Meet the AWS Competency Program

The AWS Competency Program is intended to help AWS customers find qualified members of the AWS Partner Network (APN) that have “demonstrated technical proficiency and proven success” with specific solutions and/or vertical areas. To qualify for the AWS Migration Competency, vendors must have a strong overall AWS practice, be able to showcase customer successes, demonstrate technical readiness within the Competency, and meet AWS Security Best Practices. In addition, all products and solutions from Competency holders are validated by internal AWS teams.

In particular, the AWS Migration Competency highlights companies that provide solutions or have deep experience helping businesses move workloads successfully to AWS, through all phases of complex migration projects, including discovery, planning, migration, and operations.

How New Relic helps companies migrate to AWS

New Relic helps companies benchmark and troubleshoot application performance and behaviors before, during, and after a migration to AWS. With New Relic, customers can quickly see the impact of application and infrastructure changes on errors, performance, and customer experiences.

Cloud monitoring strategies adopted by leading software teams typically focus on the components the team is responsible for, including business outcomes, customer experience, application architecture, and application code. When migrating to AWS, New Relic customers gain deep visibility into both the applications they are responsible for running as well as underlying AWS services or datacenter infrastructures. This visibility improves troubleshooting and provides the performance data needed to reduce migration risks and prove cloud success.

AWS customers commonly use New Relic to ask and answer key migration questions, including:

• Do pages load faster on AWS?
• Is it safe to migrate the database?
• Is the app delivering the expected business results?
• Should we move more apps to AWS or not?
• Did auto-scaling help an app deliver a consistent customer experience or not? Are database queries behaving as expected?

An ongoing relationship with AWS

Achieving the AWS Migration Competency builds on our existing relationship with AWS, driven by thousands of New Relic customers migrating to and running applications on AWS services. Last October we announced that we had achieved AWS APN Mobile Competency, which recognizes APN Partners with deep experience in mobile-first development who can help mobile-first businesses build, test, analyze, and monitor their mobile apps on AWS. We’re also currently participating in more than 15 AWS Global Summit Series events, and hosting another 12 hands-on workshops surrounding these events globally to provide AWS customers best practices, training, and one-on-one consultations.

New Relic has helped a wide variety of customers migrate to AWS, including Australian real-estate giant Domain Group, Australasian multiplatform media company Fairfax Media, and Swiss digital and mobile game-maker Miniclip. Research firm CB Insights used New Relic to prove a performance improvement when moving its search APIs to Amazon CloudSearch. Additionally, we collaborate with cloud service brokers around the world including Dedalus in Brazil and Cloudreach in the United Kingdom, to help our joint customers migrate to and have ongoing success with AWS.

Companies face a variety of complex platform and technology choices today. New Relic is proud to help teams make informed platform decisions and understand how follow-on changes deliver on the promise of better software via the cloud.

Learn more about New Relic customer migrations to AWS here:

• Dedalus
• Fairfax Media
• Miniclip
• Domain Group
• CB Insights

Flying bird image courtesy of Shutterstock.com.

In reality, though, a growing number of government organizations are modernizing by moving to the cloud and adopting agile and DevOps practices. In fact, a recent report from IDC Government predicts that federal cloud growth will be substantial through 2019. Even the National Security Agency announced it will be moving some of its IT infrastructure to Amazon Web Services, joining the Department of Defense, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), and other agencies in adopting cloud computing.

Serving 50 million using the cloud

Take CMS for example. Part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, CMS covers 100 million people through Medicare, Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and the Health Insurance Marketplace. A combined active user base of more than 50 million take advantage of Medicare.gov, MyMedicare.gov, Medicaid.gov, InsureKidsNow.gov, and the current administration’s landmark initiative HealthCare.gov.

As part of its shift to a more scalable and agile technology stack, CMS migrated its applications to public and hybrid clouds, switched from expensive proprietary compute and storage hardware, and started using automation tools. It deployed software analytics from New Relic to establish an environment where it can proactively identify problems in the code base and prioritize fixes.

Decreasing time to resolution and increasing development speed

The shift to an agile approach provided significant results. In the past four years, the workload for the web and new media group has more than doubled in terms of the number of websites, programs, and active users being supported. At the same time, the team supporting the digital presence has only needed to grow moderately, expanding by roughly 25%.

The insight CMS gets from software analytics is enabling the agency to be far more agile as it’s more confident about performance before moving to production. CMS accelerated deployment of new releases by 80%. With greater visibility into the health of production applications, it also improved mean time to resolution by 75%. You can learn more about how CMS is using the cloud and New Relic in the full CMS case study.

Smoothing the way for cloud usage

The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) is making it easier for agencies such as CMS to adopt cloud solutions. It provides a standardized approach to security assessment, authorization, and continuous monitoring for cloud products and services.

With a growing number of public sector customers, New Relic recently announced that it initiated the FedRAMP certification process. New Relic was also the first and only application performance monitoring vendor to document its security controls on the Cloud Security Alliance’s Security, Trust & Assurance Registry, the first to launch a vulnerability management partnership with HackerOne, and the first to begin the FedRAMP certification.

