F5 Forum London 2013: Nathan Pearce on Context and the Intelligent Services Framework

F5 have a series of country-based customer forums that we hold every year.  As we get bigger, they get better attended, by more and more senior people from our customers and partners.  It’s been really interesting to see how they have evolved as F5 hit and surpassed the billion $ revenue mark 18 months ago or so.  Today, it’s the UK’s turn.

@pearcenathan was one of the main speakers.  He covered off the challenges of application delivery and how the category even came about, going back a lifetime ago to 2004 when a number of different functionalities – load balancing, web application firewalls and others – began to be integrated onto one platform focused on delivering not simply a series of network functionalities but the applications themselves.  As entities in their own right.

This represents a profound change and underpins what sets F5 apart.

Bringing us up to date, F5 deliver what we call an intelligent services framework.  We deliver an abstraction from users and servers and apply context to both, by dint of acting as a strategic point of control within the network.  F5 sit in between the users and applications, directly in the traffic flow as a full proxy.  This delivers three core things to customers.

Fast.  Available.  Secure.

Working directly with the world’s biggest application vendors – Microsoft, Oracle etc. – we deliver Fast, Available and Secure to large enterprises and service providers in the UK and across the world.  In practice, the F5 intelligent services framework allows customers to make intelligent decisions about how applications are delivered.  For instance, why deliver a high quality image to a user on a smartphone? 

F5 also allows effective policies to be developed.  Want your mobile sales team to only be allowed access to certain apps when logging in from an unsecured device?  No problem.  Unrestricted access to the network only when using a corporate desktop inside the network perimeter.  Sure.

Learn (much) more here about how F5 allows intelligence and context to be applied to application delivery.