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SDA India in conversation with Mr.Harvinder Singh, Country Manager – India at F5 Networks, a global leader in application delivery networking to get an insight of F5’s marketing plans and strategies in India and broadly understand how F5 is helping in optimizing application performance?

Q: You have over thirteen years of experience in the IT and telecom industries. Could you tell our readership about the strategic growth in the industry during that period?

A: Gone are days when connectivity was the source of revenue for a telecom player. Today with dropping connectivity price by the day, the real money lies in value added businesses. Content distribution will become main revenue streams for telecom players. Concepts like VOIP, Video on Demand, Web TV and IPTV will be the next phase in this space.

Q: You have been recently appointed as the Country Manager at India, F5 Networks. Could you tell us your future plans for the company?

A: In my current role as Country Manager – India, F5 Networks, I am not only managing the F5 India operations but also revamping the way F5 has been doing business in India traditionally. With the current revamping, I expect the business in India to not only continue growing faster than the industry growth but also in building credibility and confidence amongst customers in F5’s technology and its presence in India.

Q: What is Application Delivery Networking and what is the need for application performance?

A: Application Delivery Networking is an approach and a suite of technologies that comprises application security, application acceleration and network availability. It ensures that applications are always secure, fast, and available across any network.
Applications running across large or complex networks don't always perform as expected. Bandwidth is often under-utilized and sluggish response times can frustrate end users. Poor performance leads to lost productivity, inefficient manual workarounds, and reduced agility and therefore the need for optimizing application performance. Every business should take measures to improve application performance and keep users satisfied.

Q: Could you explain our readership more about the DevCentral, developer community?

A: F5 DevCentral, is a thriving online community of tens of thousands of application and network professionals, it is the only Web site and community on the Internet that offers practical, real-world solutions and discussions to bridge the gap that has traditionally existed between application developers and network professionals. On DevCentral, F5 customers collaborate every day on innovative new ideas, techniques, and code, to help businesses scale and adapt quickly to changing needs.

Q: Looking into the future, could you explain us F5’s marketing plans and strategies in India?

A: The focus that F5 Networks has in India currently is building awareness about the brand and its offerings by investing in customer and channel events and also by building visibility through the print media.

Q: What are the various solutions provided by F5 and how different are these solutions from their other competitors in the market?

A: Every enterprise network is unique, with a different mix of applications, geographic locations, bandwidth constraints, and related challenges. F5 products have the flexibility to handle almost any network needs. F5 products work together to solve some of the most critical issues that IT departments face today with respect to:
· Application deployment and delivery
· Business continuity and disaster recovery
· User experience and application performance
· Application security and data integrity
· Universal security enforcement and access control
· Datacenter consolidation

F5’s USP is that F5 is the only vendor that can give you extraordinary flexibility and control over applications with TMOS, iControl, and iRules, a shared delivery platform and set of tools that operate in a fundamentally different way than competing technologies.

Q: Tell us more about your products and your target audience?

A: F5 is a recognized leader in application delivery networking. Deploying F5 products at key points in the network addresses problems directly and effectively and also cost effectively. The products from F5 are namely BIG – IP, FirePass, WANJet and Enterprise Manager.

BIG-IP is the only device in the industry that can handle the wide variety of problems faced by applications running through networks. It delivers high availability, improved performance, application security, and access control, all in one unit. FirePass ensures secure access for remote workers. WANJet is a powerful, appliance-based solution that delivers fast, steady, predictable performance for all users on a WAN. Enterprise Manager increases operational efficiency in the F5 application delivery network, it delivers a robust feature set designed to eliminate redundant tasks and simplify everyday operations and also helps in reducing operational costs.

Target audience – telecom, banking, IT – ITes sectors

Q: Who are your partners in India?

A: In India, currently we have Transition Systems as our value added distribution partner.

Q: Could you tell us about your business model and marketing infrastructure, as F5 is expanding it’s marketing and services efforts in India?

A: We are focusing on ramping up our channel network for wider and deeper market penetration and also on offering the necessary support that is required.

Q: What kind of feedback are you getting from the market so far in terms of user experience and application performance?

A: User experience and application performance is absolutely no question, with last year’s growth recorded at 145% and current performance, I am sure the answer is clear “it works and works better than others”.

Q: Is there any thing else that you would like to add for the benefit of our readership?

A: By adding intelligence and manageability into the network to offload applications and optimize the data storage layer, F5 extends the power of intelligent networking to all levels of application delivery. F5’s extensible architecture intelligently integrates application optimization, protects the application and the network, and delivers application reliability.

I would also like to mention about the latest offering from F5 Networks, VIPRION. It is a new hardware platform, and industry’s first Application Delivery Controller (ADC) having a top-end performance that is 4 times greater than the highest performance rated appliance of any competitive product in the market. With this enterprise customers and service providers can roll out a complete application-fluent infrastructure that is simpler to deploy and manage. VIPRION virtualizes the network and servers using industry-leading L7 intelligence. VIPRION’s scalability allows organizations to implement a sustainable growth strategy for their ADN.