Interview with John McAdam, CEO of F5 Networks, which has managed to garner nearly half of the Layer 4-7 switching market.
Ciscoowns networking, right? Not when it comes to the rapidly growing Layer 4-7 switching market. There, F5 Networks has managed to garner nearly 50% market share, while Cisco's share has actually declined. John McAdam, F5's CEO, attributes the company's success to having won ownership of certain strategic control points in today's consolidated2020欧洲杯预赛s. In this installment of the IDG Enterprise CEO Interview Series, McAdam talked with IDGE Chief Content Officer John Gallant about F5's efforts to make infrastructure more agile, how the company is helping IT leaders navigate the move tocloud computing, newsecurityand mobility challenges facing enterprises and why his Seattle-based company so often beats Cisco when customers choose an application switching partner.
(Read more from the IDG Enterprise CEO Interview Series, including Q&As withCisco CEO John Chambers,Riverbed CEO Jerry KennellyandSAS CEO Jim Goodnight.)
F5 is described as an application delivery vendor, but that term is nebulous to some folks and it doesn't really convey all of the things that you do. You cover everything from application acceleration, wide-area network(WAN) optimization, security, policy and more. Can you crystallize F5's mission and what sets it apart from other infrastructure companies?
We see our products as occupying the strategic control points within data centers. We see all the traffic that's going betweenapplicationsand between servers. Because of these strategic control points, we can do simple things like, historically, load balancing or encrypting the traffic. But then it gets much more sophisticated where we can basically provision applications and servers, we can look at the performance of specific applications. Our customers can use our products to change or add functionality without having to change thousands of pieces of software and different programs. We've got this opportunity because of the way data centers have been architected and are being architected, which is this whole concept of consolidated data centers, typically usingvirtualizationtechnology without a product sitting in a data center effectively controlling traffic between the apps and between the servers and between the network.
Talk about those control points. Did you identify them as an opportunity early on or is this a position in the infrastructure that you evolved to support?