F5 Appoints Kara Sprague as Chief Product Officer

Company to expand SaaS offerings and accelerate its $1 billion security business

F5 today announced the appointment of Kara Sprague to the newly created role of Chief Product Officer. In this role, Sprague will oversee F5’s entire portfolio of multi-cloud application security and delivery solutions, with a focus on expanding SaaS offerings on the F5 Distributed Cloud Platform and enabling organizations to streamline application security and delivery operations across their complex application environments.

Sprague joined F5 in 2017 to lead the Application Delivery Controller business. In her most recent role, she served as Executive Vice President, Application Delivery and Enterprise Product Ops, where she was responsible for the BIG-IP and NGINX product families, along with enterprise-wide product operations. Under Sprague’s leadership, F5 rapidly evolved its product portfolio to address the needs of companies running increasingly hybrid and multi-cloud application environments while providing greater flexibility by expanding the ways customers can consume and deploy F5 solutions.

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“As customers face the daunting challenge of managing complex hybrid and multi-cloud application infrastructures, we are focused on continuing to enhance our capabilities and radically simplifying the security and delivery of extraordinary digital experiences.”

“Kara has had an incredible impact on F5 over the past five years and has been a key driver of our expansion to a software-led business,” said François Locoh-Donou, President and Chief Executive Officer, F5. “Kara’s elevation to Chief Product Officer will accelerate the next phase of our transformation as we bring a better digital world to life by making the security and delivery of applications significantly safer and easier for all organizations.”

F5’s unprecedented expansion from a hardware-led business to a software-led business coincides with another major milestone, as the company’s annual security revenue recently surpassed $1 billion. Customers are turning to F5 for the unmatched flexibility and choice offered through a broad range of solutions that secure, deliver, and optimize any application, any API, anywhere.

F5’s portfolio of multi-cloud application security and delivery technologies provides customers with better security, improved performance and resiliency, faster deployments, policy consistency, and end-to-end visibility across on-premises, colocation, public cloud, and edge infrastructures.

“I’m honored to take on this role at such a pivotal time,” said Sprague. “As customers face the daunting challenge of managing complex hybrid and multi-cloud application infrastructures, we are focused on continuing to enhance our capabilities and radically simplifying the security and delivery of extraordinary digital experiences.”

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