Whether agencies are moving to the cloud or adopting agile and DevOps practices, New Relic is doing its part to help public sector organizations like CMS maximize and understand their technology impact in real time and give U.S. citizens the best possible digital experience.

Cloud image courtesy of Shutterstock.com.

This week, we continue to experiment with the TWiMS format, with more quick links to stories of interest. Our top story? Mark Zuckerberg gets hacked, which pretty much confirms that it can happen to anyone.

If Mark Zuckerberg Can Be Hacked on Twitter, So Can You—New York Times

What it’s about: File under “Nobody is safe from online data breaches.” Last weekend hackers gained access to the Twitter and Pinterest accounts of the crown prince of social media himself, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. They left behind a cheeky message: “We are just testing your security!” And just a few days later, the same thing happened to the Twitter account of Evan Williams, the cofounder and former CEO of … you guessed it … Twitter.

Why you should care: If you still need a reminder that you should change the password on your LinkedIn account, here it is. The group that claimed responsibility for the hack, OurMine Team, said that it got access to Zuck’s many accounts via the LinkedIn password dump from a few weeks ago. As Fast Company writes, “The fact that the founder of the biggest social media empire in history was hacked highlights just how destructive large data breaches can be.” Despite the advanced data encryption technologies in place today, as the Times’ Katie Rogers points out, the best way for everyday users to protect their online accounts from breaches boils down to some commonsense advice: “Quit using the same password for multiple websites.” However, the big security lesson here is not for general users, but for the companies and websites that require customers to hand over personally identifiable data. As Jeremi Gosni writes over at Ars Technica, LinkedIn’s lax security measures allowed for a second data dump that “lets hackers be six times better cracking future dumps.” That’s because hackers use passwords to gain insight into how people are forming their passwords, which allows them to crack more passwords to gain more insight … and on and on. In a world where the average person has 26 online accounts, one company’s security failure can threaten everybody.

Further reading:

• Mark Zuckerberg’s Twitter and Pinterest Accounts Hacked, LinkedIn Password Dump Likely to Blame—VentureBeat 
• Mark Zuckerberg and the $80 Million Stolen Password—Recode
• Mark Zuckerberg’s LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Twitter Accounts Got Hacked—Fast Company
• LinkedIn Data Breach Leads to Hacking of Zuckerberg’s Social Network Accounts—The Stack
• Twitter Co-Founder May Have Been Hit by Same Hacking Group as Mark Zuckerberg—Mashable
• Another Day, Another Hack: 100 Million Accounts for VK, Russia’s Facebook—Motherboard
• How LinkedIn’s Password Sloppiness Hurts Us All—Ars Technica
• Even ‘Dead’ Social Media Sites Are a Gold Mine for Hackers—IT Business Edge
• Hacker Lexicon: What Is Password Hashing?—Wired

Google and Amazon Are Slowly Killing the Gadget as We Know It—Business Insider

What it’s about: Intel recently acknowledged that people are replacing their PCs much less often, from about four years to almost six years, and they’re keeping their tablets almost as long. Smartphones appear to be facing a similar slowdown in replacement cycles, and author Matt Weinberger has a simple explanation of why. The hardware—and even the built-in software—is no longer the key to the user experience. Instead, it’s increasingly all about the apps and websites accessed over the web. As those improve, your existing gadget gets better, not worse, Weinberger says.

Why you should care: This trend upends the notion that buying the latest gadget is the gateway to digital happiness. Instead, it’s increasingly all about improvements in the software, which makes your existing device more useful than ever, even as it ages. It’s yet another arena in which every business is becoming a software business, including the hardware business. Software is now disrupting the very devices upon which it runs—from computers to tablets to smartphones to Google Chromecasts and Amazon Echoes. Just don’t think that means a resurgence in traditional mobile app sales. Recode cites a report from research firm Nomura that says the top 15 app publishers saw their U.S. downloads fall some 20% last month.

Further Reading:

• The App Boom Is Over—Recode
• Google’s AI software Is Moving Into Your iPhone—CNET

The Voice-First User Interface Has Gone Mainstream—Recode

What it’s about: From Apple’s Siri and Google’s OK Google to the Amazon Echo, “voice first”-based products and experiences are continuing to gain traction. But where and how are these technologies used the most? According to market research firm Creative Strategies (in collaboration with Experian), the Echo is most frequently located in the kitchen, and the three most common use cases are playing a song (34%), controlling smart lights (30%), and setting a timer (24%). A separate but related study by the same firm revealed that Siri is the most used voice-based UI, and that across Siri and OK Google, the most common tasks they are used for are searching the internet, getting directions, and making phone calls. 

