Cisco’s $3.7 billion cash deal to acquire software unicorn AppDynamics, announced in January, is now officially in the books.
To commemorate the occasion, Cisco senior vice president and chief technology officer Hilton Romanski along with AppDynamics founder and chairman Jyoti Bansal; chief executive David Wadhwani; and chief technology officer Bhaskar Sunkara will ring the Nasdaq opening bell on Wednesday. That’s a fairly tame ending to an acquisition that began with great drama. In December, AppDynamics, then valued at about $1.9 billion, announced its plan to go public. But in January, on the eve of the planned IPO, Cisco swooped in to make its rich offer and AppDynamics called off its coming out party.
AppDynamics is set to operate as a separate business led by Wadwhani, who will report into Cisco (CSCO) senior vice president Rowan Trollope.
San Francisco-based AppDynamics offers software that it says can monitor the performance of most software applications running on-premises or on third-party cloud infrastructure, flagging problems before they get out of hand. It claims its differentiator is that it can also keep tabs on such things as a company’s product sales and inventory levels.
“We provide an early warning system for enterprises by monitoring both applications and businesses,” Wadhwani told Fortune recently. “If Williams Sonoma understands, in real time, what products are selling and not selling, it can adjust what customers are offered.”
Customers include Charter Communications (CHTR), Allscripts (MDRX), the Container Store, and Autotrader.
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AppDynamics competes with New Relic (NEWR), CA Technologies, and other companies that offer application performance monitoring. Cisco, which made its name selling rafts of networking hardware into corporate data centers, will use AppDynamics to augment its smaller, but growing, software subscription business.
Cisco, like other hardware makers, has struggled as more of its customers use shared data centers run by cloud providers like Amazon (AMZN) Web Services and Microsoft (MSFT). That trend means that these businesses are buying less hardware to run in house.
Cisco will give AppDynamics broader sales and marketing coverage, Wadhwani said, and the combination of Cisco’s expertise in network infrastructure and AppDynamics visibility into applications will be a powerful combination.
