F5 Networks

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F5 Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ: [FFIV]) originally manufactured and sold some of the first load balancing products. Similar to a traffic cop on the Internet, F5’s load balancers sat in front of network servers and worked to balance incoming Internet traffic, ensuring that no one Web server became too overloaded.

Today, F5 still offers load balancing capabilities on their products (typically called appliances), but these products today offer other functionality including:

SSL Acceleration
Intelligent Compression
L7 Rate Shaping
Advanced Client Authentication
Advanced Routing
Caching
Local traffic management
Global traffic management
Application security
Link/Internet Service Provider (ISP) Load balancing
Software Development Kit (SDK) and Application Programming Interface (API)
Network Management
Global Product Support Network

Corporate history

F5 Networks, originally named F5 Labs, was co-founded in 1996 by Jeff Hussey. F5's first product was a load balancer called BIG-IP. If a server went down or became overloaded, BIG-IP directed traffic away from that server to other servers that could handle the load. F5 is named after the highest category tornado.

In 1999 the company went public and was listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange. Using internal development and acquisitions the company extended its reach beyond load balancing, producing products for what is known today as Application Traffic Management. These products went beyond routing Web traffic to the most available server to improving the delivery of the application itself by making the application run faster and more securely.

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