New Relic has appointed Michael Frendo (pictured) as its new Chief Technology Officer, tasking the veteran technology executive with aligning product strategy and engineering execution as the company expands its observability platform for the AI era.
Frendo will oversee the technical direction of New Relic’s Intelligent Observability platform, supporting the company’s more than 85,000 global customers. In the role, he will work closely with Chief Product Officer Brian Emerson to advance the next phase of platform innovation and scale recently announced capabilities introduced at the company’s New Relic Advance event.
Frendo brings more than 25 years of experience leading global engineering teams across both software and hardware development. His background spans cloud, SaaS and embedded systems, with senior roles at companies including Cisco, Polycom, Juniper and most recently Proofpoint.
At Proofpoint, where he served as CTO of Engineering, Frendo contributed to product architecture and the development of the company’s AI-driven security and compliance capabilities.
Earlier in his career, he played key roles in several major technology developments, including delivering what is described as the world’s first DOCSIS cable modem, contributing to Cisco’s early Voice over IP (VoIP) products, and leading development of a mobile firewall at Juniper that achieved significant market adoption.
New Relic Chief Executive Officer Ashan Willy said Frendo’s experience across multiple technology cycles made him well suited to help guide the company’s next phase of development.
“Michael is a seasoned technology visionary who has spent his career at the forefront of every major technological shift, from the early days of VoIP to the AI era of today,” Willy said.
As CTO, Frendo will report directly to Willy and focus on translating New Relic’s product vision into technical execution, particularly as organisations increasingly rely on observability platforms to manage complex cloud environments and AI-driven workloads.
Frendo said the company’s strategy around AI-enabled observability was a key factor in his decision to join.
“New Relic is the architect of modern observability, but what drew me here is the company’s vision for the AI era,” he said, noting the platform’s role in helping organisations move from reactive incident response toward more proactive and automated operations.
The appointment comes as observability platforms evolve to support increasingly complex distributed systems and AI applications, where visibility into application performance, infrastructure behaviour and operational anomalies has become critical for enterprise IT teams.
