Datadog Hires New Relic Channel Chief As SVP Of Alliances

Cloud monitoring provider Datadog announced on Thursday that John Gray, formerly of competitor New Relic, has joined the company as its senior vice president of Alliances. Gray will lead the company's channel partnerships business and will have some business development responsibilities as well.

Gray has over 20 years experience in software and SaaS sales and in building strategic alliances and channel programs. His past employers include IBM, BEA, Oracle and LivePerson.

Datadog is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) monitoring, and data analytics platform and the company provides a unified view of IT KPIs, events and metrics. That information helps businesses monitor their cloud infrastructure, develop and release new applications on schedule, reduce downtime and improve application performance.

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As more companies are moving workloads to the cloud, Gray said Datadog's job is to help those companies feel secure before, during and after that transition. "We give the customers the confidence to accelerate their consumption of the public cloud platforms," Gray said.

Gray said Datadog is targeting channel partners to help expand the company's business. The company wants to build relationships with more MSPs and SaaS providers who can use Datadog's tools to "deliver a more transparent view of all that complicated cloud infrastructure" that enterprises are using.

For digital agencies and systems integrators, Gray said Datadog "helps them be more successful more quickly."

This is particularly the case when it comes to helping customers who are moving to use more SaaS providers in their companies. "Customers need a better view of their data and Datadog has built a real business, not only regarding producing great products but the integrations with other tools and services – they've done a phenomenal job at that," Gray said.

Gray said he's enjoying his new role and did acknowledge that there will be competition between his current and previous employer. "New Relic does compete with Datadog," he said. "But the overlap in competition is relatively recent."

New Relic and Datadog both offer application performance monitoring and infrastructure monitoring. New Relic declined to comment for this story, but noted that the company's alliances and channels team is now led by its CMO, Robson Grieve.

Gray's pledge to partners is that he'll help them correctly message the value of having Datadog as part of the service that they provide to their customers. He added: "From a channel strategy point of view, our job is not only to convince an MSP of the value that we bring to the table but also to assist them in going to market."