Last week, application performance management (APM) startup New Relic announced the launch of New Relic Insights, a real-time analytics platform for web applications. Formerly code-named Rubicon, New Relic Insights consists of two parts: a set of analytics extensions/agents added to the enterprise application, and a cloud based service that ingests the data from the applications and allows detailed querying, analysis and reporting. New Relic’s agents extract data from the enterprise app and then store and present the information in real-time via its SQL-like query language. The entire service is a custom, closed source creation, and is not based on any existing open-source solutions such as Hadoop.

New Relic Insights helps users go beyond just crash-reporting and into more real-time data extraction and analytics, and is one piece of New Relic’s broader portfolio of planned products that includes APM (web, mobile and browser-based) and server performance monitoring amongst other things. In itself this looks like a pretty holistic approach geared towards monitoring performance across the hardware and software stack. At the same time, the interesting thing to note is that the use-cases (and correspondingly the buying decision makers) across these products are quite different from each other, spanning IT Operations, Web Development, Mobile Development and Business Analysis. In that sense, it will be interesting to see how successful New Relic will be in making its broad vision a reality. Indeed, New Relic Insights could be by itself already a challenging proposition, in terms of purposing a single platform for analytics and business intelligence across a variety of applications.

So, where might this go? Might this be just a posturing tactic by New Relic to scare off early-entrepreneurs in this domain, or is New Relic laying out the vision for what might eventually become a strategy driven by inorganic growth? Could this be a blueprint that mobile APM leaders such as Opus portfolio company Crittercism should also evaluate? We will see, but for now, it is at the least interesting that in a world that on the face of it seems to be going all-in into open-source, New Relic is joining Splunk and a few other analytics players in building a closed-source, custom analytics solution.

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Last week, image licensing giant Getty Images announced that it was opening up more than 35 million of its images to be embedded into online content platforms such as WordPress, Twitter and Tumblr. The embedded images on their part would attribute to Getty Images as the owner of the content, as well as link to the Getty content repository for purchases.

Getty and Corbis are the two dominant image repositories today. Both of them have similar business models: buy stock photograph rights from photographers, license these images out to online content creators for a fee, and enforce their ownership rights via legal channels as much as possible. Last week’s announcement has been touted by many as similar to the transformation that online music went through, wherein pirated music sharing was replaced by low-cost purchases on iTunes. In terms of legality, this seems to be a step in the right direction for Getty, because it can now utilize image embedding for two purposes: brand recognition, and advertising. Earlier, the only input that Getty had in pricing its images was buyer demand in terms of number of image purchases, but the company had no visibility into the number of eye-balls an image received, which in turn was driven by the caliber of the web-content that the image was used within. Now, with advertising and brand visibility coming from image embedding, Getty’s revenue can likely scale with the number of image impressions, which makes this new model far more effective for Getty.

But then, what about the photographer? Could he/she also be somehow enabled to make money proportionately to the number of image impressions? Could a pricing engine be built that gives the photographer a choice between selling image rights upfront (for the right amount), or receiving image royalties based on impressions, or some hybrid of these two approaches? Could someone like Getty offer its photographers such a versatile and predictive pricing platform? Now *that* would be a true marketplace strengthening innovation!

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For more than a decade now, Sydney, Australia based company Atlassian has been offering tools that are widely used by software developers and project managers. The company offers products such as issue tracking application Jira, hosted code collaboration solution Bitbucket, and Git repository management platform Stash among others, which have together helped the company get to more than $150 million in annual revenues. Over the years, third party developers have built add-ons to Atlassian’s on-premise offerings to help further meet developer needs; these have been offered via the company’s online marketplace over the past year or so. Now, as development moves more and more into the cloud, Atlassian has continued to make its own transition as well, and last week the company announced it was opening up its marketplace to third party add-ons for its cloud products as well.

Issue tracking and version control have seen a lot of advancements over the past decade, partly driven by Atlassian and competitor Github, each of which is currently valued at more than a billion dollars. As competition between the two players continues to heat up, the key aspect here will likely be which company gains greater mindshare and usage amongst developers. In this context, Atlassian’s recent launch of Git Essentials (a product suite that combines Jira, Stash and other tools into a single integrated offering for enterprises) as well as last week’s marketplace-related announcement will help the company further engage its developer community. Github on the other hand has taken a slightly different approach; instead of building an affiliate marketplace program, it offers other avenues such as job postings to bring developers to its site. With both Github and Atlassian continuing to take such steps towards developing their ecosystem within this humongous software development market, the great news is that likely there will be three winners here: Atlassian, Github and finally the software developer!

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