New Relic grows 130 percent, poised to hit $100M runrate (exclusive)

New Relic, the fast-growing software analytics company that tracks how applications are performing, said it had growth of 130 percent in the most recent quarter compared to same quarter a year ago.

The San Francisco company is private, so it doesn’t release revenue or other financial data. But the company says it’s set to generate more than $100 million in annual revenue run-rate by March 31, the end of it of the 2013 fiscal year.

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In an interview with VentureBeat, Patrick Moran, the company’s chief marketing officer, said the New Relic originally made the projection in July of 2012, but that if anything, “we’re accelerating a bit.”

The company’s fast growth comes at a time when app performance-tracking has become more important than ever for businesses.

New Relic provides companies with visibility into their apps, not just at the code level but also by pulling in data about everything that an app is syncing with — across multiple languages (Ruby, Java, Node, PHP, etc), service apps, and hybrid cloud infrastructures.

Businesses are increasingly integrating apps with each other so that apps make frequent API calls upon each other, including for data and other updates. Companies are also exploiting the benefits of cost-effective cloud infrastructure, which means they’re starting to run apps in many different places — sometimes on the public cloud, such as Amazon, or in private clouds, such as Openstack, or even upon a mix of these clouds. All of this requires more sophisticated tracking and performance monitoring.

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New Relic competes against AppDynamics, another company seeing tremendous growth. Until now, the two businesses have focused on somewhat different markets. AppDynamics is targeting midsized to large companies that often run their apps on-premise and behind a firewall. New Relic has so far focused on its software-as-a-service model (SaaS), offering its product over the cloud — finding more resonance among smaller or midsized companies.

Smaller customers have until now meant smaller revenue for New Relic. However, New Relic is clearly moving up-market. It has increased customer accounts by more than 10,000, bringing the total 50,000, it said. Among those were BBC Worldwide, Disney-ABC Television, Ericsson, Ford, and Sony.

Indeed, in an interview, Moran attributed the new growth to an increasing readiness of enterprise to embrace SaaS. “It’s accelerating at a more rapid clip,” he said. “Bigger customers are driving bigger revenue.”

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Part of this trend toward bigger clients lies in New Relic’s efforts to make it dead-simple to get started. It has spent four years refining the starting experience. Licensing fees are low for customers at the earlier, more experimental phases of an implementation. But as those customers expand to other projects, such as mobile, they will implement New Relic on those as well. “We’re certainly in the business of land and expand,” Moran said.

Mobile, in particular, has driven New Relic’s growth. For example, New Relic won the business of a major cable company for a tiny $5,000 project to monitor that provider’s mobile app that competes against Netflix. From there, though, the customer expanded the business to become a $500,000 account within a year. And this year, it’s now over $1 million, as the company uses New Relic across its other apps. “It all started when they bought us online without even talking to a sales rep,” Moran said.

Online brokerage house E-Trade is another customer. New Relic monitors all of their new infrastructure supporting E-Trade’s iPhone and iPad apps. It’s business that previously would have been won by the largest of its competitors, like IBM and CA Technologies, said Moran. “Mobile is driving customers to be more accepting of SaaS,” he said.

Finally, the other booster for New Relic was the launch of its platform in the second quarter, where it now enables other developers to build their own programs on top of New Relic’s APIs. Within two weeks, 1,000 companies were serving data over about 50 plugins that hadn’t existed before, Moran said. It now has 7,850 plugins deployed.

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These other companies are building useful new ways to monitor their apps with New Relic’s APIs, including the ability to query things like “revenue per transaction,” or asking: “Is my cloud infrastructure running slow today?”

The company said it had 20 percent revenue in the most recent quarter, which ended June 30, compared to the previous quarter.