Day One at F5 Agility EMEA 2015

This year Agility EMEA has landed in Edinburgh and it’s bigger and better than ever before. 1,000 delegates from our customers, partners and employees have come together to discuss how we can innovate in application delivery while ensuring applications are secure and customers can manage them effectively, in whatever environment they choose.

After a morning spent in the Solutions Expo and catching up at the Genius Zone with our experts, the keynote sessions kicked off with Lizzie Cohen-Laloum, Senior Vice President, EMEA Sales, outlining the speed at which adoption of technology has advanced over the last year. Following the 2014 event where many customers spoke of SDN proof-of-concepts being in the works, this year’s focus was very much on hybrid (with SDN almost accepted as a given in many large organisations).

In fact, Lizzie revealed that more than 80% of F5 customers in EMEA are adopting or looking at adopting a hybrid environment. Lizzie also revealed that 20% of customers haven’t yet identified a comprehensive identity and access management policy, while a further 20% don’t have the analytics to understand the economics of whether it is best to deploy apps from their own datacentres or the cloud.

Our soon-to-be-CEO Manny Rivelo (currently Executive Vice President, Strategic Solutions), then took to the stage to reinforce the fundamental role applications are playing in the modern enterprise. By innovating through new licensing options and services available through the cloud, this year has seen F5 change the pace of how solutions across application delivery, availability and security are delivered to businesses around the world. With a commitment that under his leadership F5 will continue to provide for its customers the opportunity and tools to deliver the most secure, fast and reliable applications to anyone anywhere at any time, the remainder of the event will dive into the detail as to how businesses and partners can join the revolution.

Ahead of the partner discussions with lead sponsors Cisco, HP and VMware, Dean Darwin, Senior Vice President Marketing, outlined the “Innovate, Expand, Deliver” F5 mantra, how the latest acquisitions and product announcements are contributing to the F5 portfolio and how the new options available to the market will deliver value to businesses. Again, hybrid was core – in Dean’s own words, “hybrid application services are the future of this company”.

We’re expecting to see these themes run for the rest of the event as we move onto the breakout sessions and further keynotes on day two, and are interested to see the different takes on them by the forthcoming speakers.

Of course we couldn’t have gone through the day without celebrating the incredible successes of our leader of the past fifteen years. John McAdam took to the stage to hand over to Manny, swiftly joined (much to his surprise) by four members of the Lisbon Lions – the legendary Celtic European Cup winning side from 1967.

Tonight we’ll descend on Edinburgh Castle where we can celebrate a hugely successful year and enjoy some whisky tasting, Scottish fancy dress and general merriment, ahead of another information packed day tomorrow. We’ll see you then!