A San Francisco-based software company founded by an IIT alumnus will be acquired by American technology giant Cisco for $3.7 billion. Jyoti Bansal founded application intelligence software company AppDynamics in 2008 with a vision to “help modern enterprises embark on their journey of digital transformation with a disruptive approach to managing their software applications.”
Cisco said it will acquire AppDynamics for approximately $3.7 billion in cash and assumed equity awards. It said AppDynamics’s cloud application and business monitoring platform enabled the world’s largest companies to improve application and business performance.
“Applications have become the lifeblood of a company’s success. Keeping those apps running and performing well has never been more important,” said Rowan Trollope, Cisco senior vice president and general manager of Cisco’s Internet of Things and Applications Business Group.
“Unfortunately, that job has only gotten harder, as IT departments and developers struggle with a tangled web of disconnected, complex data that’s hard to understand,” Trollope said.
Bansal, who had received his BS degree in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, is a Silicon Valley leader and entrepreneur.
In September 2015, he handed day-to-day operations to David Wadhwani, who serves as the President, Chief Executive Officer, and as a director of AppDynamics.
Before founding AppDynamics in 2008, Bansal, who has won several awards and recognition for his work, held engineering roles at various Silicon Valley startups.
“The combination of Cisco and AppDynamics will allow us to provide end to end visibility and intelligence from the network through to the application; which, combined with security and scale, and will help IT to drive a new level of business results,” Trollope said.
Wadhwani said with digital transformation, companies must re-define their relationships with customers through software.
“We’re excited to join Cisco, as it will enable us to help more companies around the globe,” Wadhwani said. AppDynamics will continue to be led by Wadhwani as a new software business unit in Cisco’s Internet of Things and Applications business.
The acquisition is expected to close in Cisco’s third quarter of fiscal year 2017, subject to customary closing conditions.
