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New Relic And Hortonworks See Strong Public Debuts

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Re: New Relic And Hortonworks See Strong Public Debuts

#11
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and not really anybody else, because the rest haven't really figured it out yet. I beg to differ there. ;) I work on Skylight ( https://www.skylight.io ) which is definitely doing some interesting stuff in the APM space. By focusing on just Rails, we are able to provide features that other services that try to be a jack-of-all-trades frequently miss. For example, we just rolled out a feature that helps you monitor me…

Conversely by focusing on just rails, you effectively eliminate large swaths of the enterprise market. There's a huge opportunity there for someone who can integrate across platforms and technologies, particularly if you can ship a behind-the-firewall solution.

Another Skylight founder here.

Focusing on Rails lets us build a really awesome end-to-end solution that works out of the box. Building an intuitive, explorable interface means constantly considering the application's context, and I can attest to the fact that every time we do UI, nitty-gritty details about how our customers build their applications can often become the dominant consideration. When I use general-purpose solutions that are designed for "all languages and platforms", I am often very frustrated by the resulting lowest-common-denominator APIs and UIs.

We may eventually build versions of Skylight for other platforms, but if we do, we will apply the same level of care and design for other platforms as we have done for Rails. Among other things, that will mean having team members who have written large applications in those platforms, and letting those team members drive the APIs and design for those platforms.

Re: New Relic And Hortonworks See Strong Public Debuts

#12

Thinking about New Relic vis a vis a potential startup bubble makes me think about the old saw about the gold rush where most of the people who got rich were the ones selling pickaxes rather than gold miners. On the other hand, in the current startup economy the pickaxe bubble is almost as big as the gold mining bubble, but I think it still probably applies more than it doesn't.

I take it you weren't around for the Dot Com Bubble? I can't tell you how many times I heard this repeated -- and used to justify lofty valuations for infrastructure companies. CSCO, JNPR, ORCL, INTC, EMC, NTAP were all "selling pickaxes" -- none of those valuations ever recovered. And those are the companies that survived ; many companies "selling pickaxes" perished through either bankruptcy or (more frequently) fir…

Chart of valuations the curious: https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&...

Re: New Relic And Hortonworks See Strong Public Debuts

#13
post #3

There's always mixed feelings when a competitor goes public. I work for AppNeta, and while we directly compete against New Relic, I love what they've done for the market. Their competitors were these clunky, on-premise, hard-to-use, didn't support Ruby / Python / PHP / node.js apps, and they've built a beautiful service that's legitimately easy to use. A lot of the data is available from CA or Dynatrace, but it's so…

I am super happy user of New Relic, but always interested in alternatives. I had never heard of AppNeta, so I checked it out. Looks like you guys have some nice stuff, but do you mind if I give a new customer first impression? Very confusing pricing. First off, right off the bat. There is no central price page and I had to go hunt for what you charge. Then when I did find Enterprise pricing for TraceView, it has some…

Hey, sorry that you find it confusing!

Part of the problem is that we have a couple different products, and they're not all directly comparable with New Relic. Hence the lack of a central pricing page.

TraceView is our offer that's 1:1, as you found, and it's priced monthly per host. The "unlimited" is meant to be "you can buy as many as you want", vs. the "Startup" plan, where you can have a max of 5 hosts. Does that make more sense? (I'd be more than happy to change it to something that makes more sense!)

Re: New Relic And Hortonworks See Strong Public Debuts

#14
post #9
post #3

There's always mixed feelings when a competitor goes public. I work for AppNeta, and while we directly compete against New Relic, I love what they've done for the market. Their competitors were these clunky, on-premise, hard-to-use, didn't support Ruby / Python / PHP / node.js apps, and they've built a beautiful service that's legitimately easy to use. A lot of the data is available from CA or Dynatrace, but it's so…

strange, there's no pricing info on the site, why?

We've got a couple different products, and they're priced slightly differently.

http://appneta.com/products/traceview is what you want -- scroll down :)

Re: New Relic And Hortonworks See Strong Public Debuts

#15

Thinking about New Relic vis a vis a potential startup bubble makes me think about the old saw about the gold rush where most of the people who got rich were the ones selling pickaxes rather than gold miners. On the other hand, in the current startup economy the pickaxe bubble is almost as big as the gold mining bubble, but I think it still probably applies more than it doesn't.