Why you should care: While it isn’t likely we’ll be chatting with human-like voice-based AI assistants like HAL 9000 or Jarvis anytime soon, we’re certainly headed in that direction. Based on consumer sentiment revealed in the study, people increasingly see the value and convenience of voice UI, and want to use it in more ways—it’s just a matter of honing the technology. Anyone building voice-based UI products should take note of the conclusion reached by Ben Bajarin, lead analyst on the study: “This is another area where the one with the biggest ecosystem built around their voice UI/voice OS has the best shot of being ‘hired’ by the masses.”

Further reading:

• How Voice Interfaces Are Colonizing Our Lives, By the Numbers—Fast Company

Traffic-Weary Homeowners and Waze Are at War, Again. Guess Who’s Winning?—Washington Post

The law of unintended consequences applies everywhere, even in software. While drivers may love the chance to avoid traffic jams, residents are often incensed when hordes of app-driven drivers speed down their formerly quiet streets. A key question: Who bears legal and moral responsibility for these unforeseen issues? The drivers, the app makers, or the residents who wrongly believed they could hide from the flow of traffic on public streets? Governments are increasingly blaming the app makers, as France fines Uber $907,000 and the city of San Francisco preps to fine Airbnb $1,000 a day for not removing unlicensed renters.

Software Is Still Eating the World—TechCrunch

Five years after Marc Andreesen’s seminal essay in the Wall Street Journal, he seems more prescient than ever. “The central question,” writes Jeetu Patel, “is not whether every company will have to embark on some sort of digital transformation journey depending on their business, but rather how they will go about making it happen.” This is a useful update on one of the central ideas underpinning the world of modern software.

Is HTML5 the New Windows?—TechCrunch

Author Paul Stannard details the “parallels between the arrival of cloud-based apps and the arrival of Windows 30 years ago.” He believes that “the widespread adoption and official release of the HTML5 standard in 2014 is triggering” a flood of cloud apps that are just as good if not better than desktop apps. For Stannard, this technology “revolution” is yet another disruption creating huge opportunities—and big challenges—for software developers.

7 Programming Languages We Love to Hate—But Can’t Live Without—Network World

Programming languages … you can’t live with them, you can’t live without them. Network World’s Peter Wayner identifies seven languages that perfectly sum up this outlook. While over at Jaxenter, Patrick S. Li offers this advice: “Stop designing languages. Write libraries instead.”

On Reading Issues of Wired From 1993 to 1995—The New Yorker

Once regarded as the bible of modern “cyberculture,” Wired magazine has now been around long enough that early issues can be read as historical documents. The New Yorker’s Anna Wiener dives into the archives and discovers a wistful record of a future that never was. Recommended reading.

Nationwide Blackout in Kenya Caused by Marauding Monkey—Ars Technica

The monkey, which survived, also brought down internet service across the country. And, no, you can’t make up this kind of journalistic catnip; all you can do is read it and shake your head.

David Hennessy and Asami Novak also contributed to this post.

Want to suggest something that we should cover in the next edition of TWiMS? Email us at blog@newrelic.com.

Tune In to the Future

Can’t get enough modern software news and commentary? Be sure to check out our Modern Software Podcast. New Relic Editor-in-Chief Fredric Paul and guests discuss the most important things happening in the world of software analytics, cloud computing, application monitoring, development methodologies, programming languages, and more. Listen to episode 13 or subscribe on iTunes.

Password hacker, voice-controlled device, and globe on plate images courtesy of Shutterstock.com. 

The two-day event, now in its eighth year, “is an investment in the future of our product organization, and a celebration of our people, process, and projects,” explains Darin Swanson, New Relic VP of engineering, who led program creation this year. His goal is to encourage all of us to be “more connected and aware of the great team we have and the amazing things we are passionate about and striving to achieve. We want to celebrate who we are while at the same time figuring out our next iteration.”

New Relic VP of Engineering Darin Swanson

New Relic founder and CEO Lew Cirne told attendees that the conference “is one of my favorite times of the year. It’s work but it feels like play,” which is often a recipe for doing our best, most innovative work.

New Relic founder and CEO Lew Cirne

Evolution is inevitable

Like New Relic itself, the New Relic Product Conference has grown and changed a lot over the years, and several new approaches made their debut this year. For instance, as our team has grown, we now welcome attendees from Portland, San Francisco, Phoenix, Texas, Winnipeg, Guadalajara, Barcelona, London, Poland, Vancouver, Pittsburgh, and elsewhere.

Not surprisingly, the program has evolved significantly along the way. Among the almost 20 formal presentations, this year we’ve introduced a pair of customer panels to enable our teams to develop an even closer understanding of the actual people for whom we are building our products. The half dozen customer panelists, from companies large and small, were not shy about sharing what they liked about New Relic, and their wish lists for future features and products.

A first this year, New Relic customers addressed the Engineering Conference attendees.

We also added a series of more casual “unconference” sessions and workshops in multiple tracks covering everything from building harmonious, high-functioning teams to optimizing our backend practices and insights into machine learning. The goal here, Darin says, was to more directly engage all the attendees and enable bi-directional idea and information flow. Or more simply: “Learning all around!”

More fun, too!

