Robotics Create Future Employees

F5 is supporting FIRST Robotics again this year financially and by mentoring teams.  For those of you who are not familiar with FIRST, it is the organization that’s designed to improve kids’ involvement in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM).  The US is lagging behind other countries in terms of how many STEM graduates we produce and the FIRST program has proven to get more kids interested in STEM. For companies like F5, STEM graduates are our lifeblood and we need more of them - we have about 180 job openings today. FIRST was started...

More Trial Versions of Products

We recently added ARX to the family of  F5 products that you can try for free.  If your organization is anything like ours, storage requirements are exploding.  Check out the virtual edition of ARX to see how you can make it easier and less expensive to keep up with all the files people and systems generate every day.

Spreading a Little Cheer

  Last week I had the opportunity to work with Swedish Medical Center to film a public service announcement that encourages people to donate gifts for children who are undergoing treatment at their pediatric center.  The process of filming was a lot of fun and the the kids who participated were fantastic!  Hopefully some of the local media outlets will use the message to get the word out for this worthy cause. Today we issued a press release that covers both toy donations and the “Holidays at the Hospital” event that takes place on December 19th. If...

F5 Added to the S&P 500

I turned my Blackberry on after landing yesterday to discover that FFIV was added to the S&P 500.  That’s a tremendous accolade for F5 and something that we’re very proud of. More importantly, I think it speaks volumes about our customers who have invested their money and time in our products and the innovation they’ve been able to drive by using them. CNNMoney.com wrote a piece about our addition today. One of the things I discussed with the editor was how my grandmother gave me a few shares in Eastman Kodak a long time ago.  I still have...

Overcoming 7 Key Challenges to Virtualization

Dell recently published an interesting piece on how F5's BIG-IP and ARX address some of the key challenges people encounter when they embrace server virtualization.  The challenges they discuss are: Resource Starvation Lack of Application Awareness Unanticipated Costs Unused Virtualization Features Increased Storage Requirements Congested Storage Network Management Complexity The article From Dell's Power Solutions can be found here.    

Lots of F5ers log at least 5 rides in the 5th month.

For the past 3 years people at F5 have participated in "The Commute Challenge" that is organized by Seattle's Cascade Bicycle Club.  When people accept the challenge, they agree to ride their bike to work at least 5 days during the month of May.  It's a great way to get people out on their bikes for some exercise and save a little gas while they're at it. Some of the highlights for us this year are: 147 F5ers signed up 21,443 miles ridden (which equates to roughly 21,443 fewer pounds of carbon dioxide generated) ...

File Virtualization Webcast

Rick Gillett, who just joined F5 when we completed our acquisition of Acopia last week, was recently filmed giving an overview of file virtualization.  It's hosted on the Network World site and is a great overview of what the technology can do.  Here's a link to the webcast.

Jumping off buildings

Last week I was in Australia and New Zealand for a Quarterly Business Review of our APAC region, customer and partner meetings, the grand opening of our new office in Sydney as well as media interviews. While I was there, an industry Analyst firm published an interesting report on their take of why F5 intends to acquire Acopia Networks.  If you read through it, I believe you'll find that the acquisition makes a lot of sense for us and the market.  If you want to see something that requires an actual leap of faith, check out this crazy activity that a few...

Where have you used an SSL VPN?

Earlier this week I rode in a car from JFK airport in New York to Manhattan and synchronized about 20MB worth of email on the way.  For some reason I thought this was more novel than using FirePass from an airplane. The car was a Toyota Prius run by a company called Ozocar.  The car was equipped with satellite Internet access.  I'm not sure which service they used - the driver didn't know.  They had a Linksys wireless router connected to the sattelite access so I was able to fire up my laptop and jump on the nework while rolling through...

Second Life or Get a Life?

Every now and then one of our employees will ask me if we plan on marketing F5 within the Second Life world.  Our research has shown us that there is a fair overlap between gamers and people who administer our devices as part of their real life jobs. And while Second life is thriving and you see the occasional press release from companies that have "hung out a shingle" in the virtual world trying to draft off its success, I'm not sure that it would be a wise investment for us at this time. Today I saw this news tidbit where Second Life has...