Technology

Cisco Moves to Acquire AppDynamics Before IPO

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Cisco Systems Inc. (NASDAQ: CSCO) saw its shares gain slightly early Wednesday after the company announced an earth-shattering acquisition. The networking giant reported that it had reached an agreement to acquire the private U.S. business software firm AppDynamics, marking one of its largest deals in recent memory.

What stands out about this deal is that AppDynamics was set to have its initial public offering (IPO) this week, but Cisco beat them to the punch. Cisco’s deal practically doubled what AppDynamics would have received from the IPO, based on recent pricing estimates.

Earlier this week, AppDynamics announced that it intended to price its 12.0 million shares in the range of $12 to $14, with an overallotment option for an additional 1.8 million shares. At the maximum price, the offering was valued up to $193.2 million. However, this would never come to fruition.

Under the terms of the agreement, Cisco will acquire the company for $3.7 billion in cash and assumed equity awards. Cisco has a total market cap of nearly $155 billion.

It’s worth mentioning that AppDynamics’ revenues for the fiscal years ended January 31, 2014, 2015 and 2016 were $23.6 million, $81.9 million and $150.6 million, respectively.

Rowan Trollope, Cisco senior vice president and general manager of Cisco’s Internet of Things and Applications Business Group, commented:

Applications have become the lifeblood of a company’s success. Keeping those apps running and performing well has never been more important. 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. 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 help IT to drive a new level of business results.

AppDynamics offers an innovative, enterprise-grade application intelligence software platform that is uniquely positioned to enable enterprises to accelerate their digital transformations by actively monitoring, analyzing and optimizing complex application environments at scale.

Shares of Cisco were trading up 0.3% at $30.67 midday, with a consensus analyst price target of $33.11 and a 52-week trading range of $22.46 to $31.95.

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