We have also expanded the team-building portions of the event beyond golf, soccer, juggling, cycling, hill climbs, and game nights to include movie nights, musical jam sessions, and even a lock-picking class (it’s easier than you think!). In fact, this year we have more people participating in a single afternoon activity than worked at the entire company back when we held our first conference.

They don’t just code all day—some engineers play soccer, too.

The conference is a big deal for veteran attendees and newbies alike. James Stuckey, a product manager who started at New Relic just a few weeks ago, said he’s enjoying the event in several ways: “It’s been a great mix of awesome learning opportunities, combined with a chance to connect more deeply with my team and meet Relics from all over the world.”

On the other hand, veteran Relics who have attended multiple conferences said they particularly appreciated the new unconference tracks, which allowed for deeper dives into specific technical topics.

For Darin, though, the best part is simply watching the ever-growing gathering of people engaged in passionate conversation around topics they care about. “Made possible by the planning and work we’ve done over the years curating the people, processes, and practices within New Relic Product and beyond,” he says, “those moments are super rewarding and always bring a smile to my face.”

Stay tuned to the New Relic blog—many of the conference sessions may soon become blog posts and/or public presentations at FutureStack or other events.

See below for more photos from this year’s conference:

New Relic Chief Product Officer Jim Gochee addresses conference attendees.

The more musically inclined Relics made time for jam sessions.

“Selfies” are so 2015 …

Team lunch under the big tent.

Attendees made time to get out and explore Oregon’s natural beauty with a group hike.

The hardware hackathon is a great opportunity for Relics to have fun working together in new ways.

An annual conference favorite: game night!

Senior Site Reliability Engineer Jonathan Owens presents on teamwork issues.

Photo credits: Full group shot by Danny McCarty; event photos by Caito Scherr and Fredric Paul.

That was the goal Liazon set for itself back in 2007. An industry-leading private benefits exchange for businesses, Liazon helps enterprises control benefits costs while also allowing employees to select and customize their coverage.

So how does it work? Through the Bright Choices Exchange, a system in which Liazon’s proprietary algorithm matches employees’ needs to the best available benefits package for them. Those packages are offered by top national and regional insurance providers and sold through a network of broker partners.

High traffic, high risk

If that all sounds like a win-win, it is. But consistently satisfying businesses, employees, insurers, and brokers all at once presents some challenges—especially during the crush of open enrollment periods at the end of the year.

The benefits business is highly cyclical, with 80% of transactions occurring between October and December. For Liazon, open enrollment season means high website traffic and high risk. Issues with user experience at peak times carry the danger of poor retention and lost revenue for multiple parties.

Michael Fleming, Liazon CTO, dreaded entering another open enrollment season without the necessary tools at his disposal. So, he made a decision. “We were not going to go blindly into another open enrollment,” he says. “We needed a software analytics solution and we needed it fast.”

Preventive care

With a new busy season looming, Fleming and his team installed New Relic APM. Straight away, they saw they’d made a good call.

“The day we turned on New Relic, it was like somebody suddenly turned on the lights in the room,” recalls Edmund Kaczynski, director of software engineering at Liazon.

Soon, the company expanded its use of the New Relic Software Analytics Cloud, adding New Relic Browser, New Relic Insights, and New Relic Synthetics to the mix. Deploying these tools across development, testing, and production environments helped Kaczynski and his colleagues achieve new levels of visibility.

For Liazon, using analytics in development works like preventive healthcare—addressing potential problems before they have the chance to become actual ones and saving time, money, and heartache along the way.

Winning big

Today, before any code sees the light of day, New Relic helps Liazon make sure it’s ready for prime time. “On our last deployment, we identified during testing that certain patterns of usage resulted in some ugly performance degradation,” Kaczynski says. “Without New Relic, it probably would have slipped through the cracks to production. Every time we can solve an issue before it hits production, it’s a huge win.”

Though open enrollment is now less daunting than it used to be, the pressure on Liazon is still immense. A single company offering benefits to 1,000 employees can add up to millions of dollars in revenue for Liazon’s broker partners. Downtime isn’t an option, and rapid reactions are a must. Thanks to New Relic, Liazon can more easily identify and resolve issues before customers start calling support.

As the company expands internationally, including rolling out a new globalized interface that operates in multiple languages, Fleming and his team know that New Relic has their back.

In fact, Kaczynski adds, “It’s probably the most helpful tool we’ve ever added to our stack.”

Be sure to read the full Liazon case study.

Doctor image courtesy of Shutterstock.com.

Both companies rely on New Relic to monitor application performance and provide their customers with the best user experience possible—which can make a huge difference during the stress-filled process of shopping for important big-ticket items.

Carsales.com

Carsales.com Ltd. is a publicly owned company with a network of popular websites, including Carsales.com.au, the leading automotive classifieds website in Australia.

The company prides itself on putting the customer first in everything it does. This customer-first philosophy reaches all the way into the development team. “Our software developers live and breathe the customer experience,” says CTO Jason Blackman. Team members even spend time in the company’s call center to hear customer feedback firsthand, using those insights to constantly improve the customer experience for website visitors.

