There's a payoff for consistency and commonality. In the construction industry, buildings can be completed faster when standard or prefabricated building materials are used. In the IT industry, having standard elements that get reused in multiple products can speed time-to-market, plus cut down on costs.

F5 Networks is one vendor whose efforts at standardization are paying off. F5 has been working to refine its core operating system, TMOS, over the last few years to make it work across its multiple platforms. By pursuing a modular design approach, F5 can use TMOS in different appliances, adding functionality to the core set of features as needed.

Research firm Current Analysis this week published its analysis of F5 and how the vendor is performing in different areas, including the application optimization market (Compare Application Acceleration and WAN Traffic Optimization products) and enterprise firewall and IPSec/unified threat management market. A key reason for the research firm’s positive rating of F5 is because of its success with TMOS.

“TMOS provides a full-proxy TCP engine that can be leveraged for a wide variety of traffic management functions. It features a modular kernel, which allows F5 to add new functionality rapidly to any of its BIG-IP platforms, to date including TCP optimization, application acceleration, Web application security, local and global load balancing, and ISP link optimization,” writes Michael Brandenburg, an analyst in Current Analysis’ enterprise network systems group, in the report. “F5’s TMOS platform has enabled it to enter new markets and provided it with strong differentiation vs. its traditional competitors, including Cisco, Nortel, Citrix, and Foundry.”

Brandenburg cites among F5’s other strengths its early-to-market status in the Layer 4-7 switching market; IP traffic management technology that has adapted well to changing Web processing requirements; and partnerships with server heavyweights Dell, HP, IBM and Fujitsu.

Still, F5 faces stiff competitive pressure in the application optimization market. In addition, there’s work to be done for F5 to establish its reputation and presence in the enterprise security market, Brandenburg writes:

“F5 is driving a significant portion of its growth through expansion into application security markets, and it needs to work to improve its brand visibility in the enterprise security market.”

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.