Cisco to acquire Perspica and merge it into its previous acquisition AppDynamics

Cisco, the global enterprise services giant, plans to Perspica, a machine learning-driven operations analytics firm and intends to fold Perspica’s team into AppDynamics, the company it purchased earlier this year for $3.7 billion. Over the past several years, Cisco has been spending its considerable cash to buy companies and transform into more of a services company from its current position of a networking hardware firm. The firm plans to apply Perspica’s domain knowledge around machine learning and streaming data directly to AppDynamics by embedding the engineering team with AppDynamics

While AppDynamics CEO David Wadhwani says his company has its share of data scientists, this deal brings a new influx of talent (although they were not sharing exactly how many employees are coming from Perspica) and one that understands a kind of machine learning. Instead of analyzing the data after it’s placed in the database, Perspica brings machine learning to data in real time as it streams into the system, and for a company like AppDynamics, this could prove very useful, especially as they monitor increasing amounts of data from a variety of endpoints. This is a future-proofing strategy for Cisco. While Cisco’s hardware business may be in decline, if it has services like these in place, it could still thrive as a company.