Another way Carsales.com seeks to improve customer satisfaction is by fixing issues faster and creating higher quality code. For help with that, the company turned to New Relic APM, which enables the Carsales.com tech team to see the performance of every aspect of its application environment in real time. Says Jason, “The developers love New Relic. They are wedded to the success of their own product and use New Relic to help them monitor it.”

To learn how Carsales.com drives great buyer and seller experiences with help from New Relic, read the full Carsales.com customer case study.

Domain Group

Domain Group is a leading real estate portal in Australia. With an audience of nearly 5 million users a month, the company helps potential homebuyers Down Under make one of the biggest financial decisions of their lives. Domain Group is committed to innovation—helping customers find their next home quicker and easier than ever before.

Domain Group focuses on the way that people search for real estate. Because the majority of Domain Group’s traffic comes via mobile devices, the company wanted to have the highest-rated mobile real estate app for Australian home-hunters.

The top cause of bad ratings is crashes, according to Android Team Lead Gary Lo. New Relic Mobile helped Domain better understand the technical issues that were causing bad mobile experiences—including crashes—for its customers, allowing the company to improve its 2.8 star rating to a 4.1 in just two years. “Fixing crashes is definitely the primary reason for that increase in rating, and New Relic played a huge part in that,” says Gary.

To learn more about how Domain Group used New Relic for help rebuilding its business from the ground up, watch the video below and read the full Domain Group customer case study.

Car image courtesy of Shutterstock.com.

Once in my room, I looked out the window, and there it was, the iconic green stadium that is Fenway Park, home of Major League Baseball’s Boston Red Sox. It didn’t look all that special from where I was, but that would change.

I was in town to help host some exciting events at Fenway for New Relic customers, in honor of our new partnership with Major League Baseball. Among other things, I was going to interview Christian Villoslada, a vice president from Major League Baseball Advanced Media, whom I had met the day before in New York, and Olawale “Wale” Oladehin, a solutions architect from Amazon Web Services, whom I had only talked to on the phone earlier that day.

Smells like baseball

Since I had some time before our meetings began, I decided to walk around the area of Fenway Park. Even though it was hours before game time, you could already see the area coming to life. Vendors were warming up their grills and cooking sausages with peppers and onions. The smell was already in the air. I have no other way to describe it … the area smelled like baseball.

As I made my way around the park, I discovered the statue that depicts that moment when Ted Williams handed his ball cap to a young fan who was struggling with cancer. I read the inscription, and it brought tears to my eyes. I looked up and saw the tributes to Ted Williams, Babe Ruth, and, of course, Cy Young. Fenway Park has a very long history. So long, in fact, that its opening in 1912 was overshadowed by another big event of the day … the sinking of the Titanic.

After dinner, I started working on my slides for the next day while listening to the game on TV, and watching the park from my hotel room window. I couldn’t see the field, but I could see the scoreboard. I still hadn’t been inside Fenway yet, but I was already feeling the rush of baseball.

Terrific tech tour

The next morning, I headed over to the park, and up to one of the premier luxury suites that companies use to entertain clients during games. I gazed out the big glass front window for my first view of Fenway field. The grounds crew was already out and making sure it looked its finest. Not that it needed much help really, as the outfield grass was already pristine.

I looked out over the right field wall, thinking maybe I’d see it … and there it was: the famous red seat. Boy, it was farther away than I thought. That was one heck of a shot.

What is the red seat, you ask? It’s the seat in section 42, row 37, seat 21 where Ted Williams record-breaking, 502-foot home run ball landed in 1946. This was the longest home run in Fenway’s history, hit by one of the most famous and inspirational players ever.

It was then, when I looked at that seat, when it really sunk in where I was. This was Fenway Park, one of the most iconic ball parks in America, an essential part of baseball history. And I was there.

Of course, I couldn’t miss the Green Monster, either, taking up all of left field and much of center, too. I knew I’d be watching the game that night from the seats on top.

That day we were given a “technology tour” of Fenway Park. We saw the cameras that capture all the action for later analysis. When you watch a game and see a stat such as how fast the ball was thrown from the short stop to the first baseman to make the out, these are the cameras that are used to capture that data and allow for these stats to be calculated.

However, this data is used for more than just entertainment—the team uses it as well to play better baseball. We went to the clubhouse and saw how the players use the data that is being captured during the game to improve their swings against the current pitcher. (We also got to see their batting cage in the clubhouse, and of course we took pictures!)

After the tour, we went back to the suite for a terrific Q&A discussion with Christian and Wale about New Relic and Major League Baseball. Christian shared great stories from the early days of MLBAM and Wale talked about how AWS fit into the story.

Atop the Green Monster

That evening we were joined by a different set of New Relic customers. The morning session had been for the techies, but the evening was for the executives. We had a host from the Red Sox assigned to us, and he did a fantastic job sharing the history of Fenway Park and baseball in Boston. I chatted with him later during the game, and discovered that he is an intern and because of his job with the Red Sox organization, he is the envy of all his friends.

