F5, Inc. (F5) is a multicloud application security and delivery provider.
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, or at the edge. F5 enables businesses to continuously stay ahead of threats while delivering exceptional, secure digital experiences for their customers.
The company’s application security and delivery solutions are availabl...
F5, Inc. (F5) is a multicloud application security and delivery provider.
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, or at the edge. F5 enables businesses to continuously stay ahead of threats while delivering exceptional, secure digital experiences for their customers.
The company’s application security and delivery solutions are available in a range of deployment and consumption models. The company 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. In addition, the company sells high-performance systems, or hardware, as well as a broad range of global services including maintenance, consulting, training and other technical support services.
The company’s customers include large enterprise businesses, public sector institutions, governments, and service providers. The company conducts its business globally and manages its 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’).
Strategy and Priorities
Over the past several years, 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 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’s multicloud application security and delivery solutions reduce the company’s customers’ operational complexity, enabling scalability, security, and optimization for legacy and modern applications and APIs, across any infrastructure. F5 leverages a near real-time collection of application telemetry, machine learning and artificial intelligence, and toolchain automation to enable rapid response to changes in application performance, availability, and security threats with little to no human interaction.
The key components of the company’s strategy include solving multicloud application security and delivery challenges; transforming how customers experience F5; and capturing growth in security and software-as-a-service.
F5 Products and Solutions
F5’s portfolio of multicloud application security and delivery technologies are enabling customers to address the challenges of delivering differentiated digital experiences to their customers. The company’s multicloud, infrastructure-agnostic approach means customers can use F5 to create a more unified experience across disparate hybrid IT environments, enhancing automation. The company’s product portfolio is consisted 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 may reside, 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, multicloud, 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 the company’s customers to quickly apply, secure, and manage uniform comprehensive security policies at scale, across data centers, public or private clouds, and edge computing environments.
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 the company’s 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.
Protection from sophisticated account takeover attempts.
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 the company’s MCN solutions the company offers the following product solution:
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. Connections between sites are self-maintaining, redundant, and fully automated, which reduces the need for administrative tasks such as establishing VPNs and routing. 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 multicloud 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, multicloud and edge focused content delivery network (‘CDN’) solution that allows the company’s 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 the company’s 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. This offering is sold in a subscription consumption model that scales with the customer’s Kubernetes cluster size.
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 is a lightweight solution that seamlessly integrates into DevOps environments and is platform-agnostic running across distributed architectures and hybrid environments to deliver consistent protection. 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. Also known as traditional applications, legacy applications are based on monolithic, three-tier, or client-server architectures. Such legacy applications are the most ubiquitous application architecture today, and many organizations continue to rely exclusively on legacy applications to power the most mission-critical business applications, customer-facing digital interfaces and internally used applications. For most organizations, the priority around legacy applications is maximizing operational efficiency and minimizing the total cost of ownership. 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 Next. F5 BIG-IP Next is the next version of BIG-IP rearchitected to be more modern, scalable and secure with a Kubernetes based architecture. With BIG-IP Next, customers will be able to secure and deploy apps and APIs faster and with less downtime. With the introduction of BIG-IP Next Central Manager, customers will also be able to leverage new fleet management and observability capabilities. BIG-IP Next is generally available now for local traffic management and web application firewall with remaining elements of the BIG-IP software portfolio to come.
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, providing customers a balance of cost and flexibility. All of the company’s 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.
Competition
The company’s BIG-IP offerings compete against Citrix and Broadcom. The company’s lightweight, agile, 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, and HAProxy.
In application security, the company competes with vendors 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, Cloudflare, Fortinet, Juniper Networks, Palo Alto, Radware, and Thales.
F5 Distributed Cloud Services use cases include application and API security delivered as SaaS, as well as multicloud networking. F5 competes with traditional edge players including Akamai, Cloudflare and Fastly, as well as networking vendors including Broadcom and Cisco, and pure-play vendors like Aviatrix, and public cloud providers.
Corporate Functions
Customer Services and Technical Support
In connection with the company’s products, the company offers a broad range of global services including maintenance, consulting, training, and other technical support services.
The company’s ability to provide consistent, high-quality customer service and technical support is a key factor in attracting and retaining large enterprise and service provider customers. Accordingly, 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 utilize a multi-tiered support model, leveraging the capabilities of the company’s channel partners. The company’s technical support staff is strategically located in regional service centers to support the company’s global customer base.
