Cisco's Proposed Buy of AppDynamics Would Give Customers More Data Insight, Cisco Says

Cisco’s proposed acquisition of application-performance monitoring company AppDynamics for $3.7 billion would give customers “the instrument to get insight into their applications all the way from the customer down to the code,” said Rowan Trollope, general manager-Cisco’s IoT and applications business group, on an investor call Wednesday. Visibility into the performance of apps running on Cisco’s infrastructure “has never been more critical to running their business,” he said. AppDynamics CEO David Wadhwani said the company’s technology can be deployed across private and public clouds, and enterprises are moving toward hybrid cloud models. Companies need a monitoring system that “sits above all of that for the next generation of IT operation,” he said. AppDynamics technology can give customers unified monitoring across multiple clouds, including public and private environments, he said, and customers can host data in its environment or their own. The data residency offering is critical for regulatory and compliance requirements, Wadhwani said. The company collects “trillions” of metrics for its customers every month. For Cisco, making sense of data can help its customers understand how a networking bottleneck translates to “somebody sitting in the checkout cart with a spinning hourglass,” said Trollope. “Being able to connect those dots hasn’t really been possible.” Cisco has been hearing from customers that they want more access to that kind of data, he said. Trollope envisions a world based on “systems of intelligence,” where “you rely more on automation and you rely more on the machine to make the decisions in real time.” The company with "the most richly aggregated, correlated, real-time data set" will be the one with the platform for the “enterprise of the future,” he said. The deal is expected to close in FY 2017 Q3 subject to customary approvals. Cisco's Q3 ends on April 30. Wadhwani will remain after the deal, with his firm becoming a new software business unit in Cisco's IoT/Applications business reporting to Trollope, Cisco said Tuesday.