Perhaps the best part of my visit to Fenway was when we were allowed onto the field during batting practice. We were roped off from the players and told we couldn’t shout out to them—they were working, after all—but if they came up to the rope line, we could get autographs. I waited by the Rockies dugout for one particular person: Walt Weiss, the manager of the Colorado Rockies, and an early star for the team back when they were formed in the 1990s. My then-girlfriend and I attended Walt’s first home game, opening day of 1994. After the game I proposed to her, and we’ve been married for 22 years.

I waited … and waited … and right at the last minute before we had to go, he came by and I met him, shook his hand, and got his autograph.

After that it was time to head up to our private box atop the Green Monster, advertised as “The Best Seats in Baseball.” I was skeptical … until I got there. These are fantastic seats with a unique viewpoint. And forget ballpark dogs (though they were available). The VIP dinner served at our seats consisted of a series of delicious small plates, a new one served every couple of innings, with anything we wanted to drink along the way. When I asked one of our Boston customers whether he was having a good time, he replied, “You’ve ruined baseball for me. Every time I come here I sit over there,” and he pointed to the cheap seats. “Now when I come to watch a game, I’ll wonder ‘where are the oysters on the half shell’? I’m spoiled for life!”

A great game, and a great day

And what a game we saw! Xander Bogaerts hit a shot over the top of the Green Monster near where we were sitting. And, for the first time ever, I wasn’t sad that the Rockies lost (it was 10-3), because they lost to a great baseball team that I had grown to respect after spending the day with them (and their fans).

Baseball truly is America’s favorite pastime, and I felt very fortunate to join our New Relic customers for the best day ever at Fenway Park.

Baseball bat, Boston, and baseball images courtesy of Shutterstock.com.

This week, we’re devoting all of TWiMS to covering six trends laid out in Mary Meeker’s highly influential “State of the Internet” report, which she presented this week at Code Conference. (You can watch her presentation here.) As it is every year, Meeker’s annual report is a whopper—213 slides this time—and we simply couldn’t do it justice in a single item. Instead, we’re doing deep dives into the six trends outlined in Meeker’s report that are most relevant to the modern software world. 

Global Internet Trends—Mary Meeker’s 2016 Internet Trends Report (via Recode)

What it’s about: Meeker’s presentation leads off with her Global Internet Trends breakdown. There are currently some 3 billion internet users worldwide, but growth has slowed considerably. The crazy gold rush since the first dot-com boom is effectively over, according to Meeker. If you exclude India, as Meeker did in her chart, year-over-growth is effectively holding steady at 9%. In fact, Meeker says, it’s actually decelerating just about everywhere but India. And Meeker notes a related global internet trend: The smartphone, the device that helped fuel the latest growth phases of internet usage, is also pumping the brakes. Global smartphone users grew 21% last year, compared with 31% in the previous year. Smartphone shipments are slowing “dramatically,” according to Meeker. They grew just 10% in 2015, down from 21% in 2014.

Why you should care: Slowing growth is a sign of the internet’s maturity, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. But as Meeker says in her presentation: “New users are going to continue to be harder to find.” That’s a big wake-up call for software companies and everyone who delivers products and services online. Despite India’s continued growth, tech companies may no longer be able to rely on the rapid expansion of global internet users to fuel their own growth. With the easy pickings gone, this could exacerbate an already hyper-competitive industry, in which one company’s “new” users will increasingly be someone else’s former customers. But while the net’s user growth might be slowing, the other trends Meeker highlights demonstrate that the web and mobile are far from static. They’re going to evolve in potentially dramatic ways, with plenty of new terrain for software to conquer.

Further reading: 

• Mary Meeker: This Time It’s the Internet Itself That’s Slowing Down—Recode
• Internet Boom Times Are Over, Says Mary Meeker’s Influential Report—Bloomberg
• Internet Growth Is Flat. Phone Sales Are Meh. Hello, 2016.—WIRED
• The 15 Most Important Slides in Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends Report—The Washington Post
• Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends Report: 5 Takeaways—ZDNet

Re-Imagining Communication: Video/Image/Messaging—ITR 2016

What it’s about: Our collective love—especially among the Millennial generation—of online visual experiences just keeps growing in both usage and sophistication. Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram are the leading social platforms among Millennials, and Meeker says Snapchat hit the trifecta of “communications plus video plus platform.” Meeker notes that Generation Z, which follows the Millennials, will continue to drive demand for visual engagement online. In fact, a key difference between Millennials and their younger brethren is that the former still love to text, while the latter typically prefer to communicate via images. Messaging apps are also growing rapidly, Meeker says, led by WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and WeChat. Moreover, they might soon be your phone’s primary interface.

