A brief history of (F5) time

John McAdam, F5’s CEO and Chairman, was the first keynote speaker at Agility 2013.  He talked about the history of the company, much of which is known, but drew attention in particular to a couple of items; the LineRate acquisition, whose technology is to do with application layer SDN, the opening of F5’s London and New York International Technology Centres.  The latter drives massive preference for F5 amongst our customers.  Once they visit, try our technology in (effectively) their own environments in tandem with other partner technologies, it demonstrates why F5 is generally the right choice.

And then TMOS – our platform.  We remain the only full proxy strategic control point in the data centre, and aim to be in the cloud or hybrid environments too.  The secret sauce here is the platform’s modularity; everything F5 works on the same platform, so a web application firewall can be found on a BIG-IP device along with Local Traffic Manager.

Wrapping up, John drew attention to our customer satisfaction levels; currently at 9.2/10, this is a source of tremendous pride for the company and is a key performance indicator right up to board level.  What follows – and I will cover as many as I can, in-between video shoots with customers and partners – are more in-depth slots on security, connections, scale and F5’s place in helping customers overcome these challenges.