New Relic Revamps Partner Program and Embraces AI in Observability Platform

New Relic Revamps Channel Program, Counts On Partners For Agentic AI Drive

The observability tech developer is stepping up its channel efforts under Larissa Crandall, who took over as the company's channel chief in September, with an expanded partner team, simplified program tiers, new training and certifications, and opportunities for improved partner profitability. Observability tech developer New Relic is rolling out its overhauled channel program, offering partners a simpler two-tier structure, more financial incentives and increased margins, expanded training opportunities, and new technical and sales certifications. New Relic is also providing additional partner resources, including more regional and sub-regional partner sales managers - part of a four-fold increase in partner organization staff over the last six months. The moves, being announced today, are the follow-through of channel veteran Larissa Crandall, who was hired as New Relic's channel chief in September. [Related: New Relic Looks To Speed AI Adoption With Nvidia NIM Integration] Crandall (pictured), in an exclusive interview with CRN, said the changes to the New Relic Partner Program stem from conversations she had with many of company's channel partners, including VARs and solution providers, managed service providers, strategic service providers, systems integrators and the cloud hyperscalers. "I think one of the things that is stood out to me is, yes, they wanted the increase in profitability, as every partner requests. But they also wanted something simplified. One of the big things that I kept hearing was, 'Don't make it over complicated. Simplify your program,'" said Crandall, who's official title is global vice president of channels and alliances. "There's a lot of vendors out there that are over-complicating their programs. "'Tell me how I can make money. Tell me how to best serve my customers and educate me on how to hunt for more opportunities,'" Crandall said she heard from partners. "So again, it kept going back to 'Just be easy to work with.'" New Relic, headquartered in San Francisco, competes in the crowded observability space with its New Relic Intelligent Observability Platform. In July 2023 then-public New relic struck a deal to be acquired by private equity firm Francisco Partners and asset management firm TPG for $6.5 billion. (The deal was completed in November 2023.) That was quickly followed by the hiring of Proofpoint CEO Ashan Willy as New Relic's new CEO in December 2023. He succeeded Bill Staples who had served as CEO since mid-2021. Willy, also in an exclusive interview with CRN, said New Relic has focused on growth since the acquisition and he has increased research and development spending to about 25 percent of revenue. A big part of that is developing observability capabilities within the New Relic platform to help monitor and manage the performance of the growing number of AI systems and applications - and the large language models (LLMs) that power them - that are rapidly being deployed by businesses and organizations. In one example, Willy noted that generative AI is increasingly being used to generate software code outside of traditional development operations, but fewer people understand the workings of the automatically generated code. "AI is going to increase the need for observability," Willy said. "What we do is we look at the entire application and we're able to tell how AI is performing in the context of your overall application, everything from costs, from hallucinations it may have, from the performance angle, all of that, so people get an end-to-end view of the application and all of the AI." "So observability is going to become more important. That's why this space is exploding," the CEO said. At the same time New Relic is moving quickly to add AI capabilities to its own observability platform to improve its effectiveness in such tasks as detecting system anomalies and predicting system problems and failures. In February the company announced more than 20 AI innovations that "infuse intelligence" across the New Relic Intelligent Observability Platform that can "predict and prevent business-impacting issues by surfacing the right insights," the company said at the time. Platform additions included new response intelligence and prediction capabilities, the Transaction 360 intelligent observability tool for monitoring transactions, the Streaming Video & Ads Intelligence tool, and new cost optimization capabilities including pipeline control and service architecture intelligence. New Relic also provides agentic integrations with ServiceNow, Amazon Q Business, Google Gemini and GitHub Copilot for Microsoft Azure. Partners have a major role to play as New Relic ramps up its AI initiatives. "I think from the partner perspective there's a wonderful opportunity for partners to help educate" potential customers about the value of AI and the efficiencies it can provide, Willy said. "We feel that partners are a huge part of our future." Partners "are closest to the customer. That's where the trust is a lot of times," Crandall said. "Customers are coming to them to be educated" on such topics as AI and observability. That resonates with partners like NTT Data. "Our