Application performance and security is an aspect that’s often considered an afterthought, but as we are relying on technology more and more, it’s important to think about it from the beginning. That’s why, it has become critical in today’s day and age. AppDynamics – an application performance monitoring company acquired by Cisco in 2017 – ranks high in this aspect. Hence, we were glad to talk to Abhilash Purushothaman, Regional Director (India & SAARC), about his journey, AppDynamics’ current focus, what it’s working on, and its roadmap.
PS: The interview has been edited for the sake of brevity.
Table of Contents
1. Before we begin talking about AppDynamics, our readers would love to know your journey into the world of SaaS?
My SaaS journey started way back when I was still writing code. We incubated a product that looked like it existed, but there was no way to download it, however you could sign-up for a trial and use it. Back then, SaaS wasn’t an acronym, and we never realized what we had built until many years later when AWS, Google and Salesforce created the market.
Personally, I’ve been amazed by how SaaS companies have broken down brick walls and redefined paradigms that we once thought was sacred. Originating from a fundamental technology tenant of changing the delivery and consumption model, SaaS companies have created alternate revenue and growth metrics (ARR, MRR etc.), leveraged social media beyond our imaginations (podcasts, blogs), bootstrapped from zero to millions of dollars of ARR in no time, and even made salaries transparent and public (like what Buffer did).
2. Could you explain what exactly Application Performance Monitoring means?
Applications are the lifeblood of any business. But they’re only as good as their ability to keep running and effectively serve end users and the business. Downtime, application failures and the associated finger pointing and the eventual scrambling for a solution is never good. It costs businesses time & money. Modern Application Performance Management (APM), and observability platforms, enable enterprises to get on the front foot, fix problems before they impact customers and the business, and prioritize actions based on the business impact.
APM is a set of tools that allow the IT team to observe and manage all the application environments, the applications, what makes them run in production, the delivered user experiences, and the business outcomes. It identifies the root cause of issues and quickly resolves them via automated or manual responses. It speeds up the time to respond for an application issue that needs attention. If done well, the end users often won’t not even notice there was an issue in the first place.
3. AppDynamics also talks about application security, could you highlight why it shouldn’t be ignored by enterprises?
The attack surface for security is increasing, and the threat actors are far more sophisticated than they were five to ten years ago. One specific area of vulnerability is the application. Organizations are increasingly reliant on applications to engage with and deliver services to customers, which leads to huge volumes of personal user data being housed within the application. As a result, organizations face increased vulnerability to cyber threats and security incidents. This challenge is further exacerbated as they continue to support more employees working from home who are using laptops and devices connected to the public internet.
Businesses need confidence in application performance without the fear of significant damage to brand reputation and customer trust. A slow or under-performing application can significantly impact the user experience, but when an application’s security is breached and exploited, it can be life altering for the end user. Companies simply cannot afford to ignore the risk.
4. Could you tell us what ties the various offerings by AppDynamics together? Also, share about the recently launched Secure Applications solution.
At AppDynamics, our vision is to empower businesses to thrive by turning performance into profit. At the centre of this is the AppDynamics Business Observability platform.
The AppDynamics Business Observability platform. enables organizations to see problems across the complete environment and gives traditionally disparate teams – infrastructure, network, security, application – the data necessary to quickly identify root causes and fix them, often before the user even knows there’s a problem. It helps technologists to observe what matters by applying a business lens to full-stack observability and IT performance, focusing on what matters most, and delivering a world-class digital experience and true business value.
Security forms an important part of this vision. AppDynamics and Cisco recently announced Cisco Secure Application.
Secure Application ensures continuous vulnerability assessment and protection by scanning code execution to prevent known exploits. Vulnerability data is correlated to the application and business context so that application and security teams can prioritize, execute, and track remediation by business impact.
5. What are the challenges for AppDynamics that are unique to India, as a market?
India represents a growing market opportunity for AppDynamics. We are committed to the region and to helping enterprises deliver flawless digital experiences to customers and employees. We have an R&D center as well as a Support center based out of Bangalore that contributes to some of the new innovative solutions we bring to market.
Last year AppDynamics announced the availability of its Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering in Asia, enabling customers to access AppDynamics solutions via a local cloud location. Situated in India and built on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Mumbai region, the offering is available to AppDynamics customers in India and throughout Asia. AppDynamics’ SaaS offering in Asia opens up a whole new market – particularly in India – and creates a real and differentiated value proposition for our existing and prospective customers. Enterprises can now choose our industry leading, business centric observability platform via a local SaaS offering and deploy AppDynamics solutions more rapidly and drive faster outcomes for their businesses without having to worry about Data Residency regulations.
6. Cisco is a networking giant, so could you give us some insights as to why it acquired AppDynamics four years ago? And how AppDynamics has evolved under Cisco?
As part of Cisco, we are uniquely positioned to deliver true, full-stack observability, but more importantly, we are adding the business context needed to pinpoint problems and prioritize fixes based on the impact to revenue.
Together, Cisco and AppDynamics give businesses the ability to know where the strengths and weaknesses lie inside the IT architecture and deliver the sort of consistently excellent digital experiences that customers and employees demand. We reinforce full-stack observability by combining the power of application performance monitoring with AppDynamics, network monitoring with ThousandEyes, infrastructure optimization with Intersight. and application security with the new Cisco Secure Application solution.
7. How does AppDynamics stand out from other APM tools?
The AppDynamics Business Observability platform is the only platform that enables technologists to monitor the full IT stack – from customer and employee-facing applications right through to low level infrastructure – and then link IT performance with business outcomes. With the latest announcement around our acquisition of ThousandEyes and the Secure Application capability, we stand truly differentiated in being able to offer end-to-end observability across every that’s critical to business and IT operations.
8. How has the ongoing pandemic affected AppDynamics – both in terms of businesses and no of users?
Our customers have faced unprecedented levels of pressure over the last 12 months since the pandemic started. We recently launched the ‘Agents of Transformation 2021: The Rise of Full-Stack Observability’ report, the data showed that technologists implemented digital transformation projects faster in 2020 than in any previous year – on an average, three times faster.
Cisco AppDynamics is committed to helping technologists as they continue to spearhead their organizations’ responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in an ever-more complex IT environment, providing the technology, technical support, and training they need to prosper. At the start of the pandemic, we announced the AppDynamics COVID-19 Assist Program to support customers during these challenging times.
9. Any new features / products that AppDynamics is working on?
We are very excited about the potential for Cisco Secure Applications and opportunities this provides to our customers. We are also very excited about how AppDynamics, Thousand Eyes and Secure Applications combine to give incremental value for our existing customer base in India.
10. What are your favorite SaaS products out there?
There are some great success stories out there. Along with that, there are also many niche cool ones. Personally, the ones that I find interesting are Hubstaff, Wix, Slack, Trello, Mixpanel, Basecamp, and a personal favorite, Grammarly.
