Cisco has announced its intent to acquire app performance monitoring platform AppDynamics for $3.7 billion in cash and equity. Post acquisition, AppDynamics will be continued to be led by CEO David Wadhwani, but as a new software business unit of Cisco’s IoT and Applications business. The acquisition is subject to regulatory approval, and is expected to close by the third quarter of FY-2017. According to Cisco, the acquisition “will allow us to provide end to end visibility and intelligence from the network through to the application; which, combined with security and scale, will help IT to drive a new level of business results." Essentially, Cisco will now provide analytics and insights for applications developers, although it's not clear if it will be a separate product. AppDynamics is a business application performance monitoring platform that helps business monitor apps, end users and server performance to optimize their offerings. The company offered its ‘Lite’ solution for free but with data retention limitations, and paid ‘Pro’ plans with better features. Given the company will now exist as a department of Cisco, its unlikely it will continue to offer these solutions independently. Note that this is Cisco’s second big acquisition within a year. The company had previously acquired the IoT services platform provider Jasper for $1.4 billion in February last year. It recently also invested in software as a service startup CloudCherry and mobile customer relationship management company Helpshift. The company also recently launched a Global Center of Excellence in Jaipur for smart city…
