F5 Appoints Sales Leaders, Rolls Out VNF Offering

F5 Networks has appointed two channel sales executives to lead sales in North America, and Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Lisa Citron has been named vice president of North American channels, and David Helfer has been named senior vice president of sales for EMEA. F5 provides application delivery networking technology.

F5’s Lisa Citron

During the last seven years, Citron has contributed to shaping F5’s channel. Most recently, as senior director of public cloud sales and channels, she helped to drive change in the development and recruitment of the company’s public cloud go-to-market efforts.

In her new role, Citron will help the company evolve and align partner strategies with its pivot to a cloud-focused, software-based selling effort. She is based in New Jersey and reports into Pete Brant, senior vice president of North America sales.

A veteran leader of high-performance global teams, Helfer has more than 25 years of industry experience in the technology sector. He first joined F5 in 2016 as senior vice president of worldwide partners and cloud sales.

F5’s David Helfer

In his new role, he will be responsible for accelerating F5’s application security and cloud leadership across EMEA. He is based in the U.K. and reports to Chad Whalen, executive vice president of worldwide sales.

Also this week, F5 introduced an enhanced network functions virtualization (NFV) offering. Available as part of a preconfigured, prepackaged solution, F5’s new VNF Manager is aimed at simplifying consumption of F5’s portfolio of VNFs that are provisioned in service providers’ software-defined networking environments.

“Service provider organizations have plenty of options when it comes to virtualizing elements of their network, but what they haven’t had previously is a package that delivers consumption-based pricing that can be tied directly to business outcomes,” said James Feger, vice president and general manager of F5’s service provider business. “Beyond just VNFs and basic service management, F5’s new offering provides a preconfigured solution that gives customers push-button ease-of-use for capacity thresholds, along with service programmability and orchestration capabilities for specialized requirements.”