customers aim to leverage AIOps to optimize IT operations, enhance efficiency, and proactively mitigate disruptions. However, they face challenges in identifying the most impactful tools and strategies to maximize their observability investments," said Juan Carlos Martínez, NTT DATA senior director, in a statement. "Having the opportunity to deliver our customers the New Relic Intelligent Observability Platform gives us an edge as it solves these challenges. I'm confident that New Relic, its enhanced partner team and program resources, will set us up to be valuable AI partners to current and future customers," Martínez said. Willy said New Relic is in the process of developing an agentic framework within the company's observability platform that will allow partners to build their own agentic integrations for their customers. The first capabilities expected to be available this summer. "That will be a rich form of revenue [for partners] and it moves them up the stack," the CEO said of the value partners can provide. "I think it makes them much stickier in the account and much more valuable to customers." All this has driven the increased investments New Relic has been making to its partner program under Crandall's watch. A major change is the program's reduction from four tiers to just two and the addition of what Crandall called "stronger" financial incentives offered to provide partners with increased margins and improved profitability. "It was complicated, it was not meaningful and wasn't providing a lot of value in the various tiers," Crandall said of the old program. "So we went from a four-tier program to two [and] simplified it with increased benefits around profitability." The channel chief said New Relic has increased the size of its channel team fourfold, including hiring partner sales managers - some dedicated to specific partners and others to certain geographical regions and sub-regions - as well as adding technical support staff. The New Relic Partner Program offers four new technical certifications and two new sales certifications that Crandall said are designed to provide partners with a solid foundation around intelligent observability, including value proposition, use cases and business outcomes. "The certification content changed dramatically," she said. The revamped partner program offers expanded training opportunities for partner seller and technical teams across such areas as AI, observability and cloud. Partners can also align their go-to-market strategies with new partner program tracks focused on such areas as agentic AI and co-selling with New Relic's leading technical partners including ServiceNow, Microsoft and Amazon Web Services. New Relic also invested in new partner support IT, including partner resource management and configure, price and quote systems.

New Relic Enhances Partner Program and Unlocks Agentic AI for the Enterprise with Open Partnership Ecosystem

Updated New Relic Partner Program features new incentives, resources, certifications, and paths to customer acquisition and profitability for partners New program investments underscore open partnership ecosystem's vital role in New Relic's business strategy and success; unlocks agentic AI use cases for the enterprise New Relic, the Intelligent Observability company, announced the enhancement of its New Relic Partner Program to fuel business growth for its partner ecosystem. The program updates and investments include stronger incentives for partners to enhance profitability, new and simplified certifications and digital tools, expanded dedicated partner resources, enhanced training opportunities, and new specialized program tracks. In addition, New Relic's open partnership ecosystem unlocks agentic AI use cases and brings observability to best of breed solutions across the enterprise. New Relic brings agentic AI and observability to best-of-breed solutions via an open partnership ecosystem The New Relic Partner Program empowers solution providers, managed service providers, technology partners, system integrators, and cloud platform providers to find new revenue streams and develop integrated solutions with the New Relic Intelligent Observability Platform. By connecting its platform with best-of-breed solutions from partners, New Relic delivers mission-critical insights and intelligent recommendations to the tools and platforms where customers already work. "Our open partner ecosystem has been instrumental in fueling innovations and growth of the New Relic Intelligent Observability Platform," said New Relic CEO Ashan Willy. "As we continue our growth trajectory and fine-tune our platform for today's IT environment, we know we cannot do it without our partners. That is why we've renewed our investment in the people, tools, and systems, making partnering with New Relic even more rewarding. Together with our partners, we look forward to continuing to grow, innovate, and create lasting value for our joint customers." "As Asia-Pacific embraces a resilient and connected future, strong partner ecosystems are critical to innovation and long-term growth. Our newly-enhanced channel partner program reflects this shift, offering expanded incentives, new certifications, and targeted resources to help partners grow with confidence. With a strengthened partner team