Announcing New F5 ELA Enhancements

Have you ever tried to drive somewhere as fast as you can, but you hit every red light along the way? Murphy’s Law, right? Well, the same thing can happen when you’re deploying your applications—either in your private data center or in a public cloud. Agility is paramount, so nothing is more frustrating than getting held up needlessly—not by a configuration challenge or policy update, but especially a simple product licensing issue.

F5 has offered multiple licensing options for some time now to give customers more speed and flexibility in how they consume F5 solutions, from software subscriptions and pay-as-you-go options to enterprise licensing agreements (ELA).

In fact, F5’s ELA has already enabled customers to rapidly deploy F5 virtual editions (VEs) whenever and wherever needed without manual intervention—meaning there’s no need to call your F5 sales rep for more software instances, whether you need them on-premises or in a public cloud. What’s more, you get more predictable pricing to manage your budget for all your F5 software.

Now, F5 is expanding its existing ELA program to deliver new and incremental value to our customers across more of their F5 physical and virtual infrastructure. There are two big news items here:

First, you may have seen that F5 recently acquired NGINX to help bridge the divide between NetOps and DevOps teams and provide a more complete portfolio of application services and API management. Now, F5 is pleased to announce that NGINX software will be supported within the F5 ELA. So, customers can take advantage of licensing flexibility between BIG-IP and NGINX software as part of their total F5 spend. This gives you the ability to combine software purchases in a single agreement, reduce total cost of ownership and simplify asset management.

In addition, customers can now incorporate new BIG-IP software subscriptions that run on select hardware-only priced F5 appliances into their ELA. F5 customers that currently want to invest in more hardware—but are going through digital transformation—can have the confidence that their F5 software will be portable to and reusable on COTS servers in the future as needed for no additional cost. How fantastic is that? Premium support is included for both hardware and software.

These two new options that include both NGINX software and BIG-IP software running on F5 appliances in the context of F5 ELA give customers unmatched freedom and agility in how they can deploy application services. So, get in the fast lane and enjoy the ride. Enjoy F5 software portability, combine your purchases, and simplify your world with the F5 ELA.