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This week, we are again highlighting a different Magic Quadrant: Application Delivery Controllers (ADC), and we’re going to look at things a little differently. While movement across and upwards in Gartner’s quadrants is a great achievement, sometimes sitting still is just as impressive. We know that sounds contradictory, so let us explain using one of the leaders as our model.
In the first blog installment in this series, we discussed Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Endpoint Protection and how Cylance’s power-plays in AI moved them quickly up Gartner’s Visionaries quadrant. Cylance is now so close to the Leaders “circle” that they can practically high five the boundary line. We love to see that positive movement! See our other MQ discussions on Integrated Systems, Enterprise Network Firewalls, IaaS, IPS, SIEM, SSA, and WAF.
How Leaders Stay Leading: F5 in the Gartner Magic Quadrant
If your company just made it into a Gartner Magic Quadrant, then you don’t have any time to relax. If anything, you should work that much harder to keep gaining ground. In the same way that movement upwards conveys the success and credibility of a corporation, moving down in a quadrant is just as detrimental to that reputation.
Naturally, being at the top of their quadrants places more pressure on companies (a pressure that is sure to grow exponentially if they then make it in with the Leaders themselves). And if you happen to be a Leaders frontrunner, there’s even more at stake—you certainly do not want to lose that position. This is where the holding still comes into play.
If you want to hold your ground, then you must never stop moving. Let’s see what that looks like in real-time by analyzing F5 in the Gartner Magic Quadrant.
Leader: F5 Networks—Standing Still by Moving Ahead
F5 Networks has been holding its ground in Gartner’s Magic Quadrants for Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) for some time now—not only are they in the Leaders quadrant, they have remained as a top performer within that quadrant for ten years straight!
For the first several years of its nominations, F5 Networks remained in the mid-range of the Leaders quadrant within a relatively dense cluster of competitors. However, since 2014, F5 Networks has pulled squarely away toward the top of the quadrant, and, in the most recent 2016 report, F5 Networks is head and shoulders above any other company in the Leaders bracket.
Constant Vigilance for a Sustainable Lead
How has F5 Networks managed to keep the leading role for an entire decade? According to Gartner’s 2016 Magic Quadrant for ADC report, F5 Networks remains a frontrunner because of its:
- Strong brand awareness
- All-inclusive product portfolio of physical, virtual, and cloud deployments
In short, its built a brand on a single, fluid platform that’s dedicated to speed and ideally placed for security.
F5 Networks’ Silverline provides ADC functionality for both on-premise and cloud-based applications. Its dedication to a unified platform enables quick adaptability to current market evolutions. The single platform that F5 Networks maintains supports a broad spectrum of use cases—providing not only speed features like ADC and front-end optimization (FEO), but security-minded features like web access firewall (WAF), DDoS protection, and secure web gateway (SWG) support.
Gartner also reported a growing trend that, because of F5 Networks’ consistent versatility and substantial experience within the industry, clients are implementing F5 Networks security capabilities in congruence with ADC deployments. No matter the array of applications or the complexity of the enterprise environments, Gartner asserts that “all enterprises globally should consider F5 Networks for their Mode 1 initiatives” due to its “long-standing understanding of the ADC market, and capability to address complex and customized application environments better than any other vendor in this research.” For a company that has “sat still” for so long, F5 Networks knows how to maneuver itself effectively within the ADC market.
Set the Pace
If you’re not moving forward, then you’re falling behind. Just because you land a spot in a Gartner Magic Quadrant one year doesn’t mean that you’re guaranteed that spot in the following. Gartner’s playing field is dynamic and it never rests. F5 Networks has demonstrated staying power, and it’s been doing so for more than ten years now. We are thrilled to be one of the few premiere F5 GUARDIAN level partners in North America.
Want to streamline and protect your applications and the data centers that host them? Work with us. As a GUARDIAN Professional Services partner, we know F5 Networks better than anyone.