Why you should care: The popularity of images and video on social media and elsewhere online shouldn’t catch anyone by surprise. But Meeker’s slides confirm that there is still plenty of room for growth, increasing sophistication of the technologies and platforms behind the scenes, and significant business opportunities ahead. The exponential growth and evolution of mobile messaging apps deserves a closer look, she says, with increasingly intelligent messaging apps becoming much more than venues for chatting with friends; they’re enabling deeper conversations and creating significant new business opportunities. Meeker offers an example of a mobile user engaging in a “conversational commerce” transaction, which begins with an image on Instagram, moves to an online chat, and ends with a purchase. Perhaps the biggest deal of all? Meeker’s report fuels the notion that messaging apps, increasingly powered by AI chatbots, will become the new mobile gateway. Meeker compared the current smartphone homescreen to the portals of Web 1.0­—soon to be replaced by something better.

Further reading:

• Yes, Bots Are Really Going to Take Your Homescreen’s Place—WIRED

Re-Imagining Human-Computer Interfaces: Voice/Transportation—ITR 2016

What it’s about: Just as messaging apps are changing how we use our smartphones, voice is altering how humans interact with computers overall. We are less dependent on touch interfaces as voice interactions mature and become more common, an evolution that affects all manner of online activities. One in five searches on a U.S.-based Android device are now voice-based, for example, and Meeker cites a prediction from Baidu chief scientist Andrew Ng that by 2020 half of all online searches will be conducted by voice or image. The game changer, according to Ng: when voice interfaces go from 95% to 99% accuracy.

Why you should care: The move to voice and image search changes the game for developers, UX designers, and some of the biggest names in tech. Meeker notes that Android adoption continues to outpace Apple’s iOS. But multiple observers point out that another Meeker slide comparing flagging iPhone sales with surging Amazon Echo shipments suggest that Android is not Apple’s real problem. “That juxtaposition might seem strange, but Meeker was making a point,” WIRED’s Davey Alba writes. “It’s a sign that using voice as a way to command your tech is steadily gaining traction.” Competing voice assistants like Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana are likely to become less device-specific, used to interact with all our computing devices, not just smartphones. Oh, and count your car on that list of “computing devices”—Meeker calls cars “a new paradigm in computer-human interaction,” and she predicts that increasing computerization of cars will spark a renaissance for the U.S. automotive industry.

• The iPhone’s Biggest Threat Isn’t Android—It’s Amazon’s Echo—WIRED
• Mary Meeker Thinks Apple Is the Past, Amazon Is the Future—Business Insider
• The Future Belongs to Amazon, Not Apple—ZDNet

China = Internet Leader on Many Metrics—ITR 2016

What it’s about: Mary Meeker covers her final three trends in lightning round fashion, and so will we. China, which boasts the world’s largest internet user base, offers up some critical lessons for American tech companies. That’s because, based on data from Hillhouse Capital, Meeker says Chinese companies are beating their U.S. counterparts on several important internet metrics, including online advertising and e-commerce.

Why you should care: Chinese e-commerce sites dominate retailer rankings (by revenue), and they’re growing faster than U.S. e-commerce sites. As messaging and chat apps ascend to the online and mobile thrones, American developers might want to study China’s playbook—nearly one in three WeChat users has made a purchase on the platform. Chinese users are far more likely to pull out their smartphone to pay for stuff, too. The average monthly transaction volume of WeChat Payment users is more than double the average number of debit card transactions among U.S. cardholders. WeChat Chinese New Year payments skyrocketed to 8 billion in 2015, up from 1 billion in 2014. New internet user growth might be slowing in China, as it is just about everywhere else—but it’s apparent that China is ahead of the game in important areas such as chat, mobile payments, social commerce, and more.

Public / Private Company Data—ITR 2016

What it’s about: Here, Meeker offers her annual breakdown of both public and private internet firms and how they’re continuing to impact the broader business world in major ways. Unsurprisingly, internet-related disruption continues at full throttle. While “many of us have been around the internet for a long period of time,” as Meeker says, it’s important to remember that the net’s impacts are really just beginning to be felt.

Why you should care: It’s an exciting time to be in the software business. Meeker notes that the current crop of tech leaders is growing faster than their predecessors did when they arrived on the scene: Uber is growing faster than eBay did, JD.com is growing faster than Amazon did, Slack is growing faster than Salesforce.com did. Meeker’s Top 20 Internet companies by market cap is always worth a look (slide 187), and continues to point to China as a major technology leader. Meeker closes her onstage presentation with a moral of sorts, particularly amid swirling discussions of a tech bubble: “There are pockets of overvaluation but there are pockets of undervaluation,” too, she says. And while there may be few true winners in tech, the top 20 list underlines another of her closing points: Those that win, win big.

Data as a Platform / Data Privacy—ITR 2016

What it’s about: Meeker’s 213-slide deck closes with some 20 slides on the massive and growing importance of data, particularly the concept of data as platform. Data—and the number of things that generate data—continues to grow rapidly, while data infrastructure costs continue to fall. Perhaps most compelling is slide 198, which charts the evolution of data as a platform during the past decade. The current “third wave”—moving from data evolution to data revolution—is an age of mass data intelligence, characterized by pervasive data systems, big/fast storage, and data instruments in the business. It’s fascinating to see how far data and data-related tools have come in a relatively short period of time.

