Observability Will Go Mainstream Within 5 Yrs: Ashan Willy of New Relic "Whenever there's a disruption to the digital world, it causes massive revenue loss and disruption in the physical world," Willy shares on the need for observability tools.

In December 2023, Ashan Willy was appointed as the chief executive officer (CEO) of New Relic, a San Francisco-based cloud-based software company. With new initiatives, he describes 2024 as "a very educational, rewarding year."

"From a technology standpoint, you'll see observability take advantage of artificial intelligence (AI), especially agentic AI, and start to interface with other areas," shares Ashan Willy, CEO of New Relic with BIZ Experiences India in an exclusive interview.

For the uninitiated, observability ensures that all pieces of software that makeup applications are monitored appropriately. This way a business can get early warning signals to prevent digital disruptions.

Willy shares that while there are over 50 million developers worldwide, roughly two million of them have observability. "Nobody goes (to college) to be an observability engineer," he quips. But the market is growing. The global observability tools and platforms market was estimated at USD 2.71 billion in 2023 and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 10.7 per cent from 2024 to 2030 according to Grand View Research.

The need for observability

It's a homecoming for Willey– he worked on observability a couple of decades ago when space was in its infancy– and he's thrilled about the future, "everyone's moving to the cloud." Now predominant, cloud computing applications began taking shape in the 2000s with the establishment of Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2002 being a key point. Today, it serves as the backbone of B2C or B2B2C companies largely. The cloud computing market was valued at USD 587.78 billion in 2023 and is projected to grow to USD 2,291.59 billion by 2032 according to Fortune Business Insights.

In July 2024, a faulty update from Crowdstrike, a cyber security provider, impacted banks, airlines, TV broadcasters, supermarkets, and others worldwide– which cost USD 5.4 billion to the US Fortune 500 companies on July 19 alone, The Guardian reported. According to New Relic's 2024 Observability Forecast, engineering teams spent 30 per cent of their time managing outages, with high-impact outages costing companies at least USD one million per hour.

"Whenever there's a disruption to the digital world, it causes massive revenue loss and disruption in the physical world," Willy shares on the need for observability tools. Gartner reports that 20 per cent of enterprise companies implementing distributed data architectures have adopted observability as of 2024. They predict this can grow to 50 per cent by 2026. The platform stores 1.5 EB of data in transit. "To put that in perspective, 1.5 EB is equivalent to streaming 143 million IPL Games in HD, which would take around 57,000 years to watch," he said.

In October 2024, it claimed to launch the industry's first intelligent observability platform- the New Relic Intelligent Observability. "From a business standpoint, what intelligence means is observability has gone beyond just finding out issues in your network," Willy said.

Buys and bets in the Indian market

India is an integral market for the observability provider. Among its 16,000+ paid customers, New Relic caters to businesses like HealthifyMe, HTDigital, Open Financial Technologies, Swiggy, BigBasket, and mPokket in the domestic market. "What you experience on a day-to-day basis in India is different from the rest of the world," he adds.

Willy elaborates, "BigBasket went from monitoring just a single store to over 200 in about three months. That caused them to reduce application infrastructure costs by 35 per cent, but also to help increase and speed up delivery times by about 20 per cent month on month." Additionally, HealthifyMe has been able to oversee peak traffic while reducing overall costs by 10 per cent.

The CEO notes, "We've doubled or tripled, soon to quintuple, our presence in India overall." It recently added a second Bengaluru office—and third in the country— with over 300 employees to its physical presence, "We're doing it for a few reasons. The obvious reason for us is to get great talent."

Irrespective of where a company is headquartered, an Indian presence is indispensable. "Given that there are a lot of developers in India, it's important for us to be in India. It's important for observability adoption to happen in India with New Relic," he adds.

The role of AI

New Relic's intelligent platform will aim to bridge the gap between observability best practices and measurable business outcomes through innovations like the New Relic AI integration with GitHub Copilot, New Relic Pathpoint Plus, and the New Relic Retail Solution. He calls it the "third wave of observability—dynamic, agentic, and impactive."

According to Willy, soon coding will increasingly be done by AI. "You will have more people participate in building digital products that in the past– due to lack of requisite coding skills or the requisite platforms– couldn't," he said. As a non-techie, one can build code with some plain English– if it's a good product and set to be offered–observability should tell you how that code is functioning.

Way forward

In the next three to five years, he expects observability to become mainstream, "So, at this time next year, if we're doing the same interview, I would expect to have a whole new population of people starting to use observability."

"You'll see us form much more of a meshed piece where observability will be inserted in everything people do. I think that's one big trend which will play out over the next few years," he concludes.