F5 has been in the industry for 20 years and is still the top player. How did it become the top player in application delivery?

[51CTO.com original article] A financial client once told the reporter when discussing the road to informatization development that in 2000, their information team often said, "F5 is under pressure here, and the subsidiary has put forward the demand for F5. It seems that we have to buy more F5." The reporter believes that what the client said is true and not exaggerated, because from 1999 to 2003, F5 almost monopolized the entire Chinese market and became synonymous with load balancing. Once people have the demand for load balancing, the first thing they think of is F5.

It is certainly difficult for a company to make its products perfect and win unanimous praise from users in this field, but it is possible to do so. However, it is not easy to grow rapidly with this field, to accurately grasp the future direction at every market turning point, and to always stand at the "forefront" of the market for 20 years. What is admirable is that F5 has done it, and has been doing it well. From load balancing, application delivery to application services, F5 has always been at the forefront of the global market.

Just last month, the 2018 F5 China Application Service Summit was held in Beijing and Shanghai. F5, together with nine vendors including Huawei, AWS, and VMware, delivered speeches ranging from macro to micro, from cloud to container, from API protection to secure situational awareness, and shared cases on how to provide high-quality application services in a multi-cloud environment. F5's influence is self-evident as it attracted so many industry leaders to attend. The reporter also recorded many of the speakers' wonderful views on the spot, which I believe will be very instructive for practitioners in this field.

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Huang Yanwen, president of F5 Greater China, said that in the 2018 application delivery report, F5 found that 87% of companies have begun using multi-cloud platforms and multi-cloud environments. In the application deployment process, F5 also found that more than half of the security incidents targeted applications as the initial attack target. Therefore, as enterprise users move to private and public clouds, how to control north-south traffic and how to better integrate it into the east-west traffic API scheduling environment have become the primary issues that the industry generally needs to solve. This is consistent with F5's vision - to provide application services in a multi-cloud environment to make enterprise users' applications faster, smarter, and more secure.

Adam Judd, global vice president of F5, revealed that there is a popular saying in the world now, "Digital is the new hard currency" and another saying is "Applications are the engine driving the development of the entire digital economy." This is enough to show the importance of applications in future economic development. He said that when enterprise applications begin to enter a multi-cloud environment, they will face four most typical challenges: one is how to provide consistent security strategies for all enterprise applications, the second is to protect applications from threats, the third is to optimize application performance, and the fourth is to fully understand the application status. "F5 is committed to providing customers with better application services, including consistent security strategies and comprehensive protection of business applications, protection of applications from threats, and visualization and monitoring of application performance optimization and application health."

After F5 shared its judgment on the future development trend of application delivery, the most concerned thing is their technological evolution. Wu Jingtao, chief technology officer of F5 Greater China, summarized F5's technology development strategy into five letters, namely F5's "ABCDE" - through "AI Ops" and machine learning, using F5 as the network data engine of "BigData", to achieve "DevOps" visualization and improve "user Experience" in the "Cloud" environment. "The IT industry is full of big waves. In the past, there have been thousands of products that have not withstood the test of the market and have been washed away in the wave of applications. But I believe that with the ABCDE technology strategy, F5 will continue to lead the application service market and smoothly enter the multi-cloud environment." Wu Jingtao emphasized.

F5's development strategy for application delivery has also been highly recognized by its partners. According to Wang Hui, vice president of Huawei's network product line, F5 is an important strategic partner of Huawei. In the process of cooperation between Huawei and F5, the two sides have developed solutions such as active-active data centers and disaster recovery backup. These solutions have begun to be commercially used overseas, such as Singapore Telecom in 2017. "Through cooperation with F5, the reliability, flexibility and openness of the entire SDN network of the data center have indeed been improved."

It is understood that F5 has promised to establish a testing R&D center in Beijing, develop local talents in China, and launch new solutions suitable for the Chinese market. The reporter believes that this is the first step in F5's localization strategy and a big step to take root in the Chinese market. F5's next 20 years in China are worth looking forward to.

[51CTO original article, please indicate the original author and source as 51CTO.com when reprinting on partner sites]