Mobile World Congress – Day 1

What a great start to Mobile World Congress today. We arrived at the F5 Networks booth and it looks great! For those that don’t know what I am talking about, Mobile World Congress is one of the largest, if not the largest, wireless networking trade show. We are here to talk about our current solutions such as Traffix Signaling Delivery Controller, BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager, and BIG-IP Global Traffic Manager for the communications service providers (CSP) as well as our solutions that were recently released, BIG-IP Policy Enforcement Manager, BIG-IP Carrier Grade NAT and BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager. Mobile World Congress is held in Barcelona, Spain and we are at the Fira Gran Via facility, a very nice and expansive venue. There are an estimated 70,000 people attending the show this year!

There are eight (!) separate halls housing all of the exhibitors including F5 Networks. This includes all of the key manufacturers, many of the mobile CSPs and various application and solution providers. These halls contain approximately 1500 exhibitors! By the way, if you are attending the event, you can find F5 at 6E120 in hall 6. We have a lot of cool people to talk to, including key technical personnel, members of product management and all those cool F5 people that you heard about but never got a chance to meet.

At the show, we are doing two fun promotions. The first is the Claw game, where we have one of those machines where you try to position a claw over items to pick them up. You probably remember losing a lot of quarters trying to win that stuffed animal that you wanted. The game was also featured in the movie Toy Story. Today we already had an attendee win an iPad mini and another win a set of Bose speakers in addition to countless other participants who won many other cool F5 items! We also have a contest for Mobile World Congress attendees to apply one of our F5 temporary tattoos and take a creative picture and post it on Twitter mentioning F5 for a chance to win big money!

The show is vibrant with a lot of new products and solutions. I will spend time over the next few days learning about what is hot and what is just lukewarm.  Look for some cool updates about technology and what you might be able to do with your mobile phone in the near future.  You can follow what is going on during the show by following our Twitter account, @F5CSP in addition to looking for updates on this blog.