F5 Networks Unveils E-Business Building Blocks

SAN FRANCISCO (02/29/2000) - F5 Networks Inc. yesterday announced its e-business building blocks strategy aimed at further cementing the company's position in the Internet traffic and content management market. The strategy includes new product development and OEM (original equipment manufacturer) partnerships.

The U.S. company takes an appliance approach to managing Internet traffic and content, offering customers a turnkey product containing the vendor's software running on network processor hardware.

F5 Networks is currently working on developing products in three areas -- advanced network processing, advanced security processing for SSL (secure sockets layer) transactions and intelligent content management, Marc Goodman, senior director of marketing at F5 Networks, said in a phone interview yesterday.

In the area of advanced networking processing, the company intends to release new versions of its Net load balancing Big-IP Controller software, which will off-load packet handling to the network processor, freeing up the main processor to deal with intelligent decision making, Goodman said. The additional network processor technology will be put on add-on boards. Products are due for release in the third calendar quarter of this year.

F5 Networks aims with the planned new software and hardware to give customers wire-speed gigabit performance up from today's fastest performance of around 350M-bps (bits per second), Goodman said.

What F5 Networks offers today "is sufficient, we have no customers maxxing out, but we're preparing for greater performance, meeting demands before they occur," Goodman said. For instance, if customers are looking to run a lot more streaming media, their performance demands will naturally substantially increase.

Turning to the company's development work on security, F5 Networks hopes to boost the performance of servers as they deal with secure transactions by releasing new versions of Big-IP Controller able to off-load the processing of SSL transactions away from the main processor to the network processor. Again, the company will put the necessary network processing technology onto add-on boards, with the software and hardware becoming available in the second calendar quarter of this year.

"The next natural progression will be to have a special purpose appliance that just does SSL management," said Goodman. "But that's in the future, down the road."

Ever since its founding in 1996, F5 Networks has gradually expanded on the capabilities of its products and added more building blocks to its product portfolio, Goodman said.

First came load balancer Big-IP Controller, then 3-DNS Controller for handling multiple Web sites, followed by Global-Site Controller for managing the distribution and synchronization of Net content, then See-IT Network Manager for Net traffic analysis. The best way to view yesterday's strategy announcement is as a further continuation of the company's product portfolio, with the emphasis firmly on F5 Networks' software development, Goodman said.

In the area of intelligent content management, F5 Networks plans some time later this year to improve the self tuning aspect of Net content by integrating all four of its existing products - Big-IP Controller, 3-DNS Controller, Global-Site Controller and See-IT Network Manager. The company will also offer new products to manage content endpoints around the world.

"We will distribute content in an intelligent fashion," said Goodman. "For example, in Taiwan, people may not be interested in (Internet information about Latin pop singer) Ricky Martin, but in Brazil and the rest of Latin America, they will be interested." The idea is to avoid wasting bandwidth transmitting content to areas where it's not needed, Goodman added.

In terms of future OEM relationships, Goodman wouldn't be drawn on the identities of such partners, but said the company's likely to announce further partnerships with servers and switch vendors.

F5 Networks already has relationships with server vendor Hewlett-Packard Co. and switch vendors 3Com Corp., Extreme Networks Inc. and Cabletron Systems Inc.

F5, based in Seattle, Washington, can be reached at +1-206-505-0800 or via the Internet at http://www.f5.com/.

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