Product Development
The company’s future success depends on its ability to maintain technology leadership by continuing to innovate and to improve the company’s products and by developing new products to meet the changing needs of the company’s customers and partners. The company’s engineering organization uses standard processes for the development, documentation, and quality control of services, software, and systems that are designed to meet these goals. These processes include working with the company’s business development and marketing teams, customers, and partners to identify technology innovation opportunities to better meet the evolving needs of the company’s addressable markets. The company has had dedicated teams focused on testing new disruptive innovations in technology, business models, or customer segments. The company expects innovations resulting from the work of these teams will be complementary to the company’s goal of delivering the broadest and most consistent portfolio of solutions across cloud and on-premises environments.
The company’s engineering teams are primarily located in Seattle and Spokane, Washington; Hyderabad, India; Tel Aviv, Israel; San Jose, California; and Cork, Ireland. Members of the company’s engineering teams collaborate closely with one another to ensure the interoperability and performance of the company’s solutions.
F5 holds various patents in the United States and internationally (with applications pending for various aspects of the company’s technology).
Sales and Marketing
The company’s customers include a wide variety of large enterprise businesses, public sector institutions, governments, and service providers, including many among Fortune 1000 and Business Week Global 1000 companies. The company’s customers include businesses in technology, telecommunications, financial services, transportation, education, manufacturing, healthcare, and government. In the year ended September 30, 2024 (fiscal year 2024), sales outside of the Americas represented 43.8% of the company’s net revenues.
Sales
The company’s sales teams sell its products and services directly to customers working closely with the company’s 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. The company’s field sales personnel are located in major cities across its three sales regions. Field sales personnel work closely with the company’s channel partners to sell its products and services to their customers. The company rewards partners that identify new business and provide sales expertise for the company’s portfolio of products and solutions through various incentive programs. Systems engineers, with deep technical domain expertise, support the company’s 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 the company’s sales strategy, the company has established relationships with a number of large national and international distributors, local and specialized distributors, VARs, and MSPs. The company derives a majority of its product sales from VARs and MSPs, relying on the company’s 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.
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 the company’s 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 the company’s 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 the company’s products for resale to their customers. Instead, they typically recommend and/or manage the company’s products as a part of broader solutions supporting enterprise applications and internet facing systems that incorporate the company’s technology for security, high availability, and enhanced performance.
Resellers and Technology Partners. 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 the company’s 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 the company’s software on Azure. The company’s business development team manages these relationships and closely monitors adjacent and complementary markets for opportunities to partner with those whose solutions are complementary to the company’s and could enable the company to expand its addressable market.
Marketing
As the company continues to expand its offerings, the company is focused on driving the compelling and unique value proposition of F5's solutions among the company’s existing customers, including new buying centers within existing customers, as well as with new customers. To do so, the company is revitalizing its brand, informing current customers about the company’s expanded portfolio, and broadening its reach with new customers. The company continues to focus on its core NetOps buying persona while seeking to expand the company’s relationships with DevOps, SecOps, CISO and Cloud Architect audiences.
The company is investing in driving brand, demand, and advocacy experiences, addressing touchpoints across the customer journey to ensure the company does all it can to enable the company’s customers to realize value in their investments with F5. To maximize the company’s reach and impact, the company continues to meet customers where they are by increasing the company’s focus and investments in more digitally enabled, personalized, and frictionless experiences at scale.
Manufacturing
The company outsources the manufacturing of the company’s systems to a third-party contract manufacturer, Flex Ltd. (‘Flex’), for building, assembling, and testing according to the company’s specifications at Flex's facilities in Guadalajara, Mexico and Zhuhai, China. Flex also performs material procurement, assembly, system test, quality control, and direct shipment on the company’s behalf.
The company provides a rolling forecast that allows Flex to stock component parts and other materials, plan capacity, and build finished goods inventory in anticipation of end-user demand. Flex procures components in volumes consistent with the company’s forecast, assembles the products, and tests them according to the company’s specifications. Generally, the company does not own the system components. Hardware components for the company’s products primarily consist of commodity parts and certain custom components. Many of the company’s components are purchased from sources which are readily available from other suppliers. However, the company purchases several hardware components used in the assembly of its products from a number of single or limited sources, and lead times for these components can vary significantly.
History
The company was founded in 1996. It 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 2021.
