New Relic -- a San Francisco outfit that helps developers and businesses monitor to the performance of their online applications -- has raised an additional $80 million, bringing its total funding to $115 million.
It's yet another example of a developer-centric outfit closing a mammoth round of funding. Companies such as 10gen, Atlassian and GitHub have raised similar amounts in recent months, setting the bar so high that the $30 million raised by Puppet Labs last month looked downright modest by comparison.
New Relic provides a service that persistently monitors a company's web servers and can alert developers to performance problems or site outages. It also provides a number of ways to visually examine data describing a site's performance.
The company will use the new funding to expand its ability to monitor mobile applications, and to branch into new areas, according to an announcement on its blog today.
New Relic is facing increased competition from other monitoring and analytics companies, such as Tracelytics and Boundary, and its sales and marketing are notoriously aggressive.
"New Relic has the most aggressive sales staff I've seen after CDN providers," wrote a commenter on the popular online developer hang-out Hacker News. "With their absurdly high prices, I'm surprised they need any funding."
The world of enterprise software sales has always been high-pressure and, well, rather confusing, prompting calls for a new way to buy enterprise software. "If a given software package or service isn’t free/open, it should be as easy as humanly possible to try it, pay for it, and start using it in production," Alex Payne, the former CTO of the company Simple, wrote in a blog post that garnered significant sympathy last year. "If it isn’t easy to get started with your product, I’m going to find another vendor."
New Relic does make it easy to get started. And some of its existing marketing budget is being used in creative ways. For example, the company actually sponsored a book -- The New King Makers by RedMonk analyst Stephen O'Grady -- about the growing influence of developers in business and society. Given the amount of money being thrown at developer-centric companies these days, it seems like O'Grady is on to something.
