F5 Networks Positioned in Leaders Quadrant of SSL VPN Market Research Report by Noted Analyst Firm

F5 Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ: FFIV), the global leader in Application Delivery Networking, today announced that it is positioned in the Leaders quadrant of Gartner, Inc.’s Magic Quadrant for SSL VPN, North America, published in December 2008.

Using SSL tunneling for encrypted traffic, F5’s SSL VPN solutions provide high performance, policy-based, secure access to enterprise applications for any user, over any device or network. This type of simple, broad, and flexible secure access makes IT and businesses more agile in delivering new applications to users, customers, and partners.

"In my opinion, being placed in the Leaders quadrant reinforces our strong commitment to the secure access market,” said Mark Vondemkamp, Director of Product Management at F5. "Innovations in our FirePass solution, such as the Visual Policy Editor for simplifying administration, and iRules scripting for programming complex gateway operations, set F5 apart from the competition. We are also proud of the fact that a number of leading global providers are using our solutions to deliver remote access services.”

According to Gartner, "Leaders demonstrate balanced progress and effort on all execution and vision categories. Their actions raise the competitive bar for all products in the market, and they can change the course of the industry. To remain in the Leaders quadrant, these vendors must excel in mobile access and protection and dominate in sales. A leading vendor is not a default choice for every buyer, and clients are warned not to assume that they should buy only from the Leaders quadrant.”¹

The Magic Quadrant is copyrighted December 11, 2008 by Gartner, Inc. and is reused with permission. The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner’s analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in the Magic Quadrant, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors placed in the "Leaders” quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is intended solely as a research tool, and is not meant to be a specific guide to action. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

¹ Gartner Magic Quadrant for SSL VPN, ID Number: G00163232, December 2008, by John Girard.

About the F5 FirePass SSL VPN solution

F5’s award-winning FirePass^® SSL VPN solution enables enterprises to manage employee and external personnel’s access to business applications, keep mobile users connected, and enforce compliance with strict HIPAA, PCI, and GLBA requirements. To ensure compliance and ease of management, the FirePass solution offers an industry-first combination of Windows Group Policy enforcement with pre-defined templates that enable customers to extend Active Directory (AD) Group Policy to non-domain endpoints. For mobile users, FirePass features support for popular mobile devices such as the iPhone and Windows Mobile handsets. iPhone users can sync their email, calendar, and contacts directly to the corporate MS Exchange server via FirePass and the ActiveSync protocol. For more information, go to www.f5.com/products/firepass/.

About F5 Networks

F5 Networks is the global leader in Application Delivery Networking. F5 provides solutions that make applications secure, fast, and available for everyone. By adding intelligence and manageability into the network to offload applications and optimize the data storage layer, F5 extends the power of intelligent networking to all levels of application delivery. F5's extensible architecture optimizes applications, delivers application reliability, and protects the application and network. Enterprise organizations, service providers and Web 2.0 content providers worldwide trust F5 to keep their applications running. The company is headquartered in Seattle, Washington with offices worldwide. For more information, go to www.f5.com.

This press release may contain forward-looking statements relating to future events or future financial performance that involve risks and uncertainties. Such statements can be identified by terminology such as "may," "will," "should," "expects," "plans," "anticipates," "believes," "estimates," "predicts," "potential," or "continue," or the negative of such terms or comparable terms. These statements are only predictions and actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in these statements based upon a number of factors including those identified in the company's filings with the SEC.