Maybe I should get a tattoo

Gartner recently published a new Magic Quadrant for Application Delivery Products (which basically means BIG-IP for F5). If I ever decide to get a tattoo, the new magic quadrant has to be on the short list of designs.  We're the only vendor to have always been in the leader quadrant since Gartner started publishing a Magic Quadrant for this category in 2001.  The whole F5 team should be very proud of this achievement.  Of course, since Gartner's criteria keep the quadrant drifting up and to the right over time, we can't sit on our laurels if we want to be in a similar...

Tax Relief from Spam

There have been some interesting email threads flying around internally over the past week discussing spam and how people must deal with it.  You likely know that we formed a partnership with Secure Computing that resulted in a product offering called the Message Security Module (MSM) that can be licensed on a BIG-IP.  The announcement is located here. The email threads were related to MSM and discussed how long mail had to be retained and what constituted actually receiving a message which, in turn, leads to it having to be retained. Companies are increasingly facing requirements to store email for longer periods of time. There is a...

F5 #1 According to Gartner

Gartner recently published their quarterly market share measurements for the Application Delivery Controller market.  We're very fortunate to again occupy the number one spot.  This is pretty amazing especially given the caliber of companies (Cisco, Juniper, Citrix, Foundry and more) that we're up against. Thanks to all our customers, partners and F5ers who help make this happen every day!

Citrix CFO provides some insight to Netscaler business

Some interesting tidbits from a few recent financial conferences where David Henshall, Citrix's CFO, presented: At the Credit Suisse First Boston annual Technology Conference November 30, 2006: BV Jagadeesh (former CEO of Netscaler) is moving to "more of an evangelical role" from his GM role for the Application Networking Group The Western US Sales region has been responsible for about half of their Netscaler revenue They are moving the Western regional sales VP into Jagadeesh's former GM role At a Goldman Sachs Software and IT Services Conference on November 8, 2006: WANScaler products (Orbital acquisition) will be launched in January 2007 Addressing channel partner adoption of WANScaler he said "It should...

Truthiness in Vendor Claims

You may have heard of the term "truthiness" coined by Stephen Colbert, host of the fake news show "The Colbert Report". I read a blog entry on Network Computing's site that uses that term in reference to vendor performance claims. At the heart of the discussion that ensues with the vendor is the inability to reproduce the performance claims that the vendor makes in a real environment. At F5 we take that very seriously.  Over time we have been accused of being too conservative with how we characterize the performance of our devices.  Some of the vendors that we compete against make their...

Some False Claims by Citrix

Citrix announced a new version of software for their Netscaler product yesterday.  They made a claim in their press release that is simply not true.  They stated: "This latest release of Citrix NetScaler extends our leadership in this market and further advances state-of-the-art web application delivery." There are two things about that statement that need to be corrected. First, they are claiming to extend their leadership in the market.  Hmmmm...do they lead in market share?  No.  Do they lead in functionality? No. Do they lead in performance? No.  Are they rated highest by industry analysts? No.  Leader?  I think not.  Extending a lead? ...