F5 CEO Reports on DPI Products; Availability not Provided

In November 2011, F5 announced its plans to introduce policy enforcement, Deep Packet Inspection products planned for release in 2013 (see "F5 Service Provider/Mobile Road Map: Focus on DPI" - here), after the intention to acquire Allot Communications for $500M (here) did not materialized. Allot's market cap is now $456M, after reaching $930M during 2012.

John McAdam (pictured), President and CEO, provided an optimistic update during F5's recent earning call, although a release date was not provided - despite previous reports about DPI reaching beta status (see "F5 - Moving Ahead with DPI (already in Beta)" - here).

"Our development team made fantastic progress last quarter in meeting their development milestones to deliver a significant new release of TMOS referred to internally as Solar .. and a new service provider solutions that carry a great network address translation, and policy enforcement module with deep po[a]cket inspections.

Our policy enforcement module allows bigger IT to inspect and classify application and protocol traffic and dynamically enforce service provider policies. For example, our policy enforcement module supports a GX interface enabling inter-operability with a broad set of PCRX[F] and our own traffic signaling delivery controller" [refers to the Traffix product line - see "F5 Acquires Traffix Systems for $135M" - here].

Later, questions from Matt Robison, Wunderlich Securities, referred also to DPI, and were answered by Karl Triebes - EVP, Product Development and CTO (see also "F5 Platform Road Map - 100GE Ports Planed for 2013/14" - here)

F5 VIPRION 4480

Q: So, is there any specific hardware that needs to be in place to invoke the policy enforcement – the DPI capability that is required for that?

A: Yes, with the PenModual [?], obviously our VIPRION platforms and our higher end platforms – right now, we don’t support it on the low end of the range yet, because it is very much focused on the surge provider market.

Q: Yes, so the VIPRION platforms that are available now can do it?

A: That is correct.

See "F5 Networks' CEO Discusses F1Q13 Results - Earnings Call Transcript" - by Seeking Alpha, here.