I take it you weren't around for the Dot Com Bubble? I can't tell you how many times I heard this repeated -- and used to justify lofty valuations for infrastructure companies. CSCO, JNPR, ORCL, INTC, EMC, NTAP were all "selling pickaxes" -- none of those valuations ever recovered. And those are the companies that survived ; many companies "selling pickaxes" perished through either bankruptcy or (more frequently) fir…

I was not, and for that matter, am not really participating in this one either except as an observer.

I wonder if there's a difference based on how many of those companies were selling mostly actual hardware infrastructure, which has just gotten cheaper and more commoditized over time, versus those which had actual differentiated software.

Both still got hit hard of course, a bubble's a bubble, but I wonder who did substantially worse?

Re: New Relic And Hortonworks See Strong Public Debuts

#16

Thinking about New Relic vis a vis a potential startup bubble makes me think about the old saw about the gold rush where most of the people who got rich were the ones selling pickaxes rather than gold miners. On the other hand, in the current startup economy the pickaxe bubble is almost as big as the gold mining bubble, but I think it still probably applies more than it doesn't.

The funny thing about working for a company like this is that you're still placing a bet on it. If you're selling pickaxes, you're fine ... but New Relic is selling a subscription to pickaxes, which will dry up and go away if the gold rush disappears.

So, yeah, pickaxes are great. "Netflix for pickaxes" is more strongly tied to the market's long-term future.

Re: New Relic And Hortonworks See Strong Public Debuts

#17
Can someone explain how deeply unprofitable companies can go public and somehow do well? I understand that companies are able to pull Mitt Romney's and do terrible things to make money with companies that were losing money every year, but how does it happen that people want to buy stock of a company that is losing so much money? Do I even want to know?

Re: New Relic And Hortonworks See Strong Public Debuts

#18
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conversely by focusing on just rails, you effectively eliminate large swaths of the enterprise market. There's a huge opportunity there for someone who can integrate across platforms and technologies, particularly if you can ship a behind-the-firewall solution.

Another Skylight founder here. Focusing on Rails lets us build a really awesome end-to-end solution that works out of the box. Building an intuitive, explorable interface means constantly considering the application's context, and I can attest to the fact that every time we do UI, nitty-gritty details about how our customers build their applications can often become the dominant consideration. When I use general-purp…

Sounds like a promising future, and the only sane way to approach that level of integration.

Re: New Relic And Hortonworks See Strong Public Debuts

#19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I take it you weren't around for the Dot Com Bubble? I can't tell you how many times I heard this repeated -- and used to justify lofty valuations for infrastructure companies. CSCO, JNPR, ORCL, INTC, EMC, NTAP were all "selling pickaxes" -- none of those valuations ever recovered. And those are the companies that survived ; many companies "selling pickaxes" perished through either bankruptcy or (more frequently) fir…

I was not, and for that matter, am not really participating in this one either except as an observer. I wonder if there's a difference based on how many of those companies were selling mostly actual hardware infrastructure, which has just gotten cheaper and more commoditized over time, versus those which had actual differentiated software. Both still got hit hard of course, a bubble's a bubble, but I wonder who did s…

This time around the software is getting commoditized (with open source).

Re: New Relic And Hortonworks See Strong Public Debuts

#20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am super happy user of New Relic, but always interested in alternatives. I had never heard of AppNeta, so I checked it out. Looks like you guys have some nice stuff, but do you mind if I give a new customer first impression? Very confusing pricing. First off, right off the bat. There is no central price page and I had to go hunt for what you charge. Then when I did find Enterprise pricing for TraceView, it has some…

Hey, sorry that you find it confusing! Part of the problem is that we have a couple different products, and they're not all directly comparable with New Relic. Hence the lack of a central pricing page. TraceView is our offer that's 1:1, as you found, and it's priced monthly per host. The "unlimited" is meant to be "you can buy as many as you want", vs. the "Startup" plan, where you can have a max of 5 hosts. Does tha…

Why charge me for having more hosts? I am used to the reverse. Buy more, save more.

IMHO, keep the app and 'hours of retention' limit in. Remove the hosts and user limit (I hate user limits; don't you want more people exposed to your app?!?)

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