The company this week launched the 25-session FirePass 600 appliance, aimed at the small and medium-sized enterprise with prices starting at $5,495, to complement its higher-end boxes.
On the enterprise side, F5 also said it has improved its FirePass Controller to include more caching, client-side security and performance features that it says leading competitors do not.
The company reported Wednesday that its security business, which it has entered through two acquistions over the last two years, did not grow as fast as hoped in the fiscal third quarter.
One area I frankly was not so happy with our execution last quarter was our new security products, particularly FirePass, chief executive John McAdam said in a conference call with analysts.
We did grow security revenue 10% sequentially quarter over quarter, which was below our internal targets, he said. We experienced delays in a number of projects in our US enterprise and US federal deals and we missed our internal goals by approximately $1m.
Federal sales were slow due to the US election and the war, executives suggested. Also, its sales teams were heavily focused on selling the latest version of its core Big-IP traffic management devices.
Asked whether the company is losing market share in the SSL space, against competitors that include Juniper Networks Inc and Aventail Corp, McAdam said: We don’t think so but it’s hard to tell.
Juniper acquired its SSL business when it bought NetScreen a year ago. Even before the acquisiton, the Neoteris SSL VPN was already market-leading and growing fast.
Typically, when we we did lose during the quarter it was when we were late to the deal, and that was typically against the Neoteris Juniper product, but that wasn’t that frequently, and we won a lot as well, McAdam said.
F5’s other main security product, the more recently acquired TrafficShield application firewall, is experiencing longer sales cycles, executive said. The market is 12 to 18 months newer than SSL VPNs, they said.
There’s a bit of an educational process that takes place, differentiating it from a standard network security product, McAdam said.
Despite the slower-than-expected security growth, and because of the focus on the new Big-IP, F5 did execute an impressive quarter, however.
For the three months to December 30, net income jumped to $10m from $3.8m a year earlier, on revenue up 66% to $60m. Big-IP represented 37% of bookings, the firm said.
To help spur along the security business, the company said yesterday it has doubled the capacity of the FirePass Controller and added better policy management and client security features.
The company has also now entered the low end of the SSL VPN market with the 600 appliances. That’s a market already being addressed by its competitors.
Recent traction in the SME market by the bigger firms has been putting the squeeze the low-end private vendors, with Ireland’s AEP Systems Ltd, for example, recently forced into a merger to survive.
