Seattle’s F5 Networks has done well by helping medium-sized and large companies improve the security and speed of their software, last month hitting a 52-week high following news of strong revenue and profit growth in its fiscal quarter and year ended Sept. 30.
Now, to help with future growth, the company is expanding its offerings with new products optimized for use in public, private or hybrid clouds, said Ben Gibson, the firm’s chief marketing officer.
“This is a major step in expanding our capabilities in cloud-based applications,” Gibson said. “We’re taking our cloud compatibility to the next level.”
The new BIG-IP iSeries line of application-delivery controllers is a combination of hardware and software that runs in a company’s conventional or private-cloud data center, ensuring that applications run securely and as fast as possible.
Another new offering, called application connectors, lets IT staffers automatically identify new apps being put onto the public cloud from within their company and apply those same high-performance and security features. A new offering called container connectors does the same thing for containerized applications.
And F5 has entered a partnership with Equinix, a Redwood City, Calif.-based company that owns and runs data centers. F5 will offer its hardware and software for use in some of those data centers, especially those near public-cloud data centers, so that customers can add the extra layers of performance and security from an Equinix data center to an application running on a nearby public-cloud data center.
“These are services that go above and beyond what Amazon Web Services or Azure can offer,” Gibson said. “This colocation is a pretty popular thing to do, especially with applications that are considered highly mission critical.”
Both AWS and Microsoft Azure will offer F5’s services from their respective online marketplaces as well.
F5’s hardware and software are in use at 49 of the Fortune 50 companies, Gibson said.
