Application intelligence leader AppDynamics just finished a massive round of funding securing $120 million in growth financing. This new financing raises the total capital gathered by AppDynamics to over $200 million and will fund the expansion of its Application Intelligence Platform m into the IT Operations and Business Analytics markets.

Jyoti Bansal, founder and CEO at AppDynamics, argues that Application Intelligence is rapidly becoming the go-to technology for modern enterprises to manage application performance.

According to the 2013 Gartner Market Share Analysis: IT Operations Management Software report the Application Performance Management market represents a $4 to $5 billion per year market and the wider IT Operations Management space encompasses $20 billion per year.

This funding continues AppDynamics growth from previous years that situated the company as an Application Performance Management innovator. AppDynamics received $20 million in 2012 (Series C) and was named best cloud computing company to work for by Forbes in 2013.

As more companies make the shift to the cloud and find mobile dominating their business-cycle, the number of applications they need to support has continued to expand. Software applications no longer just support the back-office of enterprise, but have become the core of customer engagement.

The Application Performance Management platform developed by AppDynamics gives businesses insight into the current and historical health of applications with visualization, dashboards, and opens up opportunities to detect and fix bottlenecks, and identify the root cause of faults.

The architectural shift to cloud, mobile, and DevOps

To facilitate the paradigm shift happening in the industry right now, AppDynamics seeks to enable automated features and intelligence that give a boost to cloud computing, mobile, and the adoption of agile and DevOps practices. To do this, a new generation of software that can automate fault detection and resolution in applications is needed by IT and DevOps teams to deal with problems.

AppDynamics believes that a new approach to managing IT and development is being defined by the role of applications versus the previous paradigm of centering on infrastructure.

The platform delivered by AppDynamics seeks to allow the Operations, Developers, and Business aspects of businesses to best use the role of applications to maximize business performance and customer satisfaction. The platform encompasses performance monitoring, user experience monitoring, infrastructure monitoring, deployment automation, automatic remediation, and operational analytics.

With its latest platform release in March 2014, the company’s Application Intelligence Platform provides the broadest and deepest visibility and management of software applications leveraging JAVA, .Net, node.js, PHP, NoSQL, SQL, Native Mobile and browser-based apps, NetApp Storage, IBM dataPower, Tibco, MongoDB and through its open platform APIs over 100 critical enterprise technologies such as Microsoft Azure, AWS, Pivotal, F5 and Hadoop.

The DevOps rapid-lifecycle of develop, test, release combined with ever increasing pools of applications in the field that need to be updated along with supporting older versions means ever increasing complexity for customer care. Automating more testing, monitoring, and deployment means more time DevOps can spend on quashing fires before they happen.

SaaS and go-to-market model for AppDynamics APM

AppDynamics argues that complex, slow-to-configure and deploy software with heavy professional support is no longer fit for the modern nimble enterprise. To better fit into the APM market niche, the AppDynamics APM platform has been designed with a go-to-market strategy in mind, allowing customers to choose hybrid SaaS/on-premises deployments, easy-to-deploy freemium offerings, and start-small-but-expand buying options.

This sort of flexibility in service provisioning should make AppDynamics a capable service for any business that wants to start employing better monitoring and analytics right out of the box.

AppDynamics believes these offerings from SaaS, on-prem, freemium-forever, and try-and-buy models make its platform unique among its competitors.

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