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F5 Solutions Help WestJet’s E-Commerce Business Soar in Profitability

Dépèche transmise le 27 avril 2009 par Business Wire

F5 Solutions Help WestJet’s E-Commerce Business Soar in Profitability

SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--F5 Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ:FFIV), the global leader in Application Delivery Networking, today announced that the rapidly growing Canadian airline WestJet is using a range of F5® solutions to deliver its fast and highly available online booking system and check-in capabilities to users around the globe. As the airline expands to offer more services to more guests and employees in an ever-increasing number of locations, WestJet has implemented F5 solutions to ensure the performance and reliability of the airline’s mission-critical applications.

“We’re growing at a rapid pace, and for IT that means we need to have a plan to accommodate that business growth,” said William Lee, Senior Manager of Technical Infrastructure at WestJet. “F5 solutions definitely make it easier for us to adapt to change and growth, and they improve IT’s responsiveness in meeting the company’s business requirements.”

The agility of its IT infrastructure has helped WestJet expand from a regional, five-city service area in 1996 to its current 55-city network across Canada, the United States, Mexico, and the Caribbean. More than 70 percent of WestJet’s reservations come from its online booking system, and the airline offers web and personal mobile device check-in as well as self-serve airport check-in kiosks. In addition, WestJet’s 7,500 employees access the company’s intranet, email, and large enterprise applications from locations across North America.

WestJet’s implementation of F5 solutions has supported each of the airline’s moves to add new capacity, applications, and data centers:

• The airline first deployed BIG-IP® Local Traffic Manager™, which intelligently manages traffic for all of WestJet’s applications and servers, including virtual machines, and ensures a fast and seamless user experience.
• As the airline’s guests and employees began to experience greater latency as a result of accessing the applications from increasingly distant locations, WestJet deployed BIG-IP WebAccelerator™ to provide dynamic caching and compression capabilities that speed page load times for users by an average of 30 percent.
• More recently, WestJet implemented the FirePass® SSL VPN solution to ensure secure remote access to internal applications and email for the thousands of WestJet employees traveling on a regular basis.
• WestJet is also preparing to implement BIG-IP Global Traffic Manager™, which will provide seamless, automatic data center failover and direct users to the best-performing data center based on network conditions and business policies set by WestJet.

“F5 solutions enhance the performance, availability, and security of WestJet’s infrastructure, helping the company move its business forward,” said Jason Needham, Sr. Director of Product Management at F5. “For companies like WestJet whose business success depends on their e-commerce and enterprise applications, F5 solutions are becoming strategic components of an agile IT infrastructure.”

About WestJet

WestJet is Canada’s leading high-value, low-cost airline offering scheduled service throughout its 55-city North American and Caribbean network. Named one of Canada's most admired corporate cultures in 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008, WestJet pioneered low-cost flying in Canada. WestJet offers increased legroom, leather seats, and live seatback television provided by Bell TV on its modern fleet of 77 Boeing Next-Generation 737 aircraft. With future confirmed deliveries for an additional 44 aircraft, bringing its fleet to 121 by 2013, WestJet strives to be the number-one choice for travelers. For more information, please visit www.westjet.com.

About F5 Networks

F5 Networks is the global leader in Application Delivery Networking (ADN), focused on ensuring the secure, reliable, and fast delivery of applications. F5’s flexible architectural framework enables community-driven innovation that helps organizations enhance IT agility and dynamically deliver services that generate true business value. F5’s vision of unified application and data delivery offers customers an unprecedented level of choice in how they deploy ADN solutions. It redefines the management of application, server, storage, and network resources, streamlining application delivery and reducing costs. Global enterprise organizations, service and cloud providers, and Web 2.0 content providers trust F5 to keep their business moving forward. For more information, go to www.f5.com.

F5, BIG-IP, Local Traffic Manager, WebAccelerator, FirePass, and Global Traffic Manager are trademarks or service marks of F5 Networks, Inc., in the U.S. and other countries. All other product and company names herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.

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.