Exhibitor News

Insights From F5

What are your reasons for coming onboard the 43^rd edition of GITEX Global, what are your expectations, and who are you hoping to meet at the show?

Mohammed Abukhater: GITEX Global is one of the most significant and influential tech events on the planet, so it is vital that F5 shows up with something to say. As ever, we value the event as a place to connect with customers and partners – both existing and potential – to learn more about their ambitions and challenges. We’re also keen to meet with, and learn from, industry experts, thought-leaders, and game-changers. GITEX Global is a wonderful gathering of minds, so the connections and conversations taking place throughout the week always have a transformation impact well into the future.

Are you planning to launch any products or services, demonstrate new technologies, or sign any partnerships during the show? Please provide details to help us amplify your presence.

Mohammed Abukhater: F5 has been investing heavily in multi-cloud application security and delivery solutions, including a growing portfolio of SaaS solutions built on the F5 Distributed Cloud Platform.  

These solutions help customers to achieve better security, improve application performance and resilience, speed up app and API deployments, and unify policies across on-premises, public cloud, and edge deployments. 

As part of our continued evolution, we recently announced new security and multi-cloud networking capabilities that uniquely position F5 to make networking easier by connecting and securing any app and API, anywhere – enabling fast network-to-network and workload-to-workload connectivity across different cloud locations, data centers, hybrid environments, and enterprise edge sites. 

How important is GITEX Global for your business, and what volume of business growth do you anticipate from your participation in the show?

Mohammed Abukhater: GITEX Global is very important to F5. It is hard to estimate exact volume of business growth, as the scope and scale of many opportunities change over time. Having said that, the event is a powerful driver for our business, and this is reflected in our growing presence every year.

How important is the Middle East and Africa for your business, and what is your growth strategy in the region over the coming years?

Mohammed Abukhater: The Middle East and Africa region is hugely important to our global strategy, and we’ve experienced excellent growth in recent years.

One of the major driving forces for that is the fact that F5 is the only company that can secure apps in a multi-cloud environment.  

On the one hand you have networking players that have multi-cloud capabilities, but they don’t have security—and nothing can derail digital transformation efforts faster than digital assets that are not secured.   

Then you have security players that have capabilities in SaaS and in the cloud, but they are not multi-cloud. To get their security capabilities, you have to put your apps in their walled garden, which is not sufficient either because apps are more and more distributed to ensure the best performance. Digital services that don’t meet the expectations of end-users cost companies millions of dollars in lost sales.  F5 was built to solve this problem.

Businesses in the MEA region want the freedom to innovate, and F5 gives them the ability and security to do that in any environment.

To what extent can the region’s bold digital transformation goals elevate the global tech ecosystem?

Mohammed Abukhater: Digital transformation is thriving in the Middle East and Africa, and the appetite from all levels of society to innovate is already making game-changing advances across the globe. Thanks to forward-looking leadership, the pace and influence of the region’s ability to harness the cutting-edge is set to increase in the coming years, and F5 is proud to play a part in that forward momentum.

Which countries and industry verticals are you targeting as part of your business plan over the next 5-10 years?

Mohammed Abukhater: Few industry verticals remain untouched by F5. We power over half of the world’s applications across all environments, including the mission-critical apps of 48 of the Fortune 50, 85% of the Fortune 500, and all 10 top global brands. Globally, we have around 18 thousand customers, which includes supporting 70% of the largest websites in the world. If you’ve logged into any app today, chances are F5 was protecting you. 

For example, every day we protect 4.5 billion web transactions and mitigate 30 billion fraudulent transactions per month.  

Notable industry verticals that continue to significantly invest in digital transformation – powered, optimized and protected by F5—include banking and financial services, government, healthcare, e-commerce, and service providers.

F5 is growing all over the world, and the Middle East and Africa region is central to our future ambitions as a company.

GITEX Global is accelerating the epic race for AI dominance in 2023:  how is your business embracing the AI innovation wave?

Mohammed Abukhater: There is unlimited potential for AI to be used for good – including solving daunting medical challenges in a matter of months or years rather than decades – but there is as much potential for it to be used maliciously.

One of the fundamental reasons we’ve seen cybercrime rise dramatically in the past few years is because security was an afterthought when we progressed from the early stages of the Web to today’s more advanced digital capabilities. As we become increasingly digital-by-default, we introduce even more complexity, which brings more vulnerabilities for companies and individuals.

Although not widely deployed, AI technology is effectively built, and as companies race forward with AI initiatives, there will undoubtedly be security risks.

To protect people, we must begin with security in mind.

Responsible AI is a cornerstone of F5’s product strategy. We believe in the power and potential of AI to identify, contain and automate responses to cyberthreats. We plan to continue the product investment we started a few years ago with the Shape Security acquisition, which uses AI to intelligently adapt as attackers exploit AI to bypass countermeasures.

As an example, our use of AI has allowed us to provide our customers long-term sustainable bot mitigation efficacy as well as enhanced protection against DDoS and for AIP traffic between containers.

We are committed to further investment in using AI to keep customers safe and ahead of sophisticated attackers. This includes helping customers leverage telemetry generated by their application traffic to respond to changes in the breadth and sophistication of cyberattacks, security posture, end-user demand, application performance, global availability, and conditions across their infrastructure environments, with little to no human interaction.  

This will enable customers to solve business challenges in operations, digital experiences, and security and fraud protection. In addition, by further leveraging machine learning and AI, F5 will help customers create new and profitable business services. 

Aside from AI, what is the world’s next big technology shift and how should government, business, and society prepare for it?

Mohammed Abukhater: Businesses and users depend on apps now more than ever. Apps are the primary way many of us now shop, learn, see a doctor, bank, work, and connect with friends and family. While they can create unprecedented opportunities to delight customers and grow business, this new world of apps also presents increasingly complex challenges.  

There are two key challenges organisations need to meet head on.

The first is dealing with the lack of visibility needed to optimize the performance of each app. Gaining insight into how application traffic is flowing—and where and how to tune it—requires granular, end-to-end visibility, but that is typically a complex and siloed process.  

Businesses also struggle with the growing complexity of scaling and securing sprawling apps, which is impacting their bottom line and potentially damaging customer relationships. According to our State of Application Delivery Report, the average organization manages portfolios of 200 to 1,000 applications across data centers, multiple clouds, and edge deployments. This is further exacerbated by the fact that the average organization uses 21 different application security and delivery technologies.

Our vision is to deliver a portfolio of solutions to enable modern, adaptive applications that use automation and AI-driven insights to adapt to their changing environment.  

Over the last five years, F5 has invested in growing and strengthening our capabilities to protect data and secure applications. We offer a portfolio of automation, security, performance, and insight capabilities that empower our customers to secure their applications and protect their users’ experience, while reducing cost and complexity.

GITEX Global and GITEX Impact will build the momentum for COP 28, taking place in Dubai from 30 November to 12 December. How do you see the adoption of ESG strategies by tech companies, and what are the critical factors for those initiatives leading to a more sustainable future?

Mohammed Abukhater: Current estimates show that enterprise technology is responsible for emitting about 1% to 2% of total global greenhouse gas emissions. This might not seem like a lot, but it is the equivalent of the total carbon emitted by the United Kingdom on the low end, and on the high end, it looks as though enterprise technology emissions have now surpassed the aviation industry!

Given the pace at which technology demand is growing worldwide, more tech companies of all sizes – not just the biggest players like Microsoft or Samsung – need to come to terms with the environmental impact their technology products have on their customers’ carbon footprints.