Cisco To Scoop Up Smartlook As Tech Giant Prioritizes Observability, Digital Experience

In its third planned acquisition of the year, Cisco reveals its move to buy qualitative analytics provider Smartlook to boost Cisco AppDynamics’ Full-Stack Observability Digital Experience Monitoring offering.

Cisco Systems Thursday revealed plans to buy Smartlook, a provider of qualitative analytics for websites and mobile apps, to boost Cisco AppDynamics’ Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM).

Smartlook is a privately held company based in Brno, Czech Republic, that specializes in Real User Monitoring (RUM) as a critical component of DEM, the tech giant said in a blog post on the pending deal.

Cisco AppDynamics, the company’s application performance monitoring software business, combined with Smartlook, will give Cisco a “big step forward” with its Full-Stack Observability (FSO) DEM offering, with new application and user experience insight, analytics and troubleshooting capabilities, said Ronak Desai, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco AppDynamics and FSO.

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“Smartlook takes an enhanced industry approach to RUM. … It utilizes session recordings with event-based analytics to analyze end-user digital behavior and provides insights into user interactions in the production application environments. This enables organizations to efficiently troubleshoot hard-to-replicate digital behavior anomalies and analyze user interaction trends across web and mobile application platforms, helping them to optimize user experiences and business outcomes,” Desai said of the company.

FSO lets IT teams bring together telemetry data from their own content and serve up correlated insight across the entire IT estate, whether they are DevOps engineers, site reliability engineers, Cloud Ops, ITOps, line of business or members of the C-suite. Performance impact and experience tracing can be seen through the lens of network issues and security vulnerabilities, according to Cisco.

Cisco’s own FSO Platform is slated for general availability in June.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Smartlook, founded in 2016, has 51 to 100 employees, according to Crunchbase. The Smartlook team will join Cisco’s FSO and AppDynamics team. The two companies expect the deal to close during the fourth quarter of Cisco’s Fiscal Year 23, which ends July 31.

Smartlook is the third announced acquisition for Cisco this year. In March, the company unveiled plans to acquire Lightspin, a cloud security software company, as the networking giant carries out its mission to unify its security portfolio. Earlier in February, Cisco revealed plans to buy Valtix, a privately held cloud network security startup that specializes in multi-cloud network security for tAmazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and Oracle.