F5 Networks introduced F5 BIG-IP Application Acceleration Manager (AAM), a unified solution that brings advanced application acceleration and traffic management technologies together on one integrated platform.

In addition, to help enterprises easily assess the performance of their web-based applications, F5 offers free of charge the F5 Application Speed Tester (FAST), a self-service benchmarking tool that provides tangible data on anticipated performance improvements.

Leveraging BIG-IP AAM, organizations can cut first-visit page load times for SaaS applications by as much as 50 percent and improve throughput in high packet-loss environments (satellite connections and some mobile networks) by up to 75 percent on mobile devices that use F5’s BIG-IP Edge Client solution.

The requirement to deliver on-demand content — especially streaming video — to a variety of mobile devices is on a sharp growth trajectory. This rising demand puts a great strain on networks and servers, which can lead to poorly performing applications, user frustration, and low productivity—even revenue loss.

BIG-IP AAM helps organizations overcome growing application performance issues as they move to web- and cloud-based application deployments. By providing fast access to applications, BIG-IP delivers a better user experience, improves data center efficiency, and streamlines Application Delivery Optimization, helping to reduce costs.

BIG-IP AAM is based on F5’s intelligent services framework that provides advanced programmability, unified application services, and on-demand scalability.

“With the huge demands placed on corporate, public, and private networks today, we understand how difficult it can be for organizations to consistently deliver exceptional application performance to their users,” said Jason Needham, VP of Product Management and Product Marketing at F5. “With BIG-IP Application Acceleration Manager, we’re helping organizations solve that challenge by accelerating applications wherever they reside—in the data center or in the cloud, and wherever they’re delivered—on network-connected or mobile devices.”

Today, organizations use multiple point solutions for video delivery, web performance, and WAN optimization, but many fall short of growing needs, and the burden of supporting these discrete solutions increases IT cost and complexity.

BIG-IP AAM helps solve these issues using a variety of advanced acceleration technologies, including delivery optimization for HLS (HTTP Live Streaming), forward error correction (FEC), and symmetric optimization.

Enterprises using BIG-IP AAM will see the following benefits:

- Improved User Experience – BIG-IP AAM provides relief for mobile users, 74 percent of whom will purportedly abandon a web page that doesn’t load within 5 seconds.1 With BIG-IP AAM, users spend less time waiting for content to load and more time using applications, so they’re able to work more productively from any location or device. BIG-IP AAM reduces the amount of data sent to mobile devices and overcomes inherent network latency issues, so video quality is improved, web pages load faster, and applications perform better—just the way users expect.

- Data Center TCO Savings – BIG-IP AAM offloads CPU-intensive processing tasks to reduce load on servers and the network, and because it sends less data over network, less bandwidth is required. By combining numerous acceleration technologies in a single, integrated solution, BIG-IP AAM eliminates the need for multiple point solutions which, in turn, simplifies the IT infrastructure and reduces management and training costs.

- Streamlined Application Delivery Optimization – BIG-IP AAM enables organizations to support and optimize legacy (FTP, UDP) and emerging (SPDY) protocols, so applications for any device can be automatically optimized without the need to modify (recode) the applications themselves. As a result, organizations can improve time to market for new revenue-generating applications and focus on developing strategic applications rather than troubleshooting the infrastructure.

BIG-IP AAM leverages today’s most advanced application acceleration technologies and incorporates features found in BIG-IP WebAccelerator and BIG-IP WAN Optimization Manager.

In addition, F5 includes standard acceleration features free of charge in its core Application Delivery Controller (ADC) solution. Beginning with version 11.4, BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) will incorporate support for TCP optimization, compression, bandwidth control, iSession technology, and SPDY as core capabilities.

BIG-IP Application Acceleration Manager will be generally available in June 2013 as a BIG-IP add-on module and as a standalone solution.