 HP Discover Las Vegas 2013, SiliconANGLE TV, wall-to-wall coverage, scour the industry, go to all the key tech events. You know it's a big event when the cube is there. And at HP, we're talking to focus on partners here. So for this segment, I've got John Prego and Jeff Strathottis, both with F5 who, gentlemen, I heard you guys are the cloud partner of the year. So first of all, congratulations. Tell us a little bit about why you F5 earned that. Sure. And to back up a little bit, we've been a partner of HPs for almost over a decade. And in 2006, we became an alliance partner officially. And this year, it culminates in a cloud partner of the year award based on our joint delivery of a BDI as a private cloud implementation. So it was pretty exciting. OK, so is that like desktop as a service? Yes. Yes, that's correct. And how does that delivery mechanism happen then? Where does that sit in cloud partners and service providers and the like? Jeff Strathottis can talk about the technicalities. So what we did was we acted basically as the glue for the BDI solution. It was a private cloud. It brought in technology services, brought in enterprise services. It also took together HP storage, HP networking, and was able to take all of that and build together into a single solution and deliver this to a customer that really needed the solution. We eliminated many of the hurdles that they had in the solution. And then we were able to replicate that to a number of different organizations as well and allow HP to see a significant opportunity come together by bringing all of those pieces together. Great. One of the things that when I think of F5 that comes to me is really it's kind of that application of delivering those services that sit on top. I have to think that things like cloud and the whole software defined meme that's going on has an impact underneath what you guys are doing. But maybe you can talk a little bit about as to how these trends in the industry are affecting F5. Sure, absolutely. We are keeping an eye on all these trends and working with HP to make sure we're working together to satisfy the demands that are coming from our client base. And cloud, certainly SDN and OpenStack, those are all elements that we want to make sure our architecture is flexible enough to support. And we're spending a lot of time and effort with HP there. We think those trends will continue that driving a lot of our demand from our customer base. As you probably know, we own about 43% of the application delivery networking marketplace. We own over 50% of the advanced marketplace where all these things are happening. And that's driving us along with data consolidation and along with the security phenomenon, which is, as you know, is becoming more and more prevalent. We address those things in complement to HP's strategies and the network, but across their different platforms. Yeah, and I'm wondering if you could speak to kind of how your go-to-market is changing appliances or some of what you've had or the kind of virtual appliances. Yes. How does that fit into the network virtualization people think? How much of delivery is on software only versus a full bundled solution? It's a growing section of our demand. We have the broadest portfolio of virtual edition software in the industry for our ADN marketplace. And we continue to see that grow. That gives us the flexibility to allow customers to deploy in any environment, whether it's the traditional enterprise or extended into the cloud environment. So Jeff, I'm guessing maybe you can walk us through just architecturally, what's the transition? How is that playing out in data centers around the world? Absolutely. So what we're finding is our historical model has been an appliance-based solution. And what we've seen is the market going basically two different directions from a carrier perspective, looking for a multi-tenant solution. We've provided a Viprion solutions chassis-based. It allows the customer to grow and expand as they need to. Large enterprises take advantage of that. And then on the other direction, what we're finding is from a software perspective is as these hypervisors continue to grow in their functionality and expand in their capabilities, we've grown our portfolio to support that as well. And what we've done is provided this virtual edition functionality that really allows customers to deploy our solutions more broadly. We've just provided a technology called BigIQ. And what that does is allows customers to interface with our solution, deploy these virtual editions out on regular hardware, take advantage of HP servers, deploy them out on their cloud environment. And then on top of that, taking things like cloud system and cloud services, automation and some of the work that we've done, automating the deployment of that, using operations orchestration to really take advantage from an operational perspective, deployment and be able to really deliver these applications much quicker than they've historically been able to do. Yeah, it's interesting. Some of the kind of rumblings when I hear some of the networking transformations is people have seen F5s dominant in the market for so long, and that's an attractive revenue stream. So you guys obviously are understanding still you're aware of the threat there and you're moving towards what's happening there. Last year we announced here on Wikibon, we basically publicly talked about some of the stuff that we announced at Interop in 2012 and we talked about the software defined networking, the virtual application networking functionality that we were working with HP networking. And the idea was with our IAP technology, taking layers four through seven, building on their IMC platform for layers two and three and providing layers two through seven to customers and be able to automate that. And so one of the things that we're delivering now is if you look at the latest version of IMC, some of the integrated work we're now delivering on that vision that we cast over a year ago. And by the end of this year, we're looking to be able to expand on that functionality to really drive those applications and the delivery of those applications to customers quicker and faster in the vision that we cast over a year ago. Yeah, I'm wondering if you could give us a little