F5 Networks, Inc., founded in 1996, has become an industry leader in Application Delivery Networking. Nathan Pearce, senior technical marketing manager at F5, has a lot of big ideas about how to leverage their position into the new world of cloud services thanks to its partnership with Amazon Web Services, Inc.

“Our customers have been looking to take advantage of the cloud and the utility modules for quite some time,” Pearce said during his interview with theCUBE at AWS Summit 2015. “But they’re wanting to take the policy they can find on their F5 equipment to make sure their applications are always fast, highly available and secure. They want to bring that into the cloud with them. So being available via Amazon Marketplace, we’re able to address that for our customers.”

Improving agility and flexibility

After clarifying that F5 is primarily a software company that also makes hardware for higher scaling situations, Nathan emphasized the company’s focus on business agility. When network development and application development were separated, he said, it limited the speed at which the industry could innovate. The two things were developed independently, and once the networks were ready, application developers would take their products and “throw them over the fence” to the network without any real collaboration. But now, continuous development cycles where the two sides work in symbiosis improve agility and flexibility. Developers can react to daily changes as networks learn agility and applications feed data back to the networks about what’s working and what isn’t.

But are customers responding well to this shift to the cloud? Drawing on his global experience, Nathan responded that each theater has a different approach. Australia and several small regional pockets have seen a huge uptake of cloud services like AWS. In some countries, financial organizations have even ratified the cloud for data transfer. But many countries are taking it slow — waiting to see if there’s any epic failure before they go “all in.” But customers have been asking for this shift.

Effectively redesigning security

Finally, Nathan discussed what old incumbent winners from past decades need to do to be successful. “Anyone who doesn’t match the utility models in the way that they’re billing and addressing their customer base, I think, is really going to struggle,” he stated. Cloud services allow an unprecedented flexibility, enabling functions like “spin-and-kill” services to react to quick changes in traffic. Coupled with APIs, they can reduce points of failure — especially at the keyboard, where many errors begin. All in all, even with questions about how to redesign security to be effective in the age of cloud services, Nathan believes that this shift will enable F5 to reach more customers with the functionality they’ve been developing since 1996.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS Summit 2015