Latest / Buzz Off / Episode 5 - Paul O'Kelly, F5

Transcript

Episode 5 - Paul O'Kelly, F5 · Buzz Off

• 0:08
  Hello and welcome to Buzz Off.
• 0:09
  My name is Oliver Chapman.
• 0:11
  I am solution area director for networking and security at Computacenter.
• 0:15
  This is a web series designed for our customers by our customers.
• 0:19
  Each time I have a different guest join me from our partner community
• 0:22
  and our customers submit three buzz words or phrases that they hate.
• 0:27
  If our guest mentions one of the buzz words or phrases,
• 0:31
  you will hear this noise.
• 0:34
  If they mention all three, then I will forcefully
• 0:38
  eject them from the studio and terminate the interview immediately.
• 0:42
  This week's buzzwords are “future proof”,
• 0:45
  “data driven” and “re-imagine”.
• 0:49
  This time I am joined by Paul O'Kelly,
• 0:52
  who is head of pre-sales U&I at F5.
• 0:55
  Good luck.
• 0:56
  Paul.
• 0:57
  Paul, welcome to Buzz Off.
• 1:00
  Thank you very much for having me. How are you feeling?
• 1:01
  Are you feeling nervous? Relaxed?
• 1:03
  In between, because I don't know what the words are.
• 1:06
  Okay. But you know the format.
• 1:08
  I mean, I've got to admit
• 1:09
  I'm feeling a little bit nervous, because if you do say the buzz words, then
• 1:12
  I'm not sure I'm going to be able to forcefully eject you.
• 1:14
  I think it's going to be like a child running into a brick wall.
• 1:17
  So. So look, I'm on your side.
• 1:20
  I'm rooting for you in this game. Okay?
• 1:21
  So can you just give me the buzz word?
• 1:23
  No. No, no. Okay. No chance, no chance.
• 1:25
  So F5, what's exciting right now at F5 and what keeps you there as well?
• 1:31
  Well, I've been at F5 almost five years and it's probably because, you know,
• 1:35
  we just keep reinventing ourselves
• 1:37
  and progressing with technology and addressing customer outcomes.
• 1:40
  So it's the technologies and the people are really important to me.
• 1:45
  What's exciting really about F5 is no longer just about load balancing.
• 1:48
  It's it's the heart of securing and delivering applications, be it
• 1:52
  monolithic, modern, AI powered, and securing those.
• 1:57
  And people are trying to grapple with the AI side, the hybrid cloud side
• 2:01
  and cyber security threats.
• 2:03
  So kind of F5 addresses all of those problems.
• 2:06
  Yeah.
• 2:06
  And that
• 2:06
  reinvention thing that you talked about I mean, I've seen that play out, right.
• 2:10
  Because as you say, they were a networking organisation
• 2:14
  initially and then security and then cloud and now AI.
• 2:18
  Right.
• 2:18
  So it's been a bit of a journey over, over.
• 2:21
  The AI.
• 2:22
  Is kind of a word that's used quite often these days.
• 2:26
  But you know, it's good.
• 2:27
  We'll be able to have the infrastructure and support for the AI,
• 2:31
  not just the AI data that has the flow, but more importantly,
• 2:34
  the applications of layer seven.
• 2:36
  Everything's API driven now, you know, and F5
• 2:39
  sits at that intersection of three of the biggest priorities of any CEO,
• 2:43
  which is application security, AI readiness and hybrid cloud.
• 2:48
  So and we're in a good position to have those conversations with our customers.
• 2:52
  And so you work with a lot of different partner organisations in your role.
• 2:58
  I would imagine from a from an F5 perspective
• 3:00
  and from your perspective as well, why Computacenter?
• 3:03
  20 year relationship, 20 years long,
• 3:07
  multiple kind of engagements
• 3:09
  with, well, every vertical I could think of, to be fair and really,
• 3:14
  you know, the ability for us to address, you know, customer outcomes.
• 3:17
  But you know, with F5 portfolio or solution sets
• 3:21
  and your managed services and skills and expertise in delivering those,
• 3:27
  I think it's a great relationship and partnership that helps our customers.
• 3:31
  So so you spend a lot of time with customers.
• 3:33
  This is a a web series for our customers specifically.
• 3:37
  When you think about the exec teams that you're engaging with,
• 3:40
  what's a question right now that every CIO should be asking their teams?
• 3:45
  One that I've heard quite a few times, which I think is very relevant,
• 3:49
  is if we were to rip up what we've got now, have a white piece of paper, plain
• 3:54
  sheet of paper, redesign something to do, what we need to do now and in the future.
• 3:58
  What would it look like
• 4:00
  and how does it differ to what we got now and the gaps acquiring?
• 4:03
  There's a big difficult difference.
• 4:05
  Yeah.
• 4:06
  So it's how do we kind of move from that to this.
• 4:09
  So that's one of the questions I would be asking the CIO.
• 4:12
  Okay. Amazing.
