Cisco Announces Intent to Acquire AppDynamics | Hacker News Reader

Cisco Announces Intent to Acquire AppDynamics

blogs.cisco.com

87 pointsroobeelee59 comments

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.

Does the chart take liquidity preference into account?

Price clears liq pref, so yup - update tomorrow with new pricing

I guess the number would be different unless you have the details, e.g. their termsheets :)

Yes, but not substantially. They raised a little under $300 million. Even if all of the money raised had a (high) 2x liquidity preference, that still leaves $3.1B to be distributed among the stock holders.

It depends on termsheet, but in most cases liquidation preference only hits when final price is low. Otherwise investors will pick the percentage.

In fact in this case late stage investors had a contractual right to buy shares at IPO signaling strength of company. Don't feel took naff for they investors though :)

Is there a way to figure out how well employees did in this deal ?

Still waiting on official figures on employee retention to be announced, but it's fair to say all preferred concerted so whatever % employees owner will convert for a decent portion of the buy out price. Say the retention piece is 10% or $370M, an employee that had 0.10% should walk away with ~$3.3M ($3.7B x 90% x 0.10%) plus anything they get under retention

That's pretty good.

It looks like the acquisition price was about ~$14 or so. From the S1, it looks like the following:

2014 employees had strike prices of $1.70-$2.43 2015 employees had strike prices of $4.48-$7.02 2016 employees had strike prices of $8.10-$12.94

For the employees who didn't exercise and hold the shares for over a year, this exit might have been worse than an IPO. In the IPO scenario, they would have the option to hold the shares for more than a year which would make them eligible for long term capital gains. In this case, the employees with options will probably be taxed ordinary income tax which can be over 50% in some cases.

While they will still have a great exit, such a high tax rate is still painful. Sometimes for a company as solid as AppDynamics, it is worth it to exercise early.

If you don't have money to exercise early, companies like the Employee Stock Option Fund exist to help cover the costs of exercise and potential taxes.

(disclaimer: I work for the ESOFund)

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.

Taxes, death, and Cisco acquiring a company..

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?

They can try to buy Sumo Logic.

it's just analyzing machine data (logs) similar to popular tools such as Splunk, in real-time and anomaly detection.

This thread is about APM software, not log analyses. AppDynamics and New Relic and similar APM products offer a lot more insight.

So I guess that IPO ain't happening. They amended their S-1 today, so sounds like this was a pretty quickly made deal.

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1435043/000119312517...

Any ideas what they amended?

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.

See my above comment. Also, some employees and investors sold small stakes over the years meaning they got some cash in hand earlier.

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.

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.

My reading indicates that AppDynamics was going to be valued very similarly to New Relic, somewhere around $1.75B.

http://tomtunguz.com/appd-s-1/

http://seekingalpha.com/article/4037830-new-new-relic-side-s...

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.

They've been increasing the initial offer price the last week as demand was high. From $10 to $14 a share. That's a positive sign for them.

To then get bought out at 100% premium from that is massively prosperous exit. Consider their last private valuation was 1.9 billion it sounds like the investors, founders and employees all have reason to celebrate tonight.

Congrats to them all for this very fortunate exit.

FWIW I was prepared to short the heck out of this stock at that valuation, so perhaps it's good for them to get the liquidity now vs after a few quarters in a rough market.

Interesting. You clearly have more insight than me on this.

One thought on the premium to the final round... Late growth investors are still looking for 3X returns (Versus say 10X from early investors) and the earlier investments carry a liquidity discount. 2X is still very good, but it's not the return that will carry the losers in the fund.

And yes - they should all celebrate. As should the rest of us! Every unicorn that exits reduces the backlog, and provides more liquidity for the rest of us.

believe the investors (who had a contractual right to purchase additional shares in ipo) exercised that right, so there was actually expectation of good public market performance.

nothing beats a sure thing though... M&A valuation avoids having everyone watching the stock price daily

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.

Heard a rumor that there was a bidding war with Microsoft and IBM in the hunt so somehow 16x revenue makes sense.

Very interesting. Happy for them and if that rumor is true I'd expect New Relic to pop on that. Especially as their growth is as good, burn is less and have been well managed too.

