AppDynamics On The IPO Pipeline

According to a Gartner report, the application performance monitoring (APM) market was estimated to grow 5.4% from $2.01 billion in 2012 to $2.12 billion by the end of 2013. Another research conducted by TRAC on over 600 IT and business professionals revealed that 71% of the organizations surveyed were using multiple solutions to address issues related with application performance.

AppDynamics’s Offerings

AppDynamics was founded in 2008 by CA alumnus, Jyoti Bansal to provide to the industry APM tools to cater to the growing demand of distributed architectures. AppDynamics’s solutions are geared to perform in new environments while ensuring that not only do they provide visibility into the application and code-level detail, but are also more dynamic solutions that would learn from an application’s past performance. This capability allowed AppDynamics deliver products that could adapt to growth in scale and even address the demands of cloud based deployment.

They pride themselves in being able to offer a solution that is simple and able to monitor complex apps while ensuring that the app speed is not compromised. They started their operations to offer solutions that could detect application problems. But today, they are even able to fix these problems. Today, their customers use their solutions to monitor, troubleshoot, diagnose, and scale production applications. The monitoring aspect of their offering alerts the dev and ops team about an issue and helps identify both the business and the usage impact of the problem. These teams can then troubleshoot by looking at a detailed drill down up to the code level data to see code execution in the app server and the database. Finally, the ops team can automate by creating application run scripts to fix some of the more simple and common problems.

AppDynamics’s Financials

Over the past few years, AppDynamics has amassed over 500 customers including big names like Netflix, Expedia, and Cablevision Systems. They operate on a freemium model. Their basic pre-production licenses are available for free in which developers have access to basic diagnostics and alerts for problems such as stalls and slow transactions. The pro version of the tool which enables complete monitoring, diagnostics, and analytics is priced at $6,600 for a three year subscription for up to 5 agents. Prices for larger deployments vary. Detailed financials are not known, but market reports suggest that their revenues grew 165% during the first half of the previous year and they were trending to an annual run rate of $100 million by mid-2014.

They are venture funded and have raised $86.5 million in investments from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Greylock Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Institutional Venture Partners. Their last round of funding was held in January 2013 when they raised $50 million from existing investors and added Institutional Venture Partners as their investors. The company is now looking for an IPO, but they have not disclosed further timelines.