App monitoring company New Relic files for $100M IPO

Software analytics company New Relic plans to raise as much as $100 million in an initial public offering (IPO).

New Relic revealed the news today in a public S-1 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The company plans to trade under the symbol NEWR, according to the filing. Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan Securities, Allen & Co., and UBS Securities are underwriting the IPO.

Last year the San Francisco-based company expanded beyond application performance management (APM) software to focus on an area with potentially wider impact: analyzing how people use software. And in October, New Relic announced it had acquired Ducksboard, a provider of data-visualization software.

For the fiscal year that ended on March 31, 2014, New Relic registered a $40.2 million net loss on $63.2 million in revenue, the filing shows.

Earlier this year, the company announced a $100 million funding round and opened its first office outside the United States.

In the domain where seven-year-old New Relic plays, competition abounds. Competitor AppDynamics is looking toward the IPO route. The filing discloses that New Relic will also contend with major enterprise software vendors, like BMC, Compuware, Riverbed, SAP, and New Relic founder and chief executive Lew Cirne’s former employer, CA. Back in 2006, CA bought Cirne’s previous startup, Wily.

Plus, other companies provide software to monitor web usage and thus represent competition for the recently released New Relic Insights software — namely Google (with Google Analytics) and Webtrends.

One interesting statistic from New Relic’s filing today: sales and marketing expenses came out to 92 percent of the company’s revenue for the fiscal year ending on March 31. Now, New Relic wants to focus more on winning big enterprise customers, according to the filing, so the sales and marketing spend will surely continue.