About F5 Networks Inc

F5, Inc. (F5) is a multi-cloud application services and security provider committed to bringing a better digital world to life. F5 partners with the world's largest, most advanced organizations to optimize and secure every application and Application Programming Interface (API) anywhere, including on-premises, in the cloud, in multi-cloud environments, or at the edge. F5 enables organizations to provide exceptional, secure digital experiences for their customers and continuously stay ahead of threats. The company's application security and delivery solutions are available in a range of deployment and consumption models. It sells packaged software in perpetual, subscription, and usage-based consumption models. The company also sells its solutions in software-as-a-service (SaaS) and managed services deployment models with subscription and usage-based consumption models. The company's customers include large enterprise businesses, public sector institutions, governments, and service providers. It conducts its business globally and manage the company's business by geography. The company's business is organized into three primary geographic regions: Americas; Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA); and the Asia Pacific region (APAC). Its website is www.f5.com. The company has 80 subsidiaries, branch offices, or representative offices worldwide. c F5 has significantly expanded its software and SaaS offerings to deliver a broad portfolio of solutions to help customers address the complexity and risk in today's hybrid IT environments. Through its BIG-IP, F5 NGINX, and F5 Distributed Cloud Services product families, F5 offers a range of integrated, artificial intelligence- and machine learning-driven solutions that support performance and protect both legacy and modern applications and APIs across data center, cloud, and edge locations. The company is leveraging near real-time collection of live application telemetry, machine learning and artificial intelligence, and toolchain automation to enable applications to rapidly respond to changes in performance, availability, and security threats with little to no human interaction. Strategy The key elements of the company's strategy include solving multi-cloud application delivery and security challenges; transforming how customers experience F5; and capturing growth in security and software-as-a-service. F5 Products and Solutions F5's portfolio of multi-cloud application services and security technologies are enabling customers to address the challenges of delivering differentiated digital experiences to their customers. The company's multi-cloud, infrastructure-agnostic approach means customers can use F5 to create a more unified experience across disparate hybrid IT environments, enhancing automation and driving operational and cost efficiencies. Its product portfolio consists of solutions made available within the following F5 product families: F5 Distributed Cloud Services, F5 NGINX and F5 BIG-IP, and are discussed below. F5 Distributed Cloud Services: A unified, security, networking, and application management service that enables customers to deploy, secure, and operate their applications wherever they resides, regardless of platform or architecture. F5 Distributed Cloud Services leverages the F5 Global Network, a purpose-built, cloud-based, global private backbone to deliver performance, reliability, and control across hybrid, multi-cloud, or edge environments. F5 Distributed Cloud Service offerings are available as packaged software and SaaS-based consumption models and include the following: F5 Distributed Cloud Web App and API Protection (WAAP): A comprehensive SaaS-based security solution, F5 Distributed Cloud WAAP allows the company's customers to accelerate time-to-service, lower total cost of ownership, and increase security efficacy on a cloud native platform that is fully integrated across a single policy engine and management console. F5 Distributed Cloud WAAP can be leveraged through multiple deployment options, allowing organizations to simplify security and improve visibility while reducing operational complexity. The solution provides the following F5 application security technologies: Advanced Web Application Firewall (WAF) capabilities through F5's BIG-IP WAF engine, which allows its customers to quickly apply, secure, and manage uniform comprehensive security policies at scale, across data centers, multi-clouds, and edge computing. Mitigation against L3-L7 application-based and volumetric DDoS attacks through advanced F5 Distributed Cloud DDoS Mitigation, a managed, cloud-delivered mitigation service that detects and mitigates large-scale network, SSL, and application-targeted attacks in real time. Enhanced API security, which leverages machine-based learning, auto-discovery, and anomaly detection, which automates the entire process of finding, securing, and monitoring APIs for anomalous behavior. Next-generation, AI enabled bot mitigation through F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense provides its customers the ability to defend applications and APIs from automated attacks. The solution leverages AI to analyze massive amounts of traffic and machine learning to ensure sustainable bot prediction models with high efficacy. F5 Distributed Cloud Multi-Cloud Networking (MCN): The company's MCN solutions simplifies networking with an integrated service stack that securely connects both networks and