How to Beat Cisco In A Web 2.0 World

Every networking company would love to build an online community of loyal customers and partners. But F5 Networks has actually done it. And that could lead to a competitve advantage in the market.

During the F5 Networks Partner Summit in New Orleans, the company claimed its DevCentral community now has 30,000 members who share tips, tricks and best practices with one another.

Of course, a lot of those members may be observers rather than participants. But that’s not surprising: In most social networks, fewer than 1 percent of the members actually raise their voice regularly on the network. Do some quick math (1 percent of 30,000), and F5 likely has about 300 fanatics on the DevCentral site.

The fantastics are evangelists — similar to open source followers — who can help F5 raise its visibility with CIOs. And the other 29,700 DevCentral members are likely fair weather friends: As long as F5 keeps producing good products, they’ll hang around at the party.

Secret Sauce?

During this week’s Partner Summit, F5 executives spoke quite a bit about maintaining technology leadership over of Cisco Systems — particularly when it comes to load balancing and application-aware networks.

Sounds great. But you can’t win on technology alone. In the Web 1.0 world, Cisco and Microsoft dominated because they had the most loyal VAR and ISV followings, respectively. Also, both companies did a spectacular job with their training and certification efforts.

In the Web 2.0 world, you need a fanatical online community to ensure long-term growth.

Everyone in the open source world already knows this. In the networking world, people are gradually beginning to understand this. Cisco has done a solid job building Web 2.0 sites for its partners and VARs.

But the fact that 30,000 people have discovered F5’s DevCentral proves that there’s room in the networking market for more competitors.