New Relic opens Europe office as it nears IPO

New Relic’s application monitoring technology is gaining popularity in Europe and other non-US markets, making it difficult for the company to run all of its global operations from its San Francisco headquarters. So the company is announcing a new office in Dublin, Ireland today.

New Relic’s software-as-a-service offering lets companies monitor how their online and mobile apps are performing all the way from the back end to the front end — across database, servers, carriers, and devices.

As the service expands internationally, employees have been running demos of the software for prospective customers in foreign countries at 1 a.m. and making phone calls at midnight, Chris Cook, New Relic’s president and chief operations officer, told VentureBeat in an interview.

“It’s not great for their quality of life, and its probably not the most efficient way to do it,” Cook said.

So the company is expanding its footprint internationally. Around 50 people will work in the new Dublin office, Cook said.

The move comes as the company gets closer to an initial public offering (IPO), which could very well happen later this year.

When VentureBeat spoke with New Relic chief executive Lew Cirne last year at the time of the company’s most recent funding round, which totaled $80 million, he said the company wasn’t planning to raise another round before going public.

Meanwhile New Relic competitor AppDynamic is in a position to go public this year, too.

But don’t get the wrong idea here. Opening an office in Europe is not any kind of preparation for the New Relic IPO, Cook said.

“Our focus is more on where are the growth vectors that we can leverage, and how can we accelerate our growth, things like that,” he said.

The company’s annual growth rate in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa — 158 percent — is higher than New Relic’s overall growth rate. So it makes sense to allocate more resources to that region in order to capitalize on all of the interest there.

“There’s a ton of upside over there if we just focus on it,” Cook said.