I was honored to be invited to present a speaking slot at the keynote of the recent F5 "Pump it up! Hi-5 2008" APAC partner conference, held in the Westin, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. I've always respected F5's products as being best in class in their field, not to mention that we at Microsoft use their products extensively both internally and externally, as an example for our microsoft.com infrastructure - so it was a 'no brainer' for me to accept (Thank you, Tina).

Equally, I just LOVE partner conferences, because I can be quite 'free' in what I say on stage. Partners are very much our friends, and service the very same customers that we see everyday - we share the same challenges, the same synergies in dealing with our diverse customer base - it brings us together in a silent and respectful understanding of what needs to be done, and so I just love sharing my thoughts with this kind of audience.

I focused on a few, very few, clear messages for my presentation. F5 and Microsoft work well together (obvious, but needs to be stated) and we work well together over three particular workloads:-

1. Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server (MOSS) and BIG-IP focusing on the Web Accelerator (WA) Module - this is the "hotspot", as I called it, especially for combined Microsoft and F5 partners - read more here, and get the deployment guide on how to do it from here.
   
   
2. Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 and total solution components from F5. Totally excellent deployment guide here. Lots of areas BIG-IP can enhance the base solution from the front-end to the back-end replication.
   
   
3. Microsoft Office Communication Server (OCS) 2007 and BIG-IP, which is really a follow on from 2) since it's part of an overall Unified Communications (UC) solution. Once again, deployment guide from here.

Suffice to say, I really enjoyed my session; I loved the stage - it just invoked passion; I loved the crowd; F5 were just great, and I really enjoyed meeting all the partners afterwards. Thanks F5, and thank you everyone at the conference. I'll definitely make a point of dropping into the F5 office next time I'm in Seattle.

Obligatory photos below:-