Sounds to me like they are now open to the idea, that way more people use some standard that they can have input on, and then they can capture the customers that don't want to try and reinvent the wheel.

This looks great to me, often I work on projects with closed systems, they aren't allowed to ship the telemetry outside their own network, so none of the SaaS solutions will work. However I work on other projects that I can use SaaS, but I'm not going to do the work to have two solutions depending on the environment.

I think this is probably less relevant today - after a certain size the "moat" for an observability company starts to be their existing customer base. If NR works with everything and everything works with NR it's much harder to make a case that you should continue adding alternatives to your observability stack.

- opinions expressed here are exactly those of a misguided employee with too much time on his hands and not those of said employee's corporate overlord, if you take any of my nonsensical rambling as investment advice you do so at your own peril. I regularly gamble all of my rupees away on coinflip games in Zelda.