Dive Brief:

• Cisco announced Tuesday plans to buy business software firm AppDynamics Inc., an application intelligence software company, for approximately $3.7 billion, according to a Cisco announcement.

• Cisco's moves comes just days before AppDynamics was set to price its IPO, Ars Technica reports. 

• AppDynamics says it monitors the performance of its customers' business applications to try to uncover flaws and performance issues before they happen. "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, will help IT to drive a new level of business results,” said Rowan Trollope, Cisco senior vice president and general manager of Cisco's Internet of Things and Applications Business Group.

Dive Insight:

The acquisition is viewed as a key step as Cisco works to pivot away from its traditional network services to more modern offerings in IoT, cloud and enterprise business process improvement.

"With the acquisition of AppDynamics, Cisco has finally broken out of its network box once and for all, in a very big way," said Milan Hanson, senior analyst at Forrester. "Cisco’s June 2016 introduction of Tetration analytics hinted that Cisco was going after more than just networks, and this move gives Tetration plenty to analyze — networks of course, but now also every other aspect of applications and infrastructure."

Cisco also was quick to snatch up AppDynamics. With the company's IPO looming, there was only a brief period of time where Cisco could really step in for an acquisition before AppDynamics went public. Now, Cisco can offer customers enhanced performance on internal business processes, another break from its traditional business offerings.