LTV. That's the key. With interest rates this low, you can pretty much justify any sales and marketing expense so long as customer attrition is low.
If New Relic has a USP (I am not qualified to weigh in on this), then I think they can go public and reward their investors with at least a market level return.
They occupy a niche that Google has a hard time making work for them (too complex) and Adobe so far doesn't really shine there either. Cue a takeover by one of these two at some point in the future.
What they provide is something that would make sense in Analytics. So who knows, maybe some day Google will annound Customer Analytics as a part of Google Analytics... For free!
It's not like they would be starting from scratch.
If New Relic has a USP (I am not qualified to weigh in on this), then I think they can go public and reward their investors with at least a market level return.