The pace of cloud innovation is a significant piece of computing’s overall value, but the pressure to constantly evolve while maintaining business imperatives can have a net negative effect on companies unprepared to manage its complexities. That’s why Lew Cirne (pictured), founder and chief executive officer of New Relic Inc., is helping organizations move away from a reactive information technology strategy and harness cloud velocity to scale through Amazon Web Services Inc.

Cirne spoke with John Walls (@JohnWalls21), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host Justin Warren (@jpwarren), chief analyst at PivotNine Pty Ltd., during AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas. They discussed the challenges of cloud’s rapid growth clip, and how New Relic is supporting businesses as they transform. (* Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s note: The following answers have been condensed for clarity.]

Warren: How do you help humans understand what’s going on in this really complex environment that’s moving so fast?

Cirne: Our theme this year is ‘build fast and break nothing, because that’s really the objective of moving to the cloud. It’s measuring everything in real time, everything in that environment, and that’s what we do for people adopting the Amazon Cloud. That measurement helps our customers have more confidence moving to the cloud faster, deploying more frequently, delivering customer value more rapidly.

Our customers, they’re right in the pit of the most high-pressure situations. You’ve got to find that issue as rapidly as possible. Our customers are sick of having to juggle around between dozens of tools that are intended to watch production. New Relic platform is [an] all-in-one platform, and when seconds matter, you don’t want to be switching between tools and context to understand the nature of the problem.

Warren: What does it feel like to put in New Relic for the first time; what’s that onboarding experience like?

Cirne: Once you’ve got an understanding of how the system provides, you go from overly cautious and timid to confident, and start playing offense with software.

Years ago IT leaders thought of software as a defensive mechanism, a way to reduce costs. Now it’s offense; it’s the growth engine for these companies. The digital customer experience is driving top-line growth, and when you’re confident, you’re actually participating [in the] growth of your company.

Warren: How do you help customers dial in on what’s actually important within this sea of information they can now look at?

Cirne: We have a variety of ways in which we approach that problem. The first is an opinionated user interface. We come to our customers with an opinion on what matters in the application environment. But even beyond that, we’re layering on AI; we call it applied intelligence because artificial intelligence — people overuse the term. But they want us to put more smarts in our platform to tell them what’s anomalous, what’s abnormal, what to pay attention to in this sea of data.

New Relic collects about 15 million data points every second off of our customers’ applications, infrastructure, and digital customer experiences, and we analyze all of it in real time to service to our customers.

Warren: What are customers looking at that they’re going to bring on to their environment next?

Cirne: In the future when someone starts a brand new project, they won’t even think about infrastructure. They’ll just think about their code. New Relic’s philosophy on visibility is, you start with the software. The whole point of all this infrastructure is to run software, and so our most important starting point for visibility is the software itself.

We made an announcement this week about delivering the first product that automatically instruments Lambda to tell you if your Lambda function is misbehaving [and] exactly how it is doing that. As the world continually moves from the old IT that used to obsess on infrastructure, [it] obsesses on how to deliver more software faster. It starts and ends with the software.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (* Disclosure: New Relic Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither New Relic Inc. nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE