F5 Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ:FFIV), the global leader in Application Delivery Networking, today announced new application optimization capabilities for its Application Delivery Controller (ADC) product line. With this announcement, F5 is the first ADC vendor to offer integrated support for SPDY, a web protocol designed to optimize the user experience and bolster security. As part of the company’s Dynamic Data Center vision, F5 is extending its leadership in optimizing web-based applications across private, public, and hybrid cloud architectures.

Highlights of today’s announcement also include a number of new front-end optimization capabilities that streamline the delivery of image-heavy content, prioritize traffic to overcome mobile network latency, and offer visibility into application performance across hosted and cloud applications. F5 technologies serve as a strategic point of control for application acceleration, providing insight into the overall context of users, applications, and networks to ensure optimal delivery and avoid costly infrastructure changes.

“Today’s organizations are struggling to ensure a fast user experience within the changing landscape of cloud-based infrastructure and myriad mobile devices,” said Jason Needham, Sr. Director of Product Management. “With F5’s new ADO solutions, customers can optimize any web-based application without the need to spend millions of dollars upgrading their infrastructure or engaging in costly performance tuning.”

F5 technologies apply front-end, network, and data center optimizations in concert to improve overall application performance and enhance the user experience, regardless of device, browser, or location. Today’s announcement adds new technologies to F5’s portfolio such as image optimization, CSS object versioning, and content re-ordering. In addition, F5 solutions now provide an innovative approach for enabling SPDY protocol optimizations for any legacy application. F5’s new centralized application analytics capabilities enable streamlined performance monitoring across hybrid cloud environments without deploying or managing additional agents, code, or servers.

Details

Many industry vendors offer products that only address specific performance bottlenecks. Implementing these multiple technologies creates additional complexity and cost, perpetuating the growing problems companies are trying to solve within their data centers. With F5, customers can integrate optimization throughout the application delivery infrastructure, eliminating the need for point products.

Building on the BIG-IP^® product family and the company’s TMOS^® architecture platform, F5 provides easy-to-manage solutions capable of addressing organizations’ needs today and into the future. With the announcement, F5 continues to deliver on its commitment to improving application performance.

Highlights of F5’s new ADO solutions include:

• Industry-Leading Support for SPDY Protocol

SPDY is an emerging web protocol that augments HTTP. Developed by Google, this protocol improves application performance up to 50 percent by enabling multiple data transfers within a single connection, as well as through compression, and client prioritization for enabled browsers like Chrome and Firefox. Historically, organizations needed to update their web server infrastructure to take advantage of SPDY’s performance improvements, adding cost and complexity to their systems. With F5’s SPDY Gateway, companies can take advantage of these performance improvements without updating their web application server infrastructure. F5 delivers this capability by translating SPDY requests into HTTP on the back end.

• Front-End Optimization Capabilities that Enhance User Experience and Save Money

Users have come to expect mobile performance that is equivalent or better than that achieved on a typical desktop computer. However, mobile devices present unique challenges due to limitations of processing power, small screens, a variety of operating systems and browsers, and the latency and packet loss introduced by mobile networks. By understanding and addressing these factors comprehensively, F5 provides a superior experience for mobile and remote users with the delivery of image optimization, CSS object versioning, and content re-ordering.

According to HTTP Archive, images represent over 60 percent of content of a typical web page. F5’s advanced image optimization solution recognizes the user’s access environment and streamlines image delivery by adjusting image size appropriately for mobile devices, removing unnecessary metadata from the transmission, and converting the image format. Internal testing demonstrates F5’s image optimization reduces the size of images by up to 50 percent. This reduces page load times, as well as bandwidth needs and costs.

• Visibility into Application Performance across Hosted and Cloud Infrastructures

F5’s Enterprise Manager^™ Centralized Analytics Module helps customers monitor and understand application performance across multiple data centers without adding agents, code, or servers. This single view of relevant statistics provides critical visibility, enabling customers to monitor performance, identify potential bottlenecks, and better plan for IT needs. By providing real-time application performance metrics—such as application response time, network latency, and connection statistics—as well as diagnostic and troubleshooting information for each BIG-IP device, Enterprise Manager further quantifies the benefits of using F5’s optimization technologies.

Supporting Quotes

“An increasing number of enterprise applications require improved user experience if they are going to meet the expectations of external users and employees,” said Mark Fabbi, VP, Distinguished Analyst, Gartner. “Because of the heightened demands and complexities of mobile devices, cloud services, and application environments, enterprises are demanding more comprehensive solutions for web performance optimization.”

“Our business focuses exclusively on government and healthcare organizations—customers that depend on optimized application access to meet mission-critical service needs,” said Jim Sweeney, CTO at GTSI. “To ensure a positive user experience from any location or device type, our teams must be able to elegantly combine optimization technologies with other best-in-class application services. F5’s new ADO solutions provide significant advantages for customers looking to scale their infrastructures for remote and mobile users. In addition, we’re glad to see F5’s support for SPDY, as it will make it easier for organizations adopting the protocol to realize performance gains.”

Availability

The F5 technologies described in this announcement will be made available along with the company’s BIG-IP version 11.2 software in the second quarter of calendar year 2012. For more information about F5’s optimization solutions, please visit www.f5.com/solutions/acceleration/.

Additional Resources

• F5’s Application Delivery Optimization – SlideShare Presentation
• Application Delivery Optimization – White Paper
• Building a CDN with F5 – White Paper
• Accelerating Mobile Access – F5 Tech Brief
• The “All of the Above” Approach to Improving Application Performance – DevCentral Blog Post
• The HTTP 2.0 War has Just Begun – DevCentral Blog Post
• The Four V’s of Big Data – DevCentral Blog Post

About F5 Networks

F5 Networks, Inc., the global leader in Application Delivery Networking (ADN), helps the world’s largest enterprises and service providers realize the full value of virtualization, cloud computing, and on-demand IT. F5^® solutions help integrate disparate technologies to provide greater control of the infrastructure, improve application delivery and data management, and give users seamless, secure, and accelerated access to applications from their corporate desktops and smart devices. An open architectural framework enables F5 customers to apply business policies at “strategic points of control” across the IT infrastructure and into the public cloud. F5 products give customers the agility they need to align IT with changing business conditions, deploy scalable solutions on demand, and manage mobile access to data and services. Enterprises, service and cloud providers, and leading online companies worldwide rely on F5 to optimize their IT investments and drive business forward. For more information, go to www.f5.com.

You can also follow @f5networks on Twitter or visit us on Facebook for more information about F5, its partners, and technology. For a complete listing of F5 community sites, please visit www.f5.com/news-press-events/web-media/community.html.

F5, BIG-IP, Enterprise Manager, and DevCentral are trademarks or service marks of F5 Networks, Inc., in the U.S. and other countries. All other product and company names herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.

This press release may contain forward-looking statements relating to future events or future financial performance that involve risks and uncertainties. Such statements can be identified by terminology such as "may," "will," "should," "expects," "plans," "anticipates," "believes," "estimates," "predicts," "potential," or "continue," or the negative of such terms or comparable terms. These statements are only predictions, and actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in these statements based upon a number of factors, including those identified in the company's filings with the SEC.