• 4:13
  And I suppose the the next challenge is once you understand
• 4:17
  what that gap looks like, putting some kind of program around it.
• 4:20
  Right.
• 4:20
  Because obviously that that feels like quite a major
• 4:24
  transformative initiative for a lot of big organisations especially.
• 4:28
  Yeah.
• 4:29
  And I think that's, you know, that's the the good thing about,
• 4:31
  you know, we've moved away from a, you know, your load balancing into application
• 4:35
  delivery, security and security platform, the platforms, the interesting bit
• 4:39
  and really relevant because people are trying to deliver
• 4:42
  different services on different platforms or different
• 4:45
  products and they've got overlaps and things like that.
• 4:49
  You know, the platform basically consolidates
• 4:52
  and converges all of those things into the security applications
• 4:56
  or products into one platform, no matter where it's being delivered to.
• 5:01
  So if it's on cloud, private cloud, data centre,
• 5:05
  you know, you have the ability to deliver those same services Fantastic.
• 5:09
  I mean, you mentioned a word there
• 5:10
  that I think is quite key, which is consolidation, right?
• 5:12
  And I think that leads me on to my next question,
• 5:15
  which is around outcomes, which are our customers they care about.
• 5:18
  Right.
• 5:19
  They don't want to
• 5:19
  they don't care about seeing pictures of application delivery controllers.
• 5:23
  They want to understand how you can help them to save money, to save time as well.
• 5:27
  When you think about some of those outcomes that we've delivered
• 5:30
  in partnership together,
• 5:31
  what are some of the use cases that spring to mind immediately?
• 5:34
  I think it's about helping organisations replace their point products and having,
• 5:40
  you know, converged solution for instance load balancing API.
• 5:45
  But you know, DDoS, all of these, these these things, it's
• 5:49
  about how you can kind of consolidate all of those into one platform,
• 5:52
  and then you're saving your customers costs for operational costs,
• 5:55
  licensing costs, etc., etc..
• 5:57
  That's for us is, you know, particularly use case with
• 6:01
  some of our customers that we've actually helped their customers
• 6:03
  through that journey and ultimately saved them money
• 6:06
  and operating operational time and cost and things like that.
• 6:10
  Yeah.
• 6:10
  And I suppose
• 6:11
  there are additional benefits to that, like probably more joined up visibility
• 6:15
  as well.
• 6:15
  And the visibility is obviously what joins it all together in telemetry.
• 6:19
  So collecting that data and what then what do you do with that data?
• 6:23
  So they're able to make more informed decisions.
• 6:26
  Yes. Yeah. Yeah.
• 6:26
  And what we're doing with the ADSP
• 6:28
  platform is now we're linking in more and more third party
• 6:32
  tools that people can then look at there
• 6:34
  so they don't even have to reinvest completely.
• 6:36
  They've got certain tools they can use
• 6:37
  and they can bring it all back into one platform. Amazing.
• 6:40
  So you talked about,
• 6:41
  I suppose, some of the reinvention and how F5 has been through a few stages.
• 6:44
  I'm going to ask you probably for your crystal ball
• 6:46
  a little bit here, but what
• 6:47
  what do you think that vision, the future vision looks like from F5 for customers?
• 6:52
  we don't have a crystal ball.
• 6:53
  But I think as technology is progressing, you know, AI
• 6:57
  especially is generating so much data.
• 7:00
  And with that comes so many security issues too.
• 7:03
  So the ability to have a platform that will allow our customers to
• 7:07
  to deliver and secure applications
• 7:09
  and AI empowered applications now and in the future.
• 7:13
  Their world runs on applications, right.
• 7:15
  Like these services go down that is potentially revenue impacting.
• 7:20
  That could be like human being impacting as well.
• 7:23
  So it's kind of a critical importance that we get that right.
• 7:26
  It keeps them moving forward. Yeah absolutely.
• 7:28
  And you know what we found and you know this
• 7:31
  with our customers is for whatever reason, our customers have found themselves
• 7:35
  at a point, an inflection point
• 7:37
  where probably no fault of their own, it's just they've organically grown.
• 7:40
  And their decisions on that strategy was right at the time.
• 7:43
  Or they might have acquired the company or be acquired.
• 7:46
  And then you find you've got overlapping security profiles and policies
• 7:49
  and platforms, and it's the ability to bring all of that together
• 7:52
  under one platform, allowing people to, say, reduce their costs
• 7:57
  and reduce their time to delivery and things like that.
• 8:01
  So, so you’re head of pre-sales in your role, probably a techie
• 8:05
  by by trade, what for you right now when you look at the portfolio,
• 8:09
  when you're hearing the insights coming through your product development
• 8:12
  team and your exec team as well, what gets you really excited
• 8:15
  when you're like this? This is this is pretty cool.
• 8:18
  You know, it's
• 8:19
  almost like a bit of an evangelist role.
• 8:23
  Empower our customers by educating them.
• 8:26
  They don't necessarily understand everything we can do as between us
• 8:31
  and computer centre.
