2018 F5 China Application Service Summit Forum was successfully held

The "F5 China Application Service Summit Forum", which has been held for many consecutive years and has received widespread attention in the industry, was successfully held in Beijing on May 22, 2018 and in Shanghai on May 24. At this conference, F5, together with many domestic and foreign long-term strategic partners including Huawei, AWS, VMware, and Digital China, shared with more than a thousand on-site guests and nearly 3,500 online live viewers the mainstream trends in the development of China's IT industry and how to provide users with a better user experience through application services in a multi-cloud architecture under these trends. At the same time, F5 also announced a localization strategy with "local services, local innovation, local testing and development, and development of local talents" as the main core at this forum, aiming to better understand the needs of Chinese users through this series of strategies and provide users with more customized application service solutions.

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Dramatic changes in applications promote digital transformation

In recent years, China has become a major market for IT technology and digital applications. With the government's increasing human and material investment in the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, and big data, the surge in the types and number of applications has long been a general trend. Application data from around the world show that Chinese users have accumulated 200 billion hours of application usage, 4.5 times more than the second-largest market. China is currently the largest application market in the world, with investment expected to increase from US$25 billion in 2016 to US$42 billion in 2020. The huge growth of digital applications, users' higher demand for application experience, and the stimulation of emerging technologies on the market have made applications the main means of management and operation for Chinese companies. At the same time, due to China's network environment and the differences in business in various industries, companies have the characteristics of relying on their own infrastructure to operate and maintain their own applications. Therefore, localization and customization of global solutions are particularly important. This is also the original intention of F5 to actively promote localization strategies.

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Close to local users, a long-term commitment from F5

As a long-term leader in the application service field, F5 can deeply understand the differences between application environments and usage requirements, and the needs of users' personal business development, which is the best direction for application environment and infrastructure deployment. Whether in the cloud, local data center or a more elastic and scalable multi-cloud environment, delivering a consistent user experience to users is the consistent vision of F5 and its partners. Mr. Huang Yanwen, President of F5 Greater China, pointed out: Whether it is technology research and development or market cultivation, the company has always developed steadily in a down-to-earth manner since its establishment. The localization strategy announced at this forum is not only our future development direction, but also F5's long-term commitment to the Chinese market. At the same time, the company has also launched a practical implementation plan to help us successfully implement this strategy. When sharing the specific steps of the localization strategy at the forum, Mr. Zhang Yiqiang, General Manager of F5 China, pointed out: The localization vision launched this time aims to combine our global leading technology perspective with the unique needs of different local industries and fields to help users cope with the pressure brought by digital transformation in all aspects and ultimately benefit from it. Therefore, F5's localization strategy will not be limited to the technology itself. We will first open the largest development and testing center in China. The establishment of this center is to enable us to provide customized and fast feedback on user needs with local first-hand experience. This will shorten the deployment time and enable our users to get support directly from our R&D and testing departments. Next, we will increase investment in the service center, hoping to create a complete and efficient service experience from pre-sales to after-sales. More importantly, F5 will further accelerate strategic cooperation with leading manufacturers in various fields in China, and build a series of application service ecosystems including container platforms, SDN, and multi-cloud environments, so as to provide our users with the most consistent user experience.

Emerging Technologies

As early as in 2016, in the "Annual Application Delivery Status Survey", F5 predicted that the Internet of Things, big data and artificial intelligence will become the main driving force for reshaping the development direction of IT technology. This coincides with the direction that my country has defined these three technologies as "three major emerging technologies" since the beginning of 2017 and has given strong support from the policy side. Therefore, in May this year, F5 not only launched the F5 Advanced WAF (API Security - New Generation WAF) for multi-cloud application security, but will also launch the BIG-IP Cloud Edition application service solution for multi-cloud environments on the 31st. Mr. Wu Jingtao, Chief Technology Officer of F5 Greater China, said: In terms of technology, we will also actively integrate advanced solutions with user needs and accelerate the localization process. In F5's "Local Innovation" plan, the company will fully consider the status of the three major emerging technologies and the applications of users in various industries in my country, and launch a localized application service solution that combines big data engines and artificial intelligence technologies to improve the operation and maintenance capabilities of my country's user application architecture, the security management capabilities of application services, and the integration and optimization capabilities of applications. In terms of talent development, F5 will promote the "Super-NetOps" training program just announced this year to the whole country. Through training for partners and user engineers, users can truly enter the era of "intelligent operation and maintenance".

Compared with previous application service summits, F5 not only brought the latest application service technology and partner sharing in this forum, but also announced the localization strategy and development direction in China. Mr. Zhang Yiqiang said at the event: The trust of users and partners in F5 and application service technology is the basis of our success in the past few years. Next, we will work with partners to get closer to users' business needs through localization strategies, so as to most effectively help users improve their core competitiveness through applications under the background of comprehensive IT technology innovation, and bring faster, smarter and safer application experience to end users.