1. Cisco Bets Big On AppDynamics

Purchase Price: $3.7 billion

Cisco snatched up AppDynamics one day before its planned IPO, paying a whopping $3.7 billion for the company. Partners said the tighter integration of applications to the network will vastly improve the end-user experience while opening up "an amazing new world" of opportunities for the channel around network refreshes. AppDynamics helps enterprises translate application data into business insight and provide end-to-end insight across their technology stack.

"[AppDynamics] is the fastest-growing software company out there," said Rowan Trollope, senior vice president and general manager for Cisco's IoT and Applications Group, who now leads its new AppDynamics division. "There's going to be opportunities in the near and medium term for us to combine and bring combined offers to the marketplace at least in the sales cycle. On the data center front, it's definitely an area where we're looking to leverage our sales force on the Cisco side to tie those together and see if we can bring even more deals to the table."