F5 Networks, Inc., a provider of application delivery networking, or ADN, reportedly has signed an OEM agreement as well as partnership agreement with California-based IP geolocation data and services provider Quova, Inc., in order to enhance its Internet protocol, or IP, geolocation capability.

 

Under the terms of the agreement, Quova’s data service will be integrated into the F5 Networks’ (News - Alert) TMOS platform starting with the upcoming BIG-IP v10.1 release, said officials with F5.

 

Quova delivers detailed demographic and network characteristic data about an IP address. Generally, online companies including broadcasters, e-retailers, ad networks, banks, and government agencies integrate Quova’s IP geolocation data into their Web applications, in order to geo-target their advertising and content, detect card-not-present fraud, manage distribution of digital content, comply with local laws, and more.

 

Apart from enhancing F5 Networks’ solutions, the partnership between both the companies also helps in enhancing F5’s ability to provide more intelligent context-aware application delivery solutions to global IT organizations with superior network security, location-aware functionality, advanced optimization tools, as well as options for localizable and customizable content.

 

According to Calvin Rowland, vice president of application partner programs at F5, IP geolocation is all about identifying and managing customers worldwide.

 

“Such relative elements of information provide our customers with unprecedented levels of intelligent traffic management, security functions, and policy enforcement on the Application Delivery Controller that could previously only be implemented on a Web or application server.”

 

With this in mind, Quova technology maps IP addresses and related data to geographic locations at various levels of granularity, this contextual location information helps in solving many security problems, including enforcing download and access restrictions based on locality.

 

With the help of Quova’s IP geo data, F5 customers will be able to solve new business networking issues at the perimeter of the network rather than down at the Web application level.

 

Moreover, localization functions, including setting the default language page and customizing content for a specific region, will also now depend on the Quova data.