color. You know, when we talk about moving to these new models of deployment, it's not only about just being cheaper or easy to deploy, but you know, what new business value can customers create with it or what can they do now that they couldn't before? Well, bringing these applications on quicker allows customers to recognize that return on investment quicker. So if they're spending weeks and months investing in these applications to get them online, that's wasted time that they can't recognize the value of those applications. So one of the value propositions that we provide is being able to take these applications, bring them online quicker, which allows them to bring additional applications online and therefore being able to recognize the revenue that's potentially associated with those, as well as improving the workflow and the productivity of customers when they deploy these applications. So John, other than winning the award here at the show, you've been having good customer interaction, you know, what flavor can you give us as a customer here? Very good customer interaction. We've also seen this amazing pace to the crowds and I think you guys are doing a great job in terms of comeback strong, in terms of providing the value your clients are asking for. So it's been very exciting. You can tell this from last year, the amount of people, the excitement in the crowd and all the solutions you're presenting, especially in these areas we're talking about. Yeah, it's interesting. I'm wondering, you know, with the kind of the converged cloud, the converged infrastructure kind of restructure, seems like it's pivoting even closer to where you guys fit in the market. Absolutely, we're very excited about the work we're doing with all the areas of HP, but especially in the converged area. All right, so, you know, it's still relatively early. We like to use sports analogies here. I'm not sure, you know, which one's your favorite sports, but we're not going to talk about the hockey from last night. We're not. But let's take baseball's an easy thing, you know. Where are we in this adoption new paradigm? Are the pitchers still warming up on the mound or in the first or second inning? Or, you know, are we kind of halfway there? You know, I think we're still in the early stages. If you look at the adoption, much of what is still needing our API adoptions, formalization of some of the programs and the APIs and the technology in order to solidify really the direction and the boundaries through which we're going to deliver some of this stuff. So, still early on, I think the adoption rate's going to be quick. As soon as we get some of these hurdles completed, from my perspective, I think it's going to be a relatively quick ramp up and we'll get to the ninth inning and maybe even over time. Yeah. Quickly. Great point about kind of that API support. More and more, we're having platform discussions with we're talking big data and what HP announced here with Haven. Or, if you look at what OpenStack's doing, are you guys involved in the OpenStack pitchers? That's something you're working with HP on and contributing to? We are supporting OpenStack. We will support OpenStack and through our, we mentioned our big IQ platform. So, and we are in discussions with HP, of course. Okay. Especially HP networking. So, Jeff, last question I want to have for you is, you know, you get down in the weeds on some of this. What's the coolest technology you've seen this week other than what F5's got here? Wow. You know, just from one of the values and the benefits of coming to a show like this, is you get an opportunity to really look at some of the cutting edge technology, get an opportunity to share and speak with some of the innovators from the CTOs and really find out really where things are going. I think from today, HP announced their cloud OS. I think what HP's doing from a cloud perspective, certainly with our winning partner of the year in the cloud computing area. I'm really looking forward to how they've cast that vision and how we can leverage what they're doing and tie into what they're doing. And I think from a cloud perspective, kind of a generic term and all-encompassing, but I think being able to bring all of that together, looking at all of the technologies that HP can bring together that they own as a piece of that, but then also their dependency on the open standards that that provides to me is really exciting. All right. And John, I'm wondering if I'll put you on the spot here, you know, people get excited about the technology. Unfortunately, kind of the macroeconomic stage have kind of been depressing as a couple of years. The people that own the budget, you know, what's their attitude? Are they seeing new opportunities that, you know, they keep kind of the CapEx flat and can adjust things? You know, how are the economic situation what you hear at the show? Two areas that have caught my attention here is one is how much progress you've made with big data. Very exciting. Your solutions in that space and we're also working with you in that space. The other one is security. That is one that is trumping all economic, you know, issues and the fact is companies need to address that and that's another area where you guys are in the forefront also, which is very exciting. You mean HP, of course. HP, yes. So absolutely, we are keeping a close eye on all these trends. John, I just want to give you the last word, I guess, you know, take away, you know, when people think about the HP, you know, F5 relationship partner of the year. You know, where do you go from here? We continue to build on what we've done and continue to add new solutions together and I think focusing on open solutions for our clients is really the key area. Yeah, open technology, flexibility, definitely some of the key themes we're hearing from Dave Donatelli, Tom Joyce, all down through the organization. Obviously, you know, openness and everything that they're doing. Big data, cloud, software to find everything here. John and Jeff, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE here, appreciate you sharing with our community what's going on. This is SiliconANGLE's live independent coverage of HP Discover 2013 and we'll be back with our next guest right after this brief break. Thank you.