This publicly traded $1.6 billion company is quietly making your apps and websites much better

Our demand for apps and software is increasing with every new iPhone, Surface Pro, and PC sold.

That means that developers are turning to new tools like New Relic, an application performance management (APM) platform that helps enterprises make sure those apps stay available and reliable for every user.

Today, New Relic announced at its annual FutureStack user conference that it's accelerating the platform by building in new analytics capabilities that give developers and operations teams a better look into what's going on with their software.

The new features are important additions for the company, which is trying to win back Wall Street's favor amid doubts that the newly-public startup can compete with bigger, more established players like IBM and HP.

"We believe there is an art and a science to building the software that changes the world," says New Relic founder and CEO Lew Cirne. "We provide the science."

(Fun fact: "New Relic" is an anagram of "Lew Cirne.")

The basic idea behind New Relic is to help developers monitor the cloud computing platforms and data centers where their apps are hosted. If, say, a database goes down, or if website page load times are way longer than normal, New Relic sounds the alarm so you can fix problems faster - or even identify problems before they start.

"Think of us as must-have technology," Cirne says.

Customers like Roku, News Corp., and Slack all use New Relic to monitor their apps and make sure that new features are running smoothly.

With the new analytics features, New Relic customers can see real-time information on how their software is performing - so if you call customer support to say that their site is freezing when you go to buy a t-shirt, they can see the blip on their master dashboard and figure out what's going on.

"This is going to be the foundation for all of our products going forward," Cirne says.

The crucial enterprise market

New Relic has had a tumultuous year: After six years as a privately held company, New Relic went public in late December 2014 to much fanfare. New Relic is popular among small and midsize development teams, who love the deep support for monitoring their software.

But after reporting earnings earlier this week, shares of New Relic tumbled 13%: It beat analyst expectations on revenue and growth, but investors are concerned that the company just isn't nailing the lucrative enterprise market.

Application performance management is decidedly not a new idea. IBM Tivoli and HP both offer similar solutions, and large enterprises are inclined to stick with the vendors they trust.

But Cirne says that those tools are too slow and too inflexible to compete with New Relic, which is hosted entirely from the cloud and built for the next generation of apps.

New Relic is also hyping an integration with Amazon Web Services, making it easier to deploy for the many enterprises who are choosing to go with the e-retailers giant cloud business.

"They don't understand that you have to have all of this in the cloud," Cirne says. "It's going to make the on-premise vendors irrelevant."