Kiwi engineers provide critical ‘follow the sun’ support for F5 Networks’ global customers

F5 Networks has opened its latest support centre in Auckland to provide ‘follow the sun’ support for customers in the Asia Pacific.

The Auckland centre is staffed by 10 engineers who attended a ‘rigorous eight week boot camp’ in the F5’s headquarters in Seattle, says Julian Eames, F5 executive vice president of business operations.

“We have run support centers now for nine years around the globe, and we ‘follow do sun’, do two shifts in any country, and then move the case to the next [centre],” says Eames during the opening of the centre in the Generator Building in Auckland’s Customs St East.

“The hardest to provide service for has been down here in the Antipodes because you are awake much earlier than the rest of the world”, and clients would sometimes ring the support centres in Singapore or the US West Coast.

The Auckland facility is F5’s fifth and newest support centre in Asia Pacific and Japan, including Singapore, Beijing, Shanghai and Tokyo. F5 has five other support centres across the globe.

He says over a year ago, the company began to look at opening a support centre for Australia and New Zealand and have “spare capacity” for customers in the Asia Pacific Region and the West Coast.

He says while cost was one of the criteria for opening the centre in Auckland, the most important factor was getting “high-end really good technical skills”.

“Our products fit right into the heart of clients networks to the point where if they have a security attack they say the average cost is $7 million, and downtime for an application is $200,000 per hour,” he says, on why the extensive training was important for the technical staff.

“We have to get in and diagnose very very quickly and get the client’s website back up and running and do a full diagnosis.”

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