application workloads, lowering operational costs and increasing agility. Under its MCN solutions the company offers the following product solutions: F5 Distributed Cloud Network Connect: A networking solution that offers easy, secure, and consolidated connectivity across public and hybrid clouds, data centers, and edge sites. It provides unified policies and single-pane-of-glass management, reducing complexity and increasing efficiency, including full multi-tenancy and segmentation, enabling self-service capabilities for DevOps, NetOps, and SecOps. Network Connect automates the configuration of native public cloud networking resources and seamlessly connects multiple clouds using site-to-site connectivity over a private backbone or the F5 Global Network. F5 Distributed Cloud App Connect: An application delivery and deployment solution for connecting clusters across various cloud providers and regions. App Connect offers orchestrated awareness for API endpoints on all connected clusters, allowing cross-cluster service discovery and advertisement for seamless app-to-app communication with fine-grained API control. App Connect provides end-to-end visibility for customers, who can choose their underlying transport, including the F5 Global Network. F5 Distributed Cloud DNS: A cloud-based Domain Name System (DNS) solution that offers DNS delivery across multi-cloud environments and modern applications. F5 Distributed Cloud DNS can be distributed globally as either a primary or secondary DNS, providing authoritative DDoS protection, Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC), and the flexibility to automatically scale to meet the company's customers growing application demands. F5 Distributed Cloud CDN: A high-performance, multi-cloud and edge focused content delivery network (CDN) solution that allows its customers to efficiently connect, secure, and optimize applications and workloads across multi- and hybrid-cloud environments through efficiently leveraging the integrated tools and technologies in the F5 Distributed Cloud Platform. F5 Distributed Cloud CDN can be purchased with other F5 Distributed Cloud offerings or as a stand-alone service. F5 Distributed Cloud App Stack: A SaaS-based solution that provides its customers the ability to deploy and orchestrate applications on a managed Kubernetes platform with centralized management of distributed applications through a single pane of glass. F5 Distributed Cloud App Stack simplifies the management of application deployments as one across on-premises, cloud, and edge locations. F5 NGINX: Built from the F5 NGINX open source software that powers hundreds of millions of websites and applications across the world, the company's F5 NGINX technology suite delivers a lightweight, agile ADC and API connectivity solution for modern, container-native, micro-services-based applications and APIs. F5 NGINX delivers a range of capabilities, including web server, load balancer, proxy, API gateways and caches in packaged software subscription consumption models. F5 NGINX product offerings include the following: F5 NGINX Plus: F5 NGINX Plus, the company's all-in-one, high performance load balancer, web server, content cache, and API gateway for modern applications, is offered as packaged software in a subscription consumption model. F5 NGINX Plus software delivers cloud-native, Kubernetes-friendly solutions that drive mission-critical applications and APIs with scalability, visibility, security, and governance. F5 NGINX Plus can be easily integrated into enterprise application workflows and CI/CD pipelines, as well as automation frameworks and ecosystems. F5 NGINX Plus is lightweight and can be used as a per-application ADC, but also scalable and performant enough for an enterprise's largest and most critical applications. F5 NGINX Plus is also offered as a fully managed native service on the Microsoft Azure Cloud allowing teams to lift-and-shift their applications to the cloud with no configuration change removing the operational burden of self-managed instances from teams. F5 NGINX Management Suite: The F5 NGINX Management Suite includes software tools that provide application and API management along with orchestration and analytics for F5 NGINX Plus instances running in private data centers and public clouds. The F5 NGINX Instance Manager accelerates application and API deployments with a self-service API driven tool set and allows enterprises to streamline lifecycle management and security. Using F5 NGINX Instance Manager, which is included in this offering, teams can inventory, control and secure F5 NGINX Plus, F5 NGINX Open Source and F5 NGINX WAF instances. F5 NGINX Ingress Controller: The F5 NGINX Ingress Controller provides traffic management for Kubernetes clusters. This solution is deployed at the central point of entry into a Kubernetes cluster and reduces complexity, increases uptime, and provides better insights into application health and performance at scale. F5 NGINX App Protect: F5 NGINX App Protect is a comprehensive WAF security and denial-of-service (DoS) defense solution designed to protect applications and API's from advanced Layer 7 attacks. It can be used in a variety of the use cases that F5 NGINX Plus is deployed and integrate easily into CI/CD pipelines for automation. F5 NGINX App Protect can be added to subscriptions and is bundled into advanced offerings for F5 Ingress Controller. F5 BIG-IP: The company's BIG-IP family of product offerings