Why you should care: Meeker includes a great quote from Looker CEO Frank Bien on just how crucial data and analytics have become: “Data is moving from something you use outside the workstream to becoming something a part of the business app itself. It’s how the new knowledge worker is actually performing their job.” Indeed, we’re entering a golden age of data, one with—as Meeker’s slides illustrate—increasingly sophisticated tools for analytics, monitoring, and CRM and other critical business needs. And, as Meeker’s deck suggests at various points, we’re really just getting started. Data nerds, this section is worth a closer look.

Bonus! The 5 Stories That Would Have Made TWiMS If Not for Mary Meeker:

Microservice Architecture Is the Agile Architecture—Infoworld
Just as agile development is designed to address engineering bottlenecks, microservices addresses a similar architectural bottleneck—from the upcoming book Microservice Architecture co-authored by Matt McLarty.

Salesforce Buys Demandware for $2.8B, Taking a Big Step Into E-Commerce—TechCrunch
The massive deal pushes Salesforce from helping optimize the sales process into “the business of sales itself.”

Why Wearables Won’t Make Us Smarter, Faster, or More Productive—Fast Company
Apparently, even the best technology is “no match for the psychological forces of inattention and inertia.”

Microsoft to Open Windows Holographic to Virtual Reality—ZDNet
Microsoft seems to be hoping that the move will “enable a gamut of mixed reality scenarios.”

Techies Are Trying to Turn the NBA Into the World’s Biggest Sports League—WIRED
All the top sports leagues, from the NBA to MLB, are looking to technology and analytics to help teams compete against each other, and for fan interest.

Want to suggest something that we should cover in the next edition of TWiMS? Email us at blog@newrelic.com.

Global internet, voice control, and jackpot images courtesy of Shutterstock.com.

• One tool for all your environments: One interface and one clear picture of your applications and infrastructure, whether they are in the cloud or on-premise or some combination thereof. Your apps can reside anywhere, and you can know how they are performing.
• Elasticity: Scale up or scale down, and your monitoring infrastructure mirrors your elasticity. The New Relic Software Analytics Cloud processes over 2M analytic events and queries over 3B data points every minute and is hungry for more. (It’s our big data problem, not yours.)
• Seamless updates: Updates aren’t a big deal. You don’t have software to maintain and no hardware to worry about. Your team stays focused on your applications and business goals, and isn’t distracted by maintaining a monitoring tool.
• Freedom: Change your architecture, move to the cloud, and add or remove applications without worrying about your monitoring infrastructure keeping up. Think of it as future-proofing your monitoring solution.

In this way, Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) and New Relic make a great combination. You can use New Relic on PCF to verify cloud migration success, remediate private cloud issues quickly, get insight into the customer experience, and monitor the health of your PCF deployments.

To help you see how easy it is to manage your Pivotal Cloud Foundry instances with New Relic, we are offering a special 60-day free license of New Relic APM for PCF users. Just download the New Relic tile for Pivotal Cloud Foundry and you can quickly start monitoring your Java, .NET, PHP, Ruby, and Node.js apps.

New Relic is a member of the Cloud Foundry Foundation, and shares the goals of driving global awareness, adoption, and development of the Cloud Foundry platform. New Relic joins SAP, VMware, IBM, Intel, EMC, and more than 50 other technology innovators as a Foundation member. We seek to sustain Cloud Foundry as the global industry standard Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) open source technology with a thriving ecosystem.

Get started monitoring your Pivotal Cloud Foundry instances today, free for 60 days! Learn more at newrelic.com/pivotal.

Cloud image courtesy of Shutterstock.com.

REA Group is the major property portal in Australia, operating Australia’s leading residential and commercial property websites: realestate.com.au and realcommercial.com.au. The company also runs a number of online properties selling real estate around the world, including Europe, Asia, and the United States.

According to Global Infrastructure Lead Colin Panisset, the company recognizes that what it’s really good at is building services to make people’s real estate journey “simple, efficient, and stress-free.” But, says Colin, “We are not great at building tools for monitoring application performance … so we’re very happy to lean on the expertise of others who are focused on that and make that their mission.”

REA Group’s search for a software analytics solution quickly led it to New Relic. “After deploying New Relic into the main application for our site, we started seeing results straight away,” says Colin. Because of this, the company soon decided to adopt the full New Relic Software Analytics Cloud.

Colin credits New Relic with helping REA Group make dramatic leaps in efficiency and innovation. “It’s a very different company since I started five years ago and New Relic has been a big part of that journey,” he says. “The ability to try things rapidly, fail fast, and see where things are going wrong and why has enabled us to pivot rapidly when necessary.”

To learn more about how REA Group uses New Relic to stay on top of the fast-moving property search market, watch the video below:

Read the full REA Group customer case study.