F5 Inc 's

The expanding capabilities of our product offerings have enabled us to address a growing array of market opportunities, many of which are outside the bounds of the application delivery networking market as defined and measured by industry analysts such as Gartner Group, Dell’Oro and others. In addition to server load-balancing and other functions normally associated with application delivery, our suite of integrated product modules has expanded our addressable market into security, WAN optimization, application acceleration, policy management, and Diameter signaling, where we compete with a growing number of companies not included among traditional ADC vendors. The ability to create custom network services using iRules and iCall has also enabled us, our customers, and our partners to design solutions to problems for which there is no off-the-shelf solution. As a result, we believe the traditional definitions of our market do not encompass all of the features, functions and capabilities of our products or accurately represent the addressable market for those products.
Within the more narrowly defined traditional ADC market, several companies sell server load-balancing products. These include Brocade Communications Systems, Inc., Citrix Systems, Inc., Radware Ltd., and a number of smaller competitors: A10 Networks, Array Networks, Inc., Barracuda Networks, Inc., and Riverbed Technology.
In related ADC markets we compete with the following:

Cisco, Juniper Networks and Checkpoint Systems, in the network firewall market;

Cisco and Juniper in the secure remote access market;

Imperva and Citrix in the web application firewall market;

Cisco, Juniper and A10 in Carrier Grade NAT;

Procera, Allot, Sandvine and other DPI vendors with our PEM offerings;

Riverbed Technology and Silver Peak Systems in the WAN optimization and application acceleration market; and

Oracle via the acquisition of Tekelec and Acme Packet in the Diameter signaling market.
The principal competitive factors in the markets in which we compete include product features and performance, customer support, brand recognition, the scope of distribution and sales channels and pricing. Certain of our competitors have and may in the future adopt aggressive pricing policies to gain market share. However, because of the superior performance, broad functionality and unique capabilities of our products, which have resulted in high levels of customer satisfaction and growing brand awareness, we believe that we can and will compete effectively against such pricing policies.