provide feature-rich, highly programmable and configurable application security and delivery solutions for legacy applications in enterprises and service providers. BIG-IPs 'best-of-suite' approach helps standardize and consolidate application security and delivery functions into a single solution, automating functions and reducing operational cost. The F5 BIG-IP family of products includes packaged software, which are available in subscription and perpetual consumption models, and F5 BIG-IP system offerings. F5 BIG-IP Packaged Software: F5 BIG-IP packaged software includes a growing portfolio of products that provide the performance and security to deliver applications to end users. F5 BIG-IP Packaged Software offerings include the following: F5 BIG-IP Security: F5 BIG-IP application security products include F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager that secures and protects user access to applications, F5 BIG-IP Advanced Web Application Firewall that protects applications with behavioral analytics, bot defense and application layer encryption, and F5 BIG-IP SSL Orchestrator that maximizes infrastructure security with encryption/decryption and traffic steering. The company also offers F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager which drives accurate detection with machine learning, stress monitoring, dynamic signatures, and attack mitigation, F5 BIG-IP Carrier Grade NAT which provides carrier-grade scalability with a high number of IP address translations, fast network address translation setup rates and high-speed logging, and F5 BIG-IP DDoS Hybrid Defender which delivers advanced cloud and on-premises DDoS defenses to ensure real-time protection against volumetric DDoS threats and dynamic network and applications attacks. F5 BIG-IP Application Delivery: F5 BIG-IP Application Delivery products include F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager which manages network traffic so applications are always fast, available, and secure; F5 BIG-IP DNS which provides hyperscale and security during high query volumes and DNS DDoS attacks; and F5 BIG-IP Policy Enforcement Manager which improves network performance through effective policy management. F5 BIG-IP Automation Tool Chain: F5 BIG-IP Automation Tool Chain is a set of automation tools that make it faster and easier to deploy and configure F5 application services. Via the F5 Automation Tool Chain, F5 BIG-IP capabilities easily integrate into orchestration frameworks such as Ansible, HashiCorp Terraform, OpenShift, and Cloud Foundry as part of a CI/CD pipeline. F5 BIG-IQ Centralized Management: F5 BIG-IQ simplifies, enhances management of, and reduces customer operational costs associated with F5 BIG-IP deployments through central management, analytics, and automation for F5 BIG-IP instances. F5 BIG-IP Systems: F5 BIG-IP systems are designed to enhance the performance of the company's software by leveraging a combination of custom field-programmable gate array (FPGA) logic and off-the-shelf silicon. All of its systems run all available F5 BIG-IP software modules. The company's next-generation hardware, rSeries systems and VELOS chassis and blades are designed to enable enhanced automation and multi-tenancy, a capability that enables running multiple versions of F5 BIG-IP software on the same system thereby making it easy to migrate from one version to another with minimal or no downtime. The company also offers its legacy systems, F5 BIG-IP iSeries and chassis-based VIPRION systems. Competition The company's BIG-IP offerings compete against Citrix Systems and VMware. Its lightweight, developer-friendly F5 NGINX offerings, which provide capabilities like optimizing Kubernetes traffic management and load balancing cloud-native and hybrid cloud applications compete against Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform, Envoy, HAProxy, and Microsoft Azure. In application security, the company competes with companies that offer web application firewall, bot detection and mitigation, API protection, carrier-grade firewall, carrier-grade network address translation (NAT), SSL orchestration, access policy management, and DDoS mitigation, including Akamai, Cisco, Citrix Systems, Cloudflare, Fortinet, Imperva, Juniper Networks, Palo Alto, and Radware. F5 Distributed Cloud Services use cases include multi-cloud networking, as well as security offered as SaaS, competing with traditional networking vendors, including VMware and Cisco, pure-play vendors like Aviatrix, and to some extent public cloud providers. Corporate Functions Customer Services and Technical Support In connection with its products, the company offers a broad range of global services, including maintenance, consulting, training, and other technical support services. The company offers a broad range of support services that includes phone and online technical support, hardware repair and replacement, software updates, online tools, consulting, and training services. The company provides these services directly to customers and also utilizes a multi-tiered support model, leveraging the capabilities of its channel partners. The company's technical support staff is strategically located in regional service centers to support its global customer base. Product Development F5 holds various patents in the United States and internationally. In addition to its own proprietary software, the company incorporates software licensed from several third-party sources