and an ecosystem-centric approach, we're excited to help our partners in APAC accelerate growth, unlock new revenue streams, and deliver unmatched customer experiences across the region." said New Relic Senior Vice President and Managing Director, Asia Pacific and Japan, Simon Lee. New Relic Partner Program enhancements give partners better predictability and profitability, including: Stronger incentives -- More financial incentives for partners can amplify revenue opportunities, as well as increase margins for our partners. New and simplified partner certifications -- Four new technical certifications and two new sales certifications help partners gain knowledge and skills aligned with today's market. Expanded partner team resources -- Increased the New Relic partner team fourfold to extend more guidance, expertise, and support to partners. This includes appointing Larissa Crandall as Channel Chief, GVP of Partner and Alliances to grow the partner organization, define strategy and enhance the partner program. The company has also invested in new tech platforms, including PRM and CPQ, to streamline processes and help partners sell more efficiently. Expanded training opportunities -- Dedicated trainings for sellers and technical teams in key areas, such as AI, observability, and cloud, so partners can be best positioned to help their customers solve critical business problems with these technologies. Specialized partner program tracks -- New tracks to align with partners' unique go-to-market strategies spanning joint marketing, sales enablement, and a tailored approach to industry verticals. New Relic helps partners embrace AI New Relic empowers partners to leverage the opportunities provided by AI, and has expanded AI-focused sales enablement for solution providers. In addition, New Relic offers agentic AI integrations to bring critical observability data and intelligent recommendations directly to IT teams and developers across the business and tech ecosystem. These integrations include: Amazon Q Business: Supports engineers with agentic insights, optimizes agent response and task automation through in-memory analysis of shared retrieval augmented generation (RAG) data, and improves cross-team decisions with autonomous knowledge transfer. GitHub Copilot for Microsoft Azure: Automatically detects issues for DevSecOps, helps developers quickly resolve errors in code changes to boost reliability and release velocity, and empowers teams with intelligent recommendations. Google Gemini: Automatically monitors deployments, receives immediate notifications, and tracks errors effectively to uphold application performance and stability. It also uses recommendations based on data analysis to improve code performance and support decision-making. ServiceNow: Brings observability insights into more work streams (like customer support), resolves tickets faster with intelligent alerts and prioritization, and automates business-impact analysis of changes in systems and services. The company also announced the industry's only observability integration with DeepSeek to accelerate AI ROI and adoption. Accelerating innovation in observability New Relic continues to solidify its leadership in observability with groundbreaking advancements. This includes 20+ innovations and integrations as part of the New Relic Intelligent Observability Platform, which weaves AI-strengthened intelligence and automation across every corner of its platform. New Relic offers the industry's most comprehensive intelligence by integrating Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) from its platform with customer-defined data and third-party sources. The platform enables new innovations like Transaction 360, Cloud Cost Intelligence, and Streaming Video & Ads Intelligence. These advancements equip businesses of all sizes to optimize digital application performance and reliability at scale. "Our customers aim to leverage AIOps to optimize IT operations, enhance efficiency, and proactively mitigate disruptions. However, they face challenges in identifying the most impactful tools and strategies to maximize their observability investments," said NTT DATA Senior Director Juan Carlos Martínez. "Having the opportunity to deliver our customers the New Relic Intelligent Observability Platform gives us an edge as it solves these challenges. I'm confident that New Relic, its enhanced partner team and program resources, will set us up to be valuable AI partners to current and future customers." The New Relic Partner Program recently earned the 5-Star Award in the 2025 CRN Partner Program Guide. To learn more, visit our website. About New Relic The New Relic intelligent observability platform helps businesses eliminate interruptions in digital experiences. New Relic is the only AI-strengthened platform to unify and pair telemetry data to provide clarity over your entire digital estate. We move your problem solving past proactive to predictive by processing the right data at the right time to maximize value and control costs. That's why businesses around the world -- including Adidas Runtastic, Domino's, GoTo Group, Ryanair, Topgolf, and William Hill -- run on New Relic to drive innovation, improve reliability, and deliver exceptional customer experiences to fuel growth. Visit: www.newrelic.com.