At best this removes a potential suitor. If MSFT was trying to buy AppDynamics they may go after an alternative, but that's the only scenario where you revalue New Relic in light of this deal.

NEWR up 20% pre market.

Looks like the initial reception is positive, yep (more like 10-15%, it'll be interesting to see where it settles). If it goes up enough I'll short it, too -- horribly overpriced tool. :)

Does AppDynamics have some appreciable lock in that would make Microsoft want to buy them, rather than compete?

For one, AppDynamics contracts are usually three years.

We just implemented AppDynamics. I can't say this hits me as good news. Hopefully Cisco is hands off with them.

How is AppDynamics compared to the other tools in your experience?

Not the OP but I prefer New Relic's User Interface. AppDynamics has much better Java integration though. Stackify has been trying to make waves and is certainly an option for .Net

We've literally just implemented it, as in this month, and I wasn't involved in the selection process, so I can't say I have a very strong opinion yet. On first blush, it's very similar to NewRelic, with a slightly clunkier UI and a saner price tag.

I've been using AppD for 2+ years, and it is better than nothing.

I have many complaints: Flash UI, data is rolled up almost immediately, use of averages, lots of capability is provided by ancient and unmaintained third party plugins. They have weird notions of compatibility (agent has to be same major version as controller) which leads to heartache when they don't migrate your SaaS controller when they said they would. Worst of all is several times the Java agent itself has been the source of a memory leak. I would expect more based on the price.

More recently, they have started trying to be all things to all people instead of being a fair-to-middling APM. Make it so I don't throw up in my mouth every time I use the UI and then we can talk.

Wouldn't it be nice to have the same level of visibility as AppDynamics without worrying about agent compatibility?

Disclaimer: I work at a startup that is in the same space as AppDynamics

New Relic and AppDynamics are quite similar and best in class. AppDynamics offers not only a cloud version but also on-premise installation. AppDynamics still uses Flash in parts of the UI, and the UI is more old-school but shows more data details. New Relic has a more polished UI, older parts are typical Rails pre-web 2.0 pages, newer parts are AJAX heavy modern. AppDynamics shows a map of all network components, New Relic map is quite new and more like an afterthought. Both use agents for several programming languages. All other alternatives have far worse offerings (either only good for one language, worse detail level, even bigger costs or just very outdated software) - incl two Thoma Bravo owned properties, Dell, MS, CA, etc

AppDynamics would have been one of the first SV IPO in 2017. How many SV tech IPOs will we actually see in 2017?

In my organization AppDynamics' reputation couldn't be worse, they could never deliver on their promises even after months of consultancy, never ending back and forth with support to fix what ended up being a network issue on their side, in the case of my team they caused 2 P1 production incidents with their buggy agents. And that's without mentioning their slow UI. Wouldn't recommend this to anyone, we hacked together in a few weeks a solution with graphite/grafana that runs circles around it. Perhaps they have more value for client facing systems because otherwise I cannot understand how they are still in business.

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.

What you say might be true in a lot of cases but I know of one case (Ubiquisys) where they were not hands off probably because it was too close to their core business and also because they had a similar internal product.

Now Cisco have given up on the whole small cells idea. And a lot of it is because of their botched management practices and some of it is also due to Ubiquisys' own inefficiencies.

I'm not saying Cisco is great --- far from it. I'm saying that their M.O. does not usually include acquihiring and shuttering products.

Interesting to see Facebook mentioned considering Parse

I can confirm this, working for Cisco in a unit that was acquired almost 2 years ago.

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.

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.

It's questionable that any IPO this quarter would be hot. Lots of shadows and cold wind about.

Does this bode well or badly for Snap and Spotify's IPOs?

Probably zero impact given that they're in different industries...

Doubt it matters since they are different segments. Snapchat and Spotify are consumer technologies where as App Dynamics is a software and services company.

any advantage over open source apps like graphite

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.

To add -- a better comparison in the open-source world might be Zipkin or Pinpoint, which aim to offer similar tracing capabilities with language integrations.

so, AppDynamics is like mysql and graphite is like innodb? so we need something more intelligent on top of service like graphite to match appdynamics

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