Skip to content 
This year F5 EMEA (#F5Agility2014) was held in Denmark and more than 500 F5 customers and partners attended the Copenhagen Congress Centre for two days of informative key notes, breakout sessions and networking opportunities. The event marked another year of technological innovations in application delivery, the emergence of SDN, the ongoing business challenges around implementing new technologies, and building on the conversations of previous years around networks, cloud and security.
Throughout the two day event, we had a huge amount of information to digest, but here are some highlighted learnings from the week:
A. F5 shared more details about Big-IQ platform that provides an intelligent framework to simplify management of application delivery services.
B. Many customers are facing challenges to manage heterogeneous networks and are finding change management to be extremely expensive. A few attendees even pointed out that their employees are not motivated as they perform the routine jobs such as editing Firewall policy and Load balancer policies. Hence, Network automation and self-service is at the top of mind for customers.
C. Neil Rickard, Research Vice President at Gartner took to the stage to discuss “Cloud, SDN and the evolution of Enterprise Networking.” He highlighted how, through 2015, at least 50% of cloud deployments will suffer from service delivery issues due to the network. Neil highlighted how the biggest benefit of virtualization and cloud computing is increased data center agility: however, the biggest barrier to this agility is network provisioning time. The survival of IT is dependent on the ability to offer this agility, so ensuring the network will be crucial.
The attendees were impressed with NCX’s rich feature coverage and multivendor orchestration. They especially liked the demo of NCX self-service portal integration with the new F5 Big-IQ orchestration. Ours was definitely a popular booth!
All in all the F5 Agility event in Copenhagen was a success! It was a great opportunity to meet with likeminded industry experts, and the event offered a chance to assess the market, our challenges and how we can improve the services that our customers need. The industry is moving at a rapid pace to adopt SDN and new ways to design, deploy and operate enterprise networks. Not surprisingly, the commonality in these trends is applications, and how to deliver them.
Thanks for another great year F5!
– Kate Garrison, July 1st, 2014.
