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Cisco Announces Intent to Acquire AppDynamics

87 points| roobeelee | 9 years ago |blogs.cisco.com

59 comments

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[+] atishd|9 years ago|reply
here's how the private investors did (roughly double returns to see at Cisco valuation): https://equityzen.com/path-to-ipo/appdynamics/ (disclaimer: i'm affiliated)

good news for late stage companies, now that public-only investors know they have some competition.

[+] nodesocket|9 years ago|reply
Wow, Lightspeed Ventures absolutely crushed it. $5 million series A is projected to be worth $300 million now. That's the kind of return that funds their entire VC firm for the next 10 years.
[+] dmode|9 years ago|reply
Is there a way to figure out how well employees did in this deal ?
[+] yueq|9 years ago|reply
Does the chart take liquidity preference into account?
[+] dmode|9 years ago|reply
Taxes, death, and Cisco acquiring a company..
[+] frik|9 years ago|reply
Dell bought a competitor, Thoma Bravo investor bought two competitors. MS has some worse offering. As someone else mentioned MS and IBM were in a bid war with Cisco over AppDynamics. So will MS or IBM try to buy the public company New Relic or one of its competitors?
[+] memmove33|9 years ago|reply
It would be nice to know how good this liquidity deal is for early/late employees, after taking into account all dilutions, liquidation preferences and "misc royalties" of preferred shares holders.

Could bring some hope (or one more slap in the face) for us easily screwable early startup employees.

[+] atishd|9 years ago|reply
See my above comment. Also, some employees and investors sold small stakes over the years meaning they got some cash in hand earlier.
[+] smb06|9 years ago|reply
Cisco wants to move up the application stack so it would make sense for them to have someone that can give them application level visibility.
[+] ejcx|9 years ago|reply
That's very interesting since they were IPOing. The price reported at 3.7B is not much higher than what was expected from their IPO.

2017, in my opinion, is going to be a very interesting year in tech.

[+] mathattack|9 years ago|reply
Perhaps they had some insight that it wasn't going to be that strong? Public markets are very unforgiving if you have a few bad quarters. That 3.7B IPO could wind up a 2B company after a few of those. CISCO stock won't get crushed by a couple bad quarters from AppDynamics.
[+] nemo44x|9 years ago|reply
It's over 100% more than the 1.7 billion they were estimated to IPO at. That's a huge premium.

And I might look at going long NEWR as their financials and prospects look the same and they're trading at 1.7b today.

[+] AlexB138|9 years ago|reply
We just implemented AppDynamics. I can't say this hits me as good news. Hopefully Cisco is hands off with them.
[+] tptacek|9 years ago|reply
Cisco is usually pretty hands-off with companies, at least more so than other large acquirers. Google and Facebook acquire teams for talent, but have relatively well-planned product lines. Cisco has expansive product lines which it grows through acquisition. Very few Cisco products originate from within Cisco.
[+] SteveNuts|9 years ago|reply
How is AppDynamics compared to the other tools in your experience?
[+] eip|9 years ago|reply
I worked for them when they first got funded. They were still working out of their VC's office in San Mateo. I had a feeling I would regret not moving back to the bay area when they asked me to.

Good on you Jyoti and Bhaskar.

[+] argonaut|9 years ago|reply
AppDynamics looked like it was going to have a successful IPO, indicating a welcome market for future enterprise tech IPOs. Interestingly, it's in Cisco's best interest to have a cold IPO market.
[+] r00fus|9 years ago|reply
It's questionable that any IPO this quarter would be hot. Lots of shadows and cold wind about.
[+] JumpCrisscross|9 years ago|reply
Does this bode well or badly for Snap and Spotify's IPOs?
[+] nemo44x|9 years ago|reply
Doubt it matters since they are different segments. Snapchat and Spotify are consumer technologies where as App Dynamics is a software and services company.
[+] capkutay|9 years ago|reply
Probably zero impact given that they're in different industries...
[+] bedros|9 years ago|reply
any advantage over open source apps like graphite
[+] albertwang|9 years ago|reply
There's frequently a lot of confusion in the APM market -- As you might have noticed, there's a lot of overlap in what both tools can do. Graphite is primarily used for time-series metrics, whereas AppDynamics is a full-stack APM vendor.

In other words, Graphite can be used to aggregate any metric you're interested in (such as CPU usage), which you would then correlate with other relevant metrics (such as number of web requests/second). If you're specifically interested in tracking application-level performance (what is my website throughput or where are my endpoint bottlenecks), you would need to find an integration for your specific environment, or custom instrument your application.

AppDynamics also has graphing features, but aims to bundle any other relevant use cases an application developer or operations person might need. For instance, it includes service topology maps (see which services are running on your infrastructure, and are talking to which other machines) and application logs (to parse unstructured text). They have also built many integrations (to collect relevant metrics), usually for large enterprises.