Exactly two years ago, Cisco announced their intent to acquire AppDynamics, and to say that it’s been quite a ride is a huge understatement.
Since the acquisition, we welcomed Perspica to the family to enrich our machine learning capabilities, expanded product coverage into areas like Business IQ, .NET Core, Kubernetes, SAP, and Mainframe, and leveraged new routes to market through Cisco and our partner programs – all of which helped us accelerate the hyper growth in our business. It’s been an amazing journey that has increased our workforce by 50% and made us one of Glassdoor’s Best Places to Work in 2019.
But while there has been a lot of change, there has always been one constant: Commitment to our customers. Together with Cisco, our mission is to empower Agents of Transformation – great leaders who have the ambition and determination to drive positive change for their customers, and in turn, their organizations, teams, and personal careers.
AppDynamics has been empowering Agents of Transformation since the day we were founded, and with Cisco, our ability to inspire change has been multiplied. That’s why today, I couldn’t be more excited to share the next chapter in the AppDynamics and Cisco story: The Central Nervous System – our vision for AIOps.
AIOps is a Mindset
AIOps enables organizations to leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning to derive real-time insights and begin automating tasks to augment technology operations teams.
But much like DevOps, AIOps will require an internal cultural change – a mindset shift for teams to move away from siloed monitoring tools and reject the notion of emergency war rooms.
When teams embrace an AIOps mindset, endless debugging tasks will be a thing of the past. AI-based systems help identify root case, predict performance, recommend optimizations, and automate fixes in real-time. So now, the time originally spent doing mundane tasks can be better focused on driving new innovation for their business.
The Central Nervous System
A critical element of embracing the AIOps mindset is to have a platform that can take input from various data sources, analyze it, and automate action in real-time.
Similar to how the central nervous system takes input from all the senses and coordinates action throughout the human body, the Cisco and AppDynamics AIOps strategy is to deliver the “Central Nervous System” for IT operations. This gives customers broader visibility of their complex environments, derives AI-based insights, and automates IT tasks to free up resources to drive new innovation.
Bringing the Central Nervous System to Life
For a system of intelligence to work effectively, it needs to understand how application performance impacts business outcomes and customer experience – and that’s exactly what our Business iQ solution makes possible.
Now, powered by the robust data set generated by APM and Business IQ offerings, the AppDynamics Cognition Engine brings real-time insights to mission-critical application and business performance by using machine learning to go beyond problem detection, to root cause identification. Once root cause is identified and exposed through an API, IT teams can start to develop an automation framework for faster remediation and resource optimization.
And then there’s Cisco – a critical piece needed to power the Central Nervous System. It starts with the breadth and depth of the data. Cisco connects and monitors billions of network devices, lights up data centers for hundreds of thousands of customers, blocks over 20 billion security threats per day, and collects hundreds of trillions of application metrics per year. With a rich automation roadmap in place, bringing this massive data set together for cross-domain correlation with machine learning and AI will deliver insights that no other company can provide.
But that’s not all. Cisco’s diverse partner ecosystem will also help develop innovative offers and scale go-to-market efforts. And it’s all of these elements that will fuel the AIOps journey for our customers.
Empowering Agents of Transformation
Together with Cisco, we’re committed to helping our customers at every stage of their AIOps journey. We want to empower great leaders to drive real business transformation and make them Agents of Transformation for their organization and their industry. And with an AIOps mindset that values prediction over reaction, answers over investigation, and actions over analysis – I know that we will.
