Wu Jingtao returns to F5 as new CTO to explain F5's future direction

[51CTO.com original article] Wu Jingtao is the kind of person who can be judged at first glance as a technical person. Although he has been in management positions for many years, once he talks about a certain technical direction, his eyes are particularly bright, his speech speed speeds up, and his thinking becomes extremely active. This is not the first time that the reporter has interviewed him, but this interview is a bit special because it is the first interview that Wu Jingtao has accepted since returning to F5.

Although traveling is fun, it is better to return home early

"Why did you come back?" This was the first question the reporter asked. The topic was a bit sensitive, but he was not surprised. He believed that many people had asked the same question before and after his return to F5.

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"To answer why I came back, I have to first figure out why I left in the first place." Wu Jingtao thought and recalled that around 2002, when F5 had just entered China, Wu Jingtao joined the company and started as a pre-sales engineer, then gradually became a technical manager and technical director. When F5's performance declined in 2013 due to the Snowden incident, Wu Jingtao restored F5's performance to its previous glory and reached a historical high by leading the Synthesis GTM plan. After that, Wu Jingtao clearly felt that he had touched the ceiling of his career at F5, because there was no new thing for him to prove himself, so in order to break through himself, he chose to leave.

So what attracted Wu Jingtao to return to the F5 team two years later? Simply put, it was F5's ambition to develop in China. According to the reporter, F5 expects to have a significant increase in sales in China. In order to achieve this goal, it needs the cooperation of senior executives from different departments. Wu Jingtao was invited back by F5 with high hopes to lead the growth of F5's business. "My new position is the Chief Technology Officer of Greater China. I need to control not only the technical direction, but also the market and business, and realize the transformation from a pure technical manager to a business manager." In other words, Wu Jingtao has found a new development direction in F5, has clear business goals, and is responsible for F5's business in Greater China. "My current job is to take the market development trend as the context, to customize solutions for potential customers and the market as the goal, and even to incubate a business field. For me, this is a real challenge to the unknown, and it is also the biggest motivation that attracts me to come back."

F5's contribution: Accelerating the process of cloud promotion

Since he is ready to contribute to the future development of F5, Wu Jingtao's judgment on F5's future market planning and technology development direction becomes crucial. From Wu Jingtao's description, the reporter felt that F5 attaches great importance to cloud environment applications.

He told reporters that in a multi-cloud environment, enterprises need to manage and deploy applications between public clouds, private clouds and local data centers in a more flexible and combined way, so as to better control IT investment costs and improve service efficiency for users. So with the promotion of Internet+, how to make full use of the elasticity of public clouds, the security and availability of private clouds and combine them with traditional data centers to build a multi-cloud and multi-active IT environment? "F5 can build a platform architecture between the user's traditional data center, private cloud and public cloud, so that the three parties can run in parallel and flexibly dispatch and manage resources at any time. This kind of control form of F5 in a multi-cloud environment will become the preferred architecture for large and medium-sized enterprise customers in the next three to five years." Wu Jingtao said affirmatively.

In fact, F5 has accumulated a considerable leading advantage in the cloud, but for Wu Jingtao, what is more important is to further cooperate more closely with the cloud on the basis of consolidating the advantage. He told reporters that most customers are in a relatively cautious trial stage when facing cloud applications, and such attempts will slow down the entire cloud promotion process, so how to accelerate this process and make the public cloud a branch service node for the core applications of the enterprise? Or accelerate the breakthrough time of the public cloud for the key business of enterprise users? Wu Jingtao believes that this is exactly where F5 can show its prowess. Through F5 multi-cloud same-platform scheduling, the main business of the enterprise can be easily cut into the public cloud, realizing the key span from non-core business to core business. "This is also the real architectural help that F5 can help enterprise customers to quickly evolve in multi-cloud architecture and strategy."

Coincidence! F5 = Focus Five = exert force in 5 directions

It has to be admitted that F5 is extremely keen in observing the Chinese market, and it is precisely because of its deep understanding of domestic cloud users that F5 has been able to thrive in the domestic application market. In the interview, Wu Jingtao also shared with reporters some application changes that F5 has observed, the main direction of F5's efforts in the future, and F5's unique value in it.

First, F5 discovered that there is a large amount of traffic throughput in the north-south direction from the user end to the data center. In order to adapt to this trend, F5's I series has more than doubled its throughput at the same price, greatly improving performance.

Secondly, within the data center, an application often needs to schedule multiple API interfaces, and each interface needs to obtain application delivery services. Wu Jingtao believes that large-volume or hardware-dependent scheduling should not be performed in the cloud. Customers need more sophisticated and flexible services, such as security services, operation services, and optimization services. For this reason, F5 can provide customers with very flexible customized services to achieve multi-API scheduling of east-west traffic.

Furthermore, in many enterprise application environments, public clouds, private clouds, traditional servers and other systems are completely separated. Wu Jingtao believes that this is wrong. In his opinion, enterprise customers have a strong demand for unified scheduling. Whether private or public resources, they are all enterprise resources and should be flexibly scheduled and managed by the enterprise. In this field, F5 can achieve same-platform scheduling regardless of the enterprise's IT environment. This is the most core and ideal architectural approach that meets the needs of enterprises. "Under F5's future public cloud new architecture, each link is a small integrated unit, and all small units are completely on the same platform and structure. Therefore, during the expansion process, customers can quickly achieve smooth expansion without limiting the overall service capabilities. This is the core value of F5's same-platform scheduling."

In addition, another direction that F5 will continue to adhere to is customer-customized optimization, which is also a major advantage that Wu Jingtao is proud of. In the past few years, F5 has served a large number of high-end customers in China's industries, and can customize and optimize application delivery based on customer access, user access, and application characteristics. Objectively speaking, the sophistication of F5's customized optimization solutions cannot be surpassed by simple functional imitation by its peers.

***, Wu Jingtao revealed that another direction that F5 is working on is a multi-level attack and defense system. As mentioned above, when an application enters a data center, it may need to schedule dozens of API interfaces at the same time, and each API interface is likely not an HTTP protocol. In this case, traditional firewalls and many Web security devices may fail. Wu Jingtao pointed out that F5 can provide a programmable defense system that can be standardized according to the application characteristics of the enterprise API to customize the defense strategy for a certain API interface. It is understood that financial industry customers and public information industries such as public security, social security and other industry organizations have very clear security requirements for the attack and defense system in the cloud environment.

In an interview with ***, Wu Jingtao emphasized that due to the different expansion situations of customers' applications in the cloud, F5 cannot predict in advance which functions of F5 customers will use. Without knowing how much external traffic is, it is impossible to confirm how many service resources provided by F5 customers need to use. Therefore, in order to better serve customers, F5 is preparing to launch a new service model, the ELA model. If users sign an ELA agreement with F5, they can use all F5 functions at will, and all restrictions such as throughput and number of uses will be cancelled. More importantly, the excess usage in *** is free, and the charging standard for the second year is 25% off the excess high value based on ***. The reporter also learned that for sudden access pressures such as Double Eleven, as long as it does not exceed 48 hours, F5 will provide free services and will not be counted in the application *** value.

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