F5 Named Microsoft 2021 Commercial Marketplace Partner of the Year

We are thrilled to announce F5 has won the 2021 Microsoft Commercial Marketplace Partner of the Year Award. The Microsoft Partner of the Year Awards honor companies that demonstrate excellence in innovation and implementation of customer solutions based on Microsoft technology. This is an especially meaningful award for us because it recognizes F5’s marketplace sales and marketing expertise, as well as consistent, high-quality, predictable delivery to marketplace customers.

According to IDC, while the overall public cloud services market grew 24.1% in 2020, the Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) segments have consistently grown at much faster rates. This underscores the increasing reliance of enterprises on cloud infrastructure and cloud-native platforms for enterprise application deployment. This trend is likely to accelerate as digital transformation and growing cyber threats drive the need for greater performance, agility and security in applications that power critical digital experiences.    

The true driver behind digital transformation for many organizations is increasing the speed at which they can experiment and launch new digital services. One critical, but rarely discussed, factor of digital transformation is procurement. Procurement has to adjust—from long to short buying cycles, from a static world of on-premises IT to the dynamic world of the cloud.

A typical enterprise has hundreds of applications in their portfolio and about half of them are developed in-house. At the same time, cloud spend on applications comprises roughly half of a company’s IT budget, and of the purchasing and use of cloud services for those apps is decentralized. In a decentralized, auto-scaling cloud context, the “old” procurement model with centralized accounting, budgeting and months of lead time doesn’t allow the flexibility needed to rapidly respond to market changes or customer opportunities. When DevOps, CI/CD and containers mean that product and engineering think in hours and days for shipping software, finance and procurement can’t think in fiscal quarters and years for buying it.

A significant part of our work with Microsoft has been evolving to a more agile approach for our customers to procure and deploy our market leading application delivery and security solutions through the Azure marketplace. This has been a key ingredient to the success of our collaboration with Microsoft—we both recognize that the role and importance of applications is changing, and that procurement needs to change along with that.  

We are honored to be recognized as the 2021 Microsoft Commercial Marketplace Partner of the Year. And this is just the start—F5 and Microsoft are continuing to innovate, bring new solutions to market and support exciting new use cases. Stay tuned!

Interested in learning more about how F5 and Microsoft can help you deliver and secure your applications? Read here or contact a sales representative.