Oscar Visaya, an electronics engineer, is hiring more people next year to expand the Philippine team of F5 Networks, a US technology company named after the highest intensity level of tornadoes.
“In 2016, we are very bullish. That’s why I asked my corporation to invest in adding five more people. Three of them were already hired and two more, I will be hiring in three to six months, which shows we are bullish not only in 2016, but also for the next three years,” Visaya, the country manager of F5 Networks Philippines, says in an interview in Makati City.
Visaya helped establish the operations of F5 in the Philippines in 2011 and is now responsible for the overall Philippines market growth. Prior to F5 Networks, Visaya, who graduated with a Bachelor of Science Degree in Electronics and Communications Engineering from Saint Louis University, served for 14 years at Cisco. He was one of Cisco’s most awarded systems engineers in Asia-Pacific.
F5 was founded on Feb. 5, 1996, hence also the name. “We are gonna be 20 years old on Feb. 5. That’s why the name F5. But the 5 there is really the intensity level of tornado. The founders went to watch the movie ‘Twister,’ where it was mentioned. That’s how they got the name,” says Visaya.
Visaya says like a tornado, F5 also rocked the IT scene when it was formed two decades ago. “During that time, it was a solution that brought tornado in the marketplace when Internet was still booming,” he says.
“There was a problem of scaling the Internet server and we initially provided load balancing. We addressed requirements from different industries. We focused on financial industries, telco and government but a lot of enterprise customers including manufacturing, retail and education are also part of the customer base,” says Visaya.
“Our story is around the three key features we are delivering for our customers. Applications are very vital to the survival of a business. What we do for these applications is we provide the highest security, the highest availability and the fastest performance,” he says, in explaining what F5 does.
F5, the leader in application delivery networking, provides hardware and software solutions to deliver fast, secure and reliable applications on any device, he says.
“Some of our competitors would just provide security, but even if it is secure and it is not fast, then you will not use it. On the other hand, if a company would come in and provide acceleration for the apps, and it doesn’t provide security, then it is fast but not secure. We completed the story by creating the solutions that provide three of them,” says Visaya.
“In the Philippines, we are playing in the high-growth areas of telco and financial services. We have a team of nine people, and I will be adding two more,” he says.
“When we started the business [in 2011], there were only 15 or 20 customers. Now, we have 100 plus customers. Over the past four years, we added more than 100 customers,” says Visaya.
Visaya says F5 is a player in layers 4 to 7 of the network switch market, with layers 1 to 3 being served by other companies such as Cisco. “Technically, we play in the layers 4 to 7 space,” he says. “We have two other serious players in the space, but we are the market leader. Globally, our market share ranges between 49 percent and 52 percent. But in the Philippines, what I have seen is that it ranges between 70 and 92 percent,” he says.
Visaya says companies have discovered the value of F5 services. “We have experience to show that even if you buy expensive networking hardware, but if the applications do not run, then that ROI [return on investment] is zero. It has grown and a lot of people are now recognizing the value of what we offer. That is the reason why over the past four years, we have grown. For our customers who deployed four years ago, they are still buying. Some of the bigger ones, they are buying every year. They are expanding our customer base,” says Visaya.
Visaya says the services provided by F5 are becoming even more relevant with the rise of applications. “We are living in applications world. We need to provide solutions to the applications world. It is really happening. Mobile apps are there. There are actually businesses that run on apps. Think about Uber. Without their app, they are nothing,” says Visaya.
F5 Networks has recently introduced expansions in its security and cloud services to extend application delivery in the face of the rising use of applications across organizations.
Visaya, citing the key findings of ‘The State of Application Delivery in APAC 2015’ survey, says the use of applications by Asia Pacific companies is growing and shows no signs of abating.
He says enterprise applications are increasingly being moved into the cloud as organizations embrace the ‘cloud-first’ philosophy.
Among those surveyed, almost half (45 percent) currently deploy 1 to 200 applications, while almost 10 percent of organizations currently deploy more than 3,000 applications.
The study also shows that at least 41 percent of IT decision makers are open to moving up to a quarter (24 percent) of their applications to the cloud by 2016.
Visaya says F5 solutions broaden the reach of IT through an open, extensible framework and a rich partner ecosystem of leading technology and orchestration vendors.
“Anything about e-commerce, there is opportunity. I was telling the team and our partners, as long as there is commerce site, it is a potential customer. Right now in the Philippines, they are sprouting like mushrooms,” he says.
“If they move to become an e-commerce company, their website is their business. We will make that secure and we will make that fast,” says Visaya.
