Stu Miniman carried out several of the interviews scheduled for Day 3 of our coverage with theCUBE, live from HP Discover 2013 in Las Vegas, focusing on HP’s Partners. His guests for this segment were John Prego, Director of Global Strategic Partners and Jeff Stathatos, Solutions Architect with F5 Networks, which has been recently granted “The Cloud Partner of the Year” Award.

Reminiscing a little bit about F5 Networks’ history, John Prego revealed that the company has been a solid partner of HP for almost over a decade. In 2006 they became an Alliance Partner and this year they received the Cloud Partner of the Year Award, based on their joined delivery of the VDI as a private cloud implementation (Desktop as a Service).

Talking about the implementation of this process, Jeff Stathatos likened F5 with a glue, bringing together technology and Enterprise services, HP Storage and HP Networks, into one single solution, being able to replicate that to a number of different organization who were interested in eliminating much of the hurdle of old technology.

F5 is actively monitoring the market, keeping an eye on the trends and working closely with HP to make sure that they satisfy the demands coming from their client base. The elements that need to maintain their architectural flexibility in order to benefit from continuous support are Cloud, STN and OpenStack.

Prego claims they hold about 43 percent of the application delivery networking market and over 50 percent of the advanced market. That is driving the company towards Data Consolidation and the security phenomenon, which is becoming more and more prevalent. F5 has addressed those issues complementary to HP’s strategies in the network, but across all their different platforms.

The historical model has been an appliance-based solution. The market is now going in two different directions, says Stathatos. From a carrier’s perspective, customers are interested in a multi-tenant solution, as they are are looking to grow and expand their business as they need. From a software perspective, additional functionality has been provided, allowing customers to deploy F5 solutions more broadly. There is this technology called BIG-IQ, which allows customers to interface with their solution, deploy these virtual additions on regular hardware, taking advantage of HP servers, deploying them on their cloud environment. BIG-IQ Cloud automates and orchestrates the deployment of application delivery services across both traditional and cloud infrastructures, simplifying the process of optimizing the clients’ business applications.

For Stathatos, the coolest technology at this event was definitely the newly released Cloud OS, HP’s operating system, which is intended to provide a common environment for public, private and hybrid cloud ecosystems.

See the entire interview below.