10 Years of Success: AWS and F5

“10 Years of Success” is a blog series celebrating a decade of the AWS Partner Network (APN) through stories of partner transformation, collaboration, and customer success.
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By Amanda Mock, Program Manager – AWS Partner Network
By Dave Morrissey, AWS Global Alliance Director – F5

In celebration of the 10-year anniversary of the AWS Partner Network (APN), we are highlighting some of our AWS Partners who have grown with us over the past decade.

Up-next in our “10 Years of Success” series is F5, an industry leader in cloud security and application services with 25+ years of experience helping businesses accelerate and simplify cloud migration.

F5 is an AWS Partner with Networking, Security, and Containers Competencies and an AWS ISV Workload Migration designation. Its offerings include firewall optimization, near-real-time threat monitoring and, most recently, F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense which is available in AWS Marketplace. Currently, F5 solutions are deployed in 48 of the Fortune 50 companies, the top 10 global telecom operators, and 15 of the top U.S. commercial banks.

Bridging the gap between cloud environments and traditional data centers, F5 empowers its customers to manage their cloud applications with programmable services designed for flexibility.

Q&A with F5

The AWS Partner Network spoke with Dave Morrissey, AWS Global Alliance Director at F5, to talk about F5’s history as an industry leader, how it worked closely with AWS teams to launch the company’s first software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering, and F5’s plans for the future.

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AWS: Ten years is a long time in the tech world. What changes have you seen in your customers and/or in your industry during that time?

Dave Morrissey: The customer base using Amazon Web Services (AWS) has broadened and cloud is becoming increasingly mainstream, with more customers adopting multiple clouds, in addition to on-premises application hosting.

Those customers want to protect the development and design they have put into their F5 architectures as they move to AWS to take advantage of the agility of cloud, while maintaining the application security and traffic management they use and trust.

AWS: What transformation and growth has your business gone through in the last 10 years?

Dave: F5 has moved from a single hardware platform-based business to virtual appliances and SaaS. As a global leader in load balancing and application delivery controllers (ADCs), F5 has evolved to offer different varieties of SaaS, lightweight DevOps systems, multi-cloud systems, and rich cloud analytics.

F5 reimagined what was possible, leveraging AWS to accelerate development and go-to-market. Our first integrated offering included Amazon CloudFront as part of the setup with our F5 service—all through the F5 customer portal. This service coupling was a first for F5.

AWS: What are some challenges you’ve had to overcome, and how did you evolve and adapt to resolve them?

Dave: When we set out to develop our first in-house SaaS solution, it was clear we might benefit from some additional expertise from AWS. We were able to leverage the AWS SaaS Factory Program and engaged with AWS experts to follow best practices for SaaS go-to-market that helped shorten our time to launch by 12 months.

As a result, we were able to create and launch our first Contract with Consumption SaaS offering in AWS Marketplace, giving our customers the variable flexibility of usage-based security.

AWS: What partner resources or programs have you leveraged most effectively to build and differentiate your business?

Dave: The AWS SaaS Factory program’s expertise helped us develop a strong SaaS offering to better support our customers. F5 was already recognized as a leader in areas of cybersecurity, networking, and container traffic control outside of AWS, and achieving Competencies for these three areas allowed us to validate our leadership on AWS as well.

Having AWS-qualified software offerings and AWS Partner designations sets us apart in the industry, allowing us to help customers more confidently move to the cloud while maintaining their trusted core components of F5 in a consistent hybrid model.

AWS: What do the next few years look like for your organization with AWS? What are you hoping to achieve for continued growth?

Dave: F5 is looking forward to growing and advancing our “build-beside” integrations with AWS to continue improving the customer experience. Being an AWS CloudFront Ready Partner is one example of this native service focus. We see that the application is the most important asset of the digital enterprise. Application capital is the primary driver of differentiation and value creation for modern enterprises.

F5 strives to support its customers with simple-to-use and consistent capabilities with the same rich set of security, container, and networking functions anywhere they want to deploy—whether it be across the cloud, mobile devices, data centers, or on premises.

AWS: What is your fondest AWS memory or experience?

Dave: Working with the AWS SaaS Factory team on our first SaaS development, which culminated with our CEO, François Locoh-Donou, presenting at the AWS Santa Clara 2019 Summit. It was so powerful to hear him tell our story and talk about how F5 was not satisfied with our prior success and challenged our own status quo to increase our software offerings and ultimately expand the use cases for F5 products.
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About the AWS Partner Network

The AWS Partner Network (APN) is a global community of partners that leverage programs, expertise, and resources to build, market, and sell customer offerings. This diverse network features 100,000 partners from more than 150 countries.

Together, partners and AWS can provide innovative solutions, solve technical challenges, win deals, and deliver value to our mutual customers.

▶ Read Jeff Barr’s blog post about the APN’s anniversary: 10 Years and Going Strong!

▶ See other stories in the APN’s “10 Years of Success” blog series.