Quoting from the F5 official announcement:
F5 Networks, Inc., the global leader in Application Delivery Networking, today announced that it has joined the VMware Technology Alliance Partner (TAP) program as a Select Partner. Through this alliance, F5 gains the use of VMware testing software, marketing tools, and technical support for technology integration between the two companies.
…
With this alliance, F5 will have the opportunity to develop tighter product integration and interoperability with VMware solutions, such as demonstrating F5 Acopia solutions’ unique ability to complement VMware Infrastructure 3 in NAS environments, expanding the ease of provisioning, increasing availability of virtual machines, and optimizing the performance of VMware solutions on NAS…
It’s interesting to see how some vendors, far away from hardware virtualization, are recently joining VMware TAP program.
It’s easy to understand the reasons moving security firms: the just announcement VMsafe is big enough to refocus the entire security industry. But the reasons moving other vendors in other industries are less evident at today.
VMware may have to say much more than expected about networking and storage.