Cisco recently announced its intentions to acquire Kubernetes startup Replex, a governance and cost management platform provider, to scale AppDynamics. The news was announced by AppDynamics’ GM Linda Tong. 

AppDynamics is a leading business observability platform provider that Cisco acquired in 2017. Cisco believes that the acquisition of Replex will help AppDynamics to expand its product capabilities in cloud-native environments. Some of the biggest changes are expected in their application infrastructure monitoring offerings, using AI and machine learning. The platform also offers a unified view of the entire application ecosystem, thus helping align IT, DevOps, and businesses around the information essential to protect the revenue and improve customer experiences.

What does Replex do?

Replex is a governance and cloud cost management platform built for cloud-native environments. It helps solve issues arising from decentralized governance and data management, thus saving the enterprises from ballooning costs. Replex provides IT and finance teams with a centralized view of costs and resource allocation. It assists development teams with accountability scoreboards. Thus it helps the teams know what resources are being used, at what price, and where. The teams can further optimize the use of resources and costs.

Linda Tong said:

"Replex’s deep expertise in Kubernetes, real-time data extraction, and analytics will further strengthen AppDynamics’ world-class product and engineering team as we accelerate the delivery of Cisco’s full-stack observability vision."

How will this collaboration benefit Cisco?

Observability is a fast-growing segment in the technology space. This involves monitoring apps by pulling data from logs and metrics and tracing to help teams identify any issues and resolve them promptly. Cisco has been eyeing the observability space for quite a while. In December 2020, Cisco strengthened the AppDynamics platform by acquiring Dashbase Inc., an events and log analytics software provider.

Full-stack observability has become key to solving complex technological challenges from shortcomings in any code at the backend to monitoring usage costs. Cloud cost visibility is low due to various components, like network, storage, and computing that require a proper understanding. In an attempt to swiftly migrate to cloud, many companies follow a lift-n-shift strategy bringing the same challenges of excess capacity of memory or storage to cloud. If the applications are not optimized for cloud infrastructure, the underlying costs remain the same resulting in increasing costs. Cloud makes it difficult to track these costs as it follows a decentralized management approach. Many companies jumped the bandwagon when the cloud was introduced in the market without understanding how much of it could be really helpful and ended up paying a huge price.

For these reasons, we at G2 expect to see observability continue to be a key part of a firm’s cost management strategy. Acquisitions of AppDynamics, Dashbase, and now Replex by Cisco address the growing interest in this space. 

We also expect Cisco to take complete advantage of Replex’s workload optimization. Workload optimization helps enterprises get a better view of resource usage and reduces costs. Cisco has very meticulously strategized its full-stack observability expansion through this acquisition. As the networking solutions giant has been expanding into SaaS for quite some time, this news comes as another feature addition to their ever-expanding product offerings.

With the increasing consumption of cloud services, it has become crucial for companies to keep a track of costs associated with it. Enterprise companies have initiated the first step of cloud governance policies by adopting cloud cost management software. 

G2 helps recognize suitable cloud cost management platforms for you

Data on G2 shows how companies are beginning to accept that cost management platforms help them track resource allocation and further save costs. During the pandemic, many companies adopted cloud services for remote work, education, even healthcare services such as telemedicine. However, the lack of detailed vision into IT infrastructure plans and strategies drove several companies to pay large amounts of cloud cost charges and were negatively impacted by ever-increasing costs. As economies have begun to rebuild themselves, cloud cost management has emerged as a new focus area. Companies are beginning to realize the different ways to manage cloud costs and are looking for software to support the same. The Cloud Cost Management category has seen the highest traffic in June 2021 and has increased by 4.44% from February 2020 to June 2021.

Another G2 category that has observed the expected sharp traffic growth is the Cloud Infrastructure Monitoring category with a 195.75% increase from February 2020 to June 2021.

Organizations have realized the importance of making engineering teams aware and responsible for managing and optimizing overall costs. Cloud cost management software makes their lives easier by providing all the infrastructure visibility they need in one place. Cloud infrastructure monitoring tools help teams track the performance of their applications. As Cisco acquires Replex, G2 expects to see more M&A activity happening in the observability space to ensure that customers can take a proactive stance to track and diagnose issues before they occur and have greater control over the IT infrastructure environment.