F5 Talks Application Optimization, Security with TMCnet at Interop

When F5 Technologies was founded in 1996, not many knew that the concept for the company stemmed from a project that was completed at the University of Washington in which students were trying to figure out how to improve the online gaming process.

“Multi-user online games had a lot of issues over dial-up,” Alan Murphy, senior technical marketing manager of F5, told TMCnet at Interop (News - Alert) 2011 in New York City on Wednesday. “It was really slow; you would make a move in the game and 30 seconds later the player would move. Students studied the interaction between users over the network, and at our core we have not changed.”

“We came from people who got tired of waiting for the little player to move around,” he added.

More than two decades later, the core value proposition of F5 has not changed as the company’s goal is to deliver applications to users. The company handles application optimization, availability and security, whether on-premise or cloud-based; it sits between the users and the applications and functions as a device that proxies all data back and forth between the user and the data center.

F5 refers to the place where it sits as “the strategic point of control,” according to Murphy.

According to company officials, F5 is the only vendor that provides an open architectural framework, offering IT organizations new ways to deliver services that generate true business value.

The company attracts everyone from mid- to high-level enterprises to Fortune 500s, 100s, and 50s to financial and credit card companies. Moreover, F5 has a large presence amongst service providers as it is located in all 10 of the top 10 worldwide service provider networks. Some of F5’s most well-known customers include Facebook (News - Alert) and Sprint.

Having been in the space for more than two decades, F5 has certainly seen a lot of changes in the industry.

“On a macro level, 15 years ago we saw companies build data centers; they built these monolithic resource buildings next to power plants,” Murphy said. “Now customers are really starting to figure out how can I make the most use with the least amount of resources.”

“People are saying we need those services – for email to always be up and for the website to always be up – but we have to do with a smaller footprint,” he added. “That is no question why virtualization took off.”

For F5, as new trends like virtualization and cloud computing emerge, the company stands well positioned to fit into these new trends since its focus is infrastructure. Specifically, as customers move from internal data centers to the cloud and want more applications, they have to worry about how to get users to those particular assets. That’s where F5 comes in.

F5 makes sure the assets are secure and that users can manage applications’ response times.

“We were very fortunate during the economic downturn because companies looked inside and said, ‘We should spend money on infrastructure that lasts 10 to 15 years,’” Murphy said.

In an effort to maintain its competitive edge, at Interop this week F5 unveiled its new IPv6 Solution Services offering, an offering that will help organizations address their need to establish a presence on the IPv6 Internet as new IPv6-only devices flood the market and the available supply of IPv4 addresses dwindles. F5 has also announced that its BIG-IP solutions are deployed in the Network Operations Center (NOC (News - Alert)) at Interop New York.

“The goal of the turnkey package is to let customers know that if they are thinking about IPV6 translation, they don’t have to be intimated or re-architect the entire solution,” Murphy said. “There are solutions that allow them to easily migrate as needed.”

“If you want a professional service offering you can call us up and we can help you do that from day one,” he added. “We come in and learn about your technology and how you are using IPV6 and create a solution so you can migrate today.”