F5 Report: App Availability Top Customer Priority

F5 Networks (FFIV) revealed the results of its inaugural 2015 State of Application Delivery survey, which found that application availability is the No. 1 priority among IT professionals.

The importance of availability services garnered 40 percent of votes among respondents answering what services they could not imagine deploying their applications without. Security services only received 30 percent of the vote, which reinforces the belief that security is only useful if an application is actually in working order, according to the company.

“Applications are vital to business operations, as are the application services designed to improve performance, enhance security and ensure reliability,” said Dean Darwin, senior vice president of Marketing at F5, in a statement. “The data from F5’s first survey in exploring the state of application delivery confirms the role these services play in successful application deployments. As customers incorporate public, private and hybrid cloud models, application service offerings must also continue to evolve to address complexity and meet new and existing challenges.”

The survey, which polled more than 300 F5 customers across verticals including financial services, telecommunications, the public sector and consumer products, found that application environments are growing at a rapid pace. Twenty percent of respondents said they currently have between 201 and 500 applications deployed in their environments, with an additional 28 percent utilizing between one and 200 applications.

The importance of private cloud environments dominated F5’s list of top-ranked trends, with 59 percent of respondents ranking private cloud as the top technology for the next two through five years. Mobile apps garnered 56 percent of the vote.

The survey also revealed that API-enabled infrastructure is a key driver of business agility, with programmability ranked as an essential component for DevOps, software-defined networking and cloud computing. The survey found that customers increasingly are looking for ways to customize the automation and orchestration of their network services via programmatic technologies.

Finally, software-defined networking remains popular among respondents as a way to reduce operating expenses, according to the survey. Overall, about two-thirds of respondents were interested in utilizing SDN to reduce their operating expenses.

“One of our top priorities in the channel is how we continue to further educate partners,” said Jim Ritchings, senior vice president of Worldwide Channels at F5, in an interview with The VAR Guy. “I think the big opportunity … rests with our ability to better enable them.”

F5 will be hosting a free webinar series later this month with company executives for those interested in learning more about the survey findings.