Personal blog of Yzmir Ramirez

When Salesforce launched Force.com in 2007 as a place for developers to build applications on top of Salesforce, it was a pivotal moment for the concept of SaaS platforms. Since then, it’s been said that every enterprise SaaS company wants to be a platform play. Today, New Relic achieved that goal when it announced the New Relic One Observability Platform at the company’s FutureStack conference in New York City.

Company co-founder and CEO Lew Cirne explained that in order to be a platform, by definition, it is something that other people can build software on. “What we are shipping is a set of capabilities to enable our customers and partners to build their own observability applications on the very same platform that we’ve built our product,” Cirne told TechCrunch.

He sees these third-party developers building applications to enable additional innovations on top of the New Relic platform that perhaps New Relic’s engineers couldn’t because of time and resource constraints. “There are so many use cases for this data, far more than the engineers that we have at our company could ever do, but a community of people who can do this together can totally unlock the power of this data,” Cirne said.

Like many platform companies, New Relic found that as it expanded its own offering, it required a platform for its developers to access a common set of services to build these additional offerings, and as they built out this platform, it made it possible to open it up to external developers to access the same set of services as the New Relic engineering team.

“What we have is metrics, logs, events and traces coming from our customers’ digital software. So they have access to all that data in real time to build applications, measure the health of their digital business and build applications on top of that. Just as Force.com was the thing that really transformed Salesforce as a company into being a strategic vendor, we think the same thing will happen for us with what we’re offering,” he said.

As a proof point for the platform, the company is releasing a dozen open-source tools built on top of the New Relic platform today in conjunction with the announcement. One example is an application to help identify where companies could be over-spending on their AWS bills. “We’re actually finding 30-40% savings opportunities for them where they’re provisioning larger servers than they need for the workload. Based on the data that we’re analyzing, we’re recommending what the right size deployment should be,” Cirne said.

The New Relic One Observability Platform and the 12 free apps will be available starting today.

When we think of enterprise SaaS companies today, just about every startup in the space aspires to be a platform. That means they want people using their stack of services to build entirely new applications, either to enhance the base product, or even build entirely independent companies. But when Salesforce launched Force.com, the company’s Platform as a Service, in 2007, there wasn’t any model.

It turns out that Force.com was actually the culmination of a series of incremental steps after the launch of the first version of Salesforce in February, 2000, all of which were designed to make the software more flexible for customers. Company co-founder and CTO Parker Harris says they didn’t have this goal to be a platform early on. “We were a solution first, I would say. We didn’t say ‘let’s build a platform and then build sales-force automation on top of it.’ We wanted a solution that people could actually use,” Harris told TechCrunch.

The march toward becoming a full-fledged platform started with simple customization. That first version of Salesforce was pretty basic, and the company learned over time that customers didn’t always use the same language it did to describe customers and accounts — and that was something that would need to change.

Customizing the product