Interesting given the prior acquisition of AppDynamics. If true, I think they should have taken the deal. My reasoning: I worked in the APM space and there app

Interesting given the prior acquisition of AppDynamics. If true, I think they should have taken the deal. My reasoning: I worked in the APM space and there appeared to be an upper limit to how much companies were willing to spend on APM and related technologies that caps the opportunity. In general, the charging per agent/server model runs into trouble on big infrastructure - do I cover production? What about staging? If I don't cover staging, then am I creating a testing/QA problem? Etc. It just becomes a much tougher sell when you get over $500k. Hell, over $200k. I would regularly hear companies say things like "well, we can cover half of production because I can't bring that to our CEO - he'll freak." So I think that might be part of what we're seeing with New Relic's recent revenue performance (they recently cut guidance on full year revenue). New Relic does about $600m a year and is valued at $3.5b - their max value was about 2x that - so $7b. Caveats: - Are they growing faster? Absolutely. - Are they a great company? Absolutely. - Does taking the deal and giving up full control of your company always make sense? Of course not. - Is money the only metric of success? No of course not. - Does it matter when you're talking billions? Probably not.