoring tell us as to where that fits in to the entire picture of new relic. >> Yeah for sure great to chat with you Stu. You know client side monitoring for us, is the part of our observability platform that extends all the way out to where the user actually is. So people think of New Relic as this really great platform for understanding everything that is going on in the application logic, and the servers, but our client side monitoring does is extend it all the way out to the phone that is in the consumers hand or the laptop that's right in front of them. >> Stu Miniman: All right so obviously there is a direct connection between that and that digital customer experience. Maybe explain some of the challenges there and how new relic is helping to work on solving those. >> Yeah you know, digital customer experience is all about collecting and understanding the relationship between two different types of data. There are the technical metrics, all of that information about how long people are waiting, latencies and pieces of the software everything from how long it takes to connect to the server, how long it takes to build the response to the web page, Deliver it, render it, all that stuff. There's lots and lots to collect on the technical side. But the other half of DCX is the personal side, the human side. The person who is on the receiving end of all that stuff, how's it affecting their behavior? How long are they spending on the site? Are they buying? Are they clicking on a second webpage? Are they engaging in the game? Are they booking that travel reservation? And so collecting all of those business metrics, and then collecting right next to them all of the technical metrics and bring that back in a way that you can understand the relationship between those two things is what DCX, digital customer experience is all about. >> Yeah it is fascinating the expectation that we have today in 2019 is so different then the past. It used to be like "Okay, I know if a website doesn't load in this long, they are going to leave me" But you know what are those expectations, what is that ultimate end user. What is a good customer experience for them? >> Buddy Brewer: Yeah it's changing all the time, and it changes depending on what part of the world people are in, it changes depending on the type of device and this is why it is important for customers to actually collect the information and understand their relationship with their customers. It's really hard to put a single number on it. Because what's true for a commerce site, might not be true for a media site. What's true for a site in Australia, might not be true for a site in The Americas, or in the UK. There are certain patterns that certain people have seen, Google had a statistic out awhile ago that said that over half of people will leave a mobile site that takes longer than three seconds to load. And so there are some patterns out there, but a big belief, for us, is that one of the most important relationships our customers have, is the relationship with their customers. That is why it is so important for them to collect their own metrics around how long people are waiting, and how that waiting is affecting their behavior. >> Stu Miniman: Yeah, so it seems obvious that you know having data to back up what's going on is important. Bring us inside a little bit the importance of monitoring in this space though. >> Yeah, absolutely and this is why it's so important. We are so excited to be talking about our observability platform that we have here today at FutureStack. The fact that it's open, you can bring all of this information in. We've got all of this agent technology that collects things about what's happening in the servers what's happening in the info structure, information that's happening on the client side. As well as this ability to absorb information from third parties, then connecting it all together to give you that context. So there is the context that is being solving problems from the front end to the back end of the application stack. There is also the context like we were talking earlier, the digital customer experience. The connection between the technical metrics and the human metrics, and how they are actually experiencing the application. And then making all of that stuff, the connected stuff, programmable. So then our customers were the first observability platform that you can actually build applications on top of. And so we've released twelve of those today that folks can use. It's going to continue to expand, and it's something that our community can contribute to, our customers can actually take our visualizations, and our analytics and customize them to do exactly the things that they need to do. >> Stu Miniman: All right, Buddy observability is still a relatively new term for a lot of people. Help us dig down, you actually did a blog post even, about, you know, the principals of observability and modern applications. What, how should customers be looking at observability and how do they sort between you know, what is a good solution versus, you know, an okay solution? >> Buddy Brewer: Yeah, well there are some really important pieces that we think people need if they want observability about what's happening in their application. It starts with getting all of that information in one place. You know we have this really fast database, in our DB that store all of the telemetry that we collect on behalf of our customers. And it's getting larger and larger as we continue to open that up to things like these third party data sources. Then there is context that is really important to layer on top of that. Bringing the information together in ways that start to make sense out of those little individual pieces. One of the things that we found though, is that our customers are running applications that are so complicated, there is so much going on in these applications today, that even with the context there is still forty or fifty things that are happening at the same time when a customer