CIO Influence Interview with Akshay Bhargava, GVP, Product Management and Growth Platform at New Relic

Akshay Bhargava, GVP, Product Management and Growth Platform at New Relic, shares his insights on creating a data-driven engineering culture through their observability platform,  address challenges in modern technology stacks and software lifecycle management in the Q&A:

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Hello Akshay, welcome to our CIO Influence Interview Series. Please tell us about your Tech journey so far.

As GVP of Product at New Relic, I lead product-led growth, our observability portfolio, and product innovations using generative AI, analytics, security, synthetics, OpenTelemetry, and more — all with a strong focus on helping organizations eliminate interruptions in digital experiences. Throughout my career, I’ve focused on innovating new tech categories by blending product development with sales growth strategies.

Prior to joining New Relic, I held leadership roles in product at Oracle, 1Password, MalwareBytes, and FireEye.

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New Relic is known for its data-driven approach to empowering engineers. How do you ensure that this philosophy is integrated across all levels of the product development process?

We’ve designed our platform to foster a data-driven culture across development, operations, security, and site reliability engineering teams. This collaborative approach breaks down silos and enables faster, more accurate decision-making based on a single source of truth. To further support this, our platform offers these additional capabilities to foster better product development:

• AI-powered analytics to quickly surface meaningful insights from vast amounts of data
• Customizable dashboards and alerts to focus on the metrics that matter most to each team
• Integrations with over 750 technologies to ensure comprehensive visibility across diverse tech stacks

By providing engineers with the tools to access, analyze, and act on data throughout the development process, we empower them to create better software experiences for their users. This data-driven mindset not only improves product quality but also drives innovation and growth by allowing teams to iterate faster and more effectively. Ultimately, our goal is to enable organizations to establish a truly data-driven engineering culture, where decisions at every level are informed by actionable insights.

What have been the most significant impacts of New Relic’s shift to a consumption-based business model on customer engagement and business growth?

Moving away from traditional subscription models, consumption-based pricing changed how New Relic interacts with our customers by creating a clear exchange of value. In a subscription pricing model, customers paid a monthly recurring fee – independent of their software usage. With the new consumption pricing model, customers have easy access to all 30+ products in our platform and only pay for the capabilities they’re actually using. This approach ties revenue directly to how much customers use the product, ensuring we only earn when their solutions consistently deliver real benefits.

By focusing on innovation and customer satisfaction, New Relic can drive faster revenue growth and build strong customer loyalty. Our shift to consumption-based pricing was a bold move, breaking away from the industry’s usual fixed licenses. But our commitment to prioritizing customers has paid off—our existing clients smoothly transitioned, and thousands of new customers have embraced New Relic’s customer-centric pricing model.

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New Relic is described as the most powerful cloud-based observability platform. Can you share some recent innovations in the New Relic platform and the specific challenges they address?

We recently announced the industry’s first fully integrated and AI-driven digital experience monitoring (DEM) solution, New Relic DEM, which optimizes app performance and prevents interruptions.

Challenges in digital experiences, such as slow-loading apps or failures to perform, significantly impact customer satisfaction and, ultimately, company revenue. These problems are amplified by the rapid adoption of cutting-edge AI large language models (LLMs), which, despite their sophistication, can occasionally produce inconsistent or inaccurate outputs, potentially jeopardizing a company’s brand reputation.

New Relic’s DEM solution monitors how users interact across all applications – including those utilizing AI – to flag incorrect AI responses and identify user friction points. New Relic DEM combines real user monitoring (RUM) capabilities in one platform, which provides companies with complete visibility into customer experience and insights in the context of tech stacks. This helps enterprises to run smoother operations by understanding the health of their applications and quickly resolving issues, which allows them to improve the design of new app features and ultimately, drive business success.

How is New Relic leveraging advanced technologies such as AI and machine learning to enhance its observability solutions?

The AI landscape is ever changing, and it’s growing at a rapid pace. At New Relic, we’re constantly reviewing what the industry is using so that we can determine which developments and integrations to prioritize. AI helps us to democratize our platform by allowing even non-technical users to better understand application insights, and we’ve done this in a few different ways.

One of New Relic’s offerings is New Relic AI, the world’s first generative AI assistant for observability. Through a chatbot integrated into our platform, users can interact naturally using plain language to better approach problems without needing technical coding skills. New Relic AI drastically improves our observability solutions by enhancing workflows and providing immediate troubleshooting capabilities. For example, engineers can ask questions about issues directly through the chat interface, like “Why is my cart not functioning?” New Relic AI then analyzes telemetry data to identify potential causes and propose solutions.

We also recently announced the general availability of New Relic AI Monitoring (AIM), the industry’s first APM solution for AI-powered applications. As organizations implement AI into their products and processes, AI workloads are becoming an integrated part of organizations’ application architectures. We leveraged our expertise in cloud APM to provide complete visibility into AI-powered applications with AI monitoring, empowering businesses to effectively oversee performance, optimize costs, and ensure the ethical use of AI.

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What are some of the top challenges you see in the observability space today, and how is New Relic addressing these challenges?

Navigating modern organizations’ complex technology stacks—from SaaS tools and POS systems to external APIs—poses a significant challenge for enterprises due to the lack of a unified view into their ecosystem.

The challenge lies in making sure that both engineering teams and business leaders have access to important data and insights from their tech stack. In today’s business environment, data is imperative to providing consistent and positive customer experiences. New Relic’s platform and integrations like New Relic AI allow engineering and business teams to work together to make more informed decisions based on increased visibility into their tech stacks. We’re also seeing a growing conversation in the industry around the challenges of enterprise AI adoption and more specifically, the lack of ROI. Observability addresses this obstacle through its ability to provide visibility across the AI stack.

New Relic recently announced an integration with NVIDIA NIM inference microservices, which aims to streamline the process and reduce expenses associated with developing, deploying, and monitoring generative AI (GenAI) applications. New Relic AI monitoring gives customers deeper insights across the AI stack for applications built with NVIDIA NIM including full stack visibility, deep trace insights for every response, the ability to isolate model-related performance, error, and cost issues, deep GPU insights, and model comparison.

Can you discuss the emerging trends or technologies in the software lifecycle management space that you are most excited about?

In virtually every industry, AI is dominating discussions, and the software lifecycle management space is no exception – it is transforming observability practices and organizations are swiftly integrating AI-powered applications into their technology stacks.

AI has already boasted several benefits to software developers, like efficiency improvement, code generation, alert fatigue, predictive analysis, and more. But, more importantly, it opens business observability to more people. Even those without technical training can dive into the data and understand it deeply. With AI integrations and applications, they can see how software performance affects critical business metrics, helping them make smarter decisions. We’ll continue to see experimentation and adoption of AI across the industry, and New Relic is excited to participate in and facilitate this transition.

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