Skykit Boosts Workplace Experience Focus With New Relic “Observability Data” Partnership

October 21, 2022 by Dave Haynes

Minneapolis-based CMS software shop Skykit has announced an interesting integration partnership with a company that has more than 500 pre-built integrations, tools and resources from common business systems and applications used in workplaces.

The partnership is positioned as a way end-users can tap into and visualize (or use in other ways) real-time data for digital signage, without the time, complication and cost of building, testing, securing and implementing manual data connectors.

The partnership is with New Relic, which calls itself the observability company, and the integration is now available via New Relic Instant Observability, the San Francisco firm’s “open source ecosystem of 500+ integrations, tools, and pre-built observability resources.”

Says the PR:

Skykit is improving and driving secure efficiencies in how companies communicate key data with employees through digital signage. Prior to Skykit’s release of Dashboard Connections, companies were often faced with manual, insecure and labor-intensive methods for connecting real-time data to digital signage. Now, the Skykit integration with New Relic enables New Relic customers to securely authenticate their dashboards to large format screens across multiple locations through Skykit Beam, a cloud-based digital signage CMS.

As a leader in observability, New Relic empowers engineers with data to plan, build, deploy, and run great software. New Relic delivers the only unified data platform for all telemetry paired with powerful full-stack analysis tools to help engineers do their best work with data, not opinions. New Relic users can create custom interactive dashboards to visualize, analyze, and correlate any data from agents, third-party instrumentation, open telemetry, and more. Alternatively, they can also install hundreds of pre-built dashboards to start monitoring their stack in minutes.

“New Relic customers now have a secure and scalable solution for broadcasting their critical dashboards to digital signage. Our solution engages teams with heads-up communication and instant, real-time access to critical data, even when team members are working on other tasks or programs,” says Irfan Khan, Skykit CEO.

“Our customers operate command centers and lead teams who need to be able to quickly and accurately monitor New Relic dashboards. Skykit allows those teams to display their dashboards on large-format screens, further enabling teams to act on the data quickly and efficiently,” says Akhil Kapoor, Vice President, Cloud and Product Partnerships at New Relic.

The Skykit-New Relic integration is available to all engineers as part of the 500+ integrations available with New Relic’s observability platform. New accounts get 100GB per month of free data ingest, one full platform user, and unlimited basic users, queries, dashboards, and alerts. 

Skykit earlier this month announced a partnership with Datadog, another company focused on real-time data, and the firm seems to getting focused on workplace as a key vertical market, expanding its descriptive line in the last couple of years to being “a leader in digital signage and workplace experience solutions.”

I think this is smart. If your software firm just goes to market offering a general digital signage solution, you are in a crowded field and competing mainly on price, which is deadly.

If you have a vertical market focus, features and capabilities tend to be more important to many or most customers, and there are fewer competitors with the features and capabilities that address that market’s needs. Any digital signage platform can, in theory, provide a workplace solution, but only a small subset are integrated with business systems and built for what’s generally called workplace experience.