has an issue. That's where our applied intelligence, which is another piece of what we are launching today at FutureStack, comes into play so that you can take those things and condense them down into smaller more manageable related chunk of information that folks can act on and fix their applications. >> Stu Miniman: Yeah, it was actually really impressive to see, you know, in the demo this morning, being able to poke through and get meaningful results off of tens of terabytes of data. In, I would say, much faster than I can run a report on the industries leading CRM tool where all of our customer data lives today. So you know, pretty interesting stuff is to how you can enable customers and it kind of almost will change the expectations as to what a good experience is like. >> Yeah that's right and you think about how there's that use case of things where normal and then they got bad, and so you logged in and diagnosed to get things back to normal. And having that speed, that ability to get that information quickly is really key there. There's also a whole other use case, this is the digital customer experience user case, where things are normal, but we want our customers to be able to play offense with software. To be able to take what's normal for them today, and to get better and better and better in ways that drive better business outcomes for them and allow them to compete and win in a space where, consumer expectations are just getting tougher everyday. >> Yeah, you know always look at there. How can, how can you just, you know, exceed what customers expecting and give them so that they will, you know, love your solution even more because you gave them more than expecting? How's New Relic helping customers, you know, move along that journey. >> Yeah, you know nobody likes to be kept waiting. At the end of the day the customer always has a unified view. So we want to give our customers, the consumer always have a unified view, we want to give our customers the unified view with all of the details. So that they can deliver a better experience for their customers. And it has to do with, again like I was saying collecting the technical information, also collecting the information about how that's affecting customer behavior and then looking at those two things next to each other in context. So that they can see how one affects the other. >> Stu Miniman: All right so, Buddy give us some of the outcomes that customers will see based on the announcements, today at the show. >> Buddy Brewer: Yeah so for the customer experience, one of those programmable pieces that we launched is this really simple application that you can just drop in to New Relic and it shows you right away the difference between engagement when people are getting good experiences, versus when customers they are getting bad experiences. And when we show this to people often times they are shocked. For example take a metric like bounce rate. What's the likelihood that someone who comes to your site is going to stay on your site? When people think about it, usually they are thinking about it in aggregate, across the entire site. But when you separate it out into the good experiences, and the bad experiences, maybe you've got an overall bounce rate of forty-percent, but when you give those really fast experiences to your users they are only bouncing at twenty-percent, so they are twice as engaged. Then conversely the folks who are getting the bad experiences, because let's be honest on any given day, websites are, you know delivering good and bad experiences to different groups of users, that bounce rate might be seventy-percent. And when you see the disparity between these two things it's a motivator to action. Now what's really important after that is that you've got the data underneath so that you can actually do something about it. And that's where this end to end observability platform that collects all of the information from the front end to the back end is so useful. >> Stu Miniman: Yeah, I have to think that it's pretty powerful not just for the customer experience, but I can get accountability from my partners, so where it be my ISP or my cloud provider, I can be like "Hey, uh, you promised me this response, this bandwidth and here's the data, we need to make sure that I'm actually getting what I'm paying for" >> Yeah that's right and at the end of the day what the customer saw, what our customers customers, the consumer at the end of that connection sees, is the truth. And so collecting that data, whether they are on a mobile device using an application or they are using a browser. Any of that stuff. Having that information is not only useful for internal accountability, and things that are in peoples direct control, but also absolutely, there's so many, so many third parties that people are using, to make their application's go today. >> Stu Miniman: Yeah, we know the visibility of actual data to help us not only make decisions but, inform everything that we doing is so critically important today. All right Buddy, why don't you give the final word, digital customer experience. What do you want people coming out of FutureStack 2019 here in New York City, really understanding? >> Yeah, I think that when it comes to New Relic, it's that we providing folks the ability to have exactly the view that they need of all of the data that's relevant to the performance of their application. So that they can solve technical problems, so that they can solve business problems. Because at the end of the day, your digital business is your business increasingly. The digital experience is what defines peoples brands. And so we want our customers to have complete control and visibility over all of that. >> Stu Miniman: All right, Well Buddy Brewer thanks so much for joining and sharing what's going on with New Relic and that digital customer experience >> Thanks so much Stu. >> All right, little bit more left here at FutureStack 2019, I'm Stu Miniman and thanks for watching theCUBE. [Outro Music]