into its products. Sales and Marketing The company's customers include a wide variety of enterprises and service providers among Fortune 1000 and Business Week Global 1000 companies, including those in technology, telecommunications, financial services, transportation, education, manufacturing, healthcare, and government. In the year ended September 30, 2023, sales outside of the Americas represented 43.7% of its net revenues. Sales The company sells its products and services to large and medium enterprises, government entities, and service providers through a variety of routes to market and channels. Its sales teams sell its products and services directly to customers by working closely with its channel partners, including distributors, value-added resellers (VARs), managed service providers (MSPs), and systems integrators. F5 sales Teams. The company's inside sales team generates and qualifies leads from marketing and helps manage accounts by serving as a liaison between the field and internal corporate resources. The company's outside sales team works directly with partners and customers across the globe. Its field sales personnel are located in major cities across its three sales regions. Field sales personnel work closely with its channel partners to sell its products and services to their customers. The company rewards partners that identify new business and provide sales expertise for its portfolio of products and solutions through various incentive programs. Systems engineers, with deep technical domain expertise, support its regional sales account managers and channel partners providing pre-sale technical solution engineering and support, as needed. Distributors, VARs, and MSPs: As a key component of its sales strategy, the company has established relationships with a number of large national and international distributors, local and specialized distributors, VARs, and MSPs. It derives a majority of its product sales from VARs and MSPs, relying on its large distributors for fulfillment, training, and partner enablement. The company's agreements with its channel partners are not exclusive and do not prevent them from selling competitive products. These agreements typically have one-year terms with no obligation to renew, and typically do not provide for exclusive sales territories or minimum purchase requirements. For the year ended September 30, 2023, sales to two of its worldwide distributors, Ingram Micro, Inc. and Synnex Corporation represented 15.6% and 15.0% of its total revenues, respectively. The company's agreements with distributors are standard, non-exclusive distribution agreements that renew automatically on an annual basis and generally can be terminated by either party with 90 days written notice prior to the start of any renewal term. The agreements grant certain distributors the right to distribute its products to resellers, with no minimum purchase requirements. Systems Integrators: The company also markets its products through strategic relationships with systems integrators, including Dell Services, DXC, HP Enterprise Services, and IBM Global Services, who include its products as core components of application deployments or network-based solutions they deploy for their customers. In most cases, systems integrators do not directly purchase its products for resale to their customers. Instead, they typically recommend and/or manage its products as a part of broader solutions supporting enterprise applications and internet facing systems that incorporate its technology for security, high availability, and enhanced performance. Resellers and Technology Partners: Historically, the company's ability to compete with much larger companies has been strengthened through partnerships with large systems and software vendors. The company partners with many technology partners and public cloud providers who resell its products. The company has ongoing partnerships with the major cloud providers, such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform and has expanded its reseller routes to market to include their public cloud marketplaces. F5 has recently signed a Strategic Collaboration Agreement (SCA) with AWS and are actively engaged with Microsoft Azure on private offers levering its software on Azure. Marketing As it continues to expand its offerings and the company's range of consumption models, it focuses on driving the compelling and unique value proposition of F5 among its existing customers, including new buying centers within existing customers, as well as with new customers. To do so, it revitalizing the company's brand to inform customers about its expanded portfolio and broaden its reach with new customers. The company continues to focus on its core NetOps persona while seeking to expand its relationships with DevOps, SecOps, CISO and Cloud Architect audiences. The company invests in driving brand, demand, and advocacy experiences, addressing touchpoints across the customer journey to ensure it do all it can to enable its customers to realize value in their investments with F5. To maximize its reach and impact, it continues to meet customers where they are by increasing its focus and investments in more digitally enabled, personalized, and frictionless experiences at scale. History The company was founded in 1996. The company was incorporated in 1996 in the state of Washington. The company was formerly known as F5 Networks, Inc. and changed its name to F5, Inc. in November 2021.