• 8:31
  They don't really understand
• 8:33
  what we can do and what we've been doing over the last,
• 8:36
  the last 18 months where we've been heavily
• 8:38
  investing in the platform kind of direction.
• 8:40
  Some of our customers are still very much thought we're an ADC
• 8:44
  kind of player, but we've come on so far.
• 8:48
  So educating our customers and
• 8:51
  and then understanding their challenges and how we can help them.
• 8:56
  And for me. Is the key.
• 8:57
  But just to drill into that a little bit, what would you say.
• 9:00
  Because I'm with you. Right?
• 9:01
  I think there are probably is a lot of that, the traditional
• 9:05
  understanding of what F5 does and how they support customers.
• 9:09
  But what is that light bulb moment?
• 9:12
  We're actually when you are engaging in those education sessions,
• 9:14
  what's the thing that usually customers go, well, that's pretty interesting.
• 9:18
  I didn't realise F5 could support me with that.
• 9:21
  I mean, first of all, you need to understand
• 9:23
  what their journey is and where they're trying to go first.
• 9:25
  And then when you kind of say, well, actually,
• 9:27
  we can help you with that, or we can help you with this, or
• 9:29
  we can help you kind of consolidate this, or we can save your cost on this.
• 9:32
  Oh, what's your challenge with AI?
• 9:35
  And sometimes, sometimes they don't even know what the challenges are.
• 9:38
  So it's a case of, you know, this is what we're seeing around the market.
• 9:41
  This is what we're seeing with other customers.
• 9:43
  How does that resonate with you? Are you seeing the same things?
• 9:46
  And that for me is like
• 9:47
  when you start saying, oh, we're not the only ones in this position.
• 9:50
  No you're not.
• 9:50
  And we've helped these other customers do this, this and this by doing this.
• 9:54
  And for them it's like, oh, well, I didn't realise you could do all of that.
• 9:57
  Yeah we can.
• 9:58
  Excellent. And so final question.
• 10:01
  You're doing well. We've had we've had no buzzers.
• 10:03
  Yeah I know I've been listening out of your feeling.
• 10:07
  You know. a little bit of a sneak preview.
• 10:09
  What's coming next from F5 that customers should have on their radar.
• 10:13
  I think
• 10:15
  a lot more of what
• 10:16
  we're doing and we're continuing to develop that platform.
• 10:18
  It's it's not just about delivering things
• 10:21
  at speed now and providing features.
• 10:23
  You know, as customers adopt
• 10:25
  AI and increasingly distributed applications are becoming more prevalent,
• 10:29
  F5’s vision is to make security and performance resiliency
• 10:33
  invisible to our customers so they could innovate without compromise.
• 10:37
  Okay, that's that's pretty much where we're going.
• 10:39
  And that's pretty much summarises the vision that we have.
• 10:43
  And what I quite like about that is actually, it feels to me that F5
• 10:47
  is being quite steadfast in its approach, actually in quite consistent.
• 10:51
  Right?
• 10:51
  Because, I mean, I can remember working with F5 around ten, ten years ago,
• 10:56
  and the storytelling at that point was always fast, available, secure.
• 11:01
  Right.
• 11:01
  And it feels like not like not a lot has changed from a vision perspective,
• 11:05
  which actually can be viewed as quite a positive. Right.
• 11:07
  And maybe a bit of foresight into where we were going.
• 11:09
  Well, and I think that's the word
• 11:11
  I was actually thinking about when you were saying that is
• 11:14
  we had a vision and that vision was it was hybrid cloud where everyone was thinking
• 11:18
  everything was going to go on to the cloud,
• 11:19
  you know, into into the private or public clouds.
• 11:22
  And we were like, no, that's not going to happen.
• 11:24
  And we stuck firm by our vision and we found by that.
• 11:27
  And, you know, it's played out.
• 11:29
  You know,
• 11:29
  customers are finding themselves
• 11:30
  now in a situation where they've got multiple environments.
• 11:33
  They don't know how to manage them all.
• 11:34
  They've got 3 or 4 different security policies.
• 11:37
  They've got three different cloud teams.
• 11:39
  It's like that vision is really paid dividends for us because we had that
• 11:42
  insight or foresight, as you say, to that.
• 11:45
  This is where the market's going,
• 11:47
  where everyone else thought it was going somewhere else.
• 11:50
  Fantastic.
• 11:50
  Well Paul, you've done it. Congratulations.
• 11:54
  Thank you for joining me. No buzzers. Yeah.
• 11:57
  Thank you for joining me.
• 11:58
  Much appreciate it. Great. Thank you for having me.
• 12:00
  Well done.
• 12:01
  Paul got through it again.
• 12:03
  No buzzwords this time.
• 12:04
  He talked about that evolution of F5, but still staying steadfast
• 12:08
  to their vision of making applications fast, available and secure
• 12:12
  whilst being fully AI driven and all of the other buzzwords.
• 12:17
  He played an aggressive game but well done.
• 12:19
  Made it through. Great conversation.
• 12:21
  Thank you for joining me. See you next time.