F5 gets coverage due to Enron
F5 got some "coverage" on the front page of the business section of the Seattle Times today in an article about the upcoming trial of some of the key figures in the Enron debacle.
Look carefully at the photo that has the caption "A visitor at Enron's headquarters in Houston carries boxes as he leaves Nov. 29, 2001, after the energy company collapsed, wiping out thousands of jobs." That visitor was one of our field systems engineers who caught wind of the collapse and astutely grabbed some BIG-IPs that Enron was evaluating (and had not paid for) at the time. An Associated Press photographer captured him as he carted the boxes out the front door. If I remember correctly, the photo first ran in USA Today.
The Seattle Times likely had nothing to do with this coincidence as the story was written by Thomas S. Mulligan of the Los Angeles Times. I'm not sure if the Seattle Times gets to select which photos they run with the story in cases like this. In fact, there are no articles written by local reporters in the Sunday business section - all of the content is syndicated from other sources like Reuters. There is one short paragraph under the "Economic Snapshot" heading that I believe was written by a local source who comments on statistics.
That brings me around to another thought on the topic and that is our lack of success when it comes to getting attention from the local media here in Seattle. In the very early days of the company we got a lot of coverage. as we grew and had a real business going, we weren't as sexy a story and it was tough to get much attention since we weren't a consumer play. We did get some mentions when we went public. Then the dot com bubble burst and some of the pain we went through when we had to lay people off was documented. We retrenched, totally changed our target market from dot com to enterprises, managed to keep our revenues in tact (albeit not growing) and got the company firing on all cyclinders. Today we have managed to give our shareholders some of the best returns in the industry.
We have gotten mentions when we have acquired companies and there was one piece that came out last summer with a less than flattering headline althought the content was okay. But with a lack of locally generated column inches in vehicles like the Seattle Times F5 clearly needs to take different approaches to reach the local market. One of the reasons that I want to raise our awareness is to assist in our recruiting efforts. F5 has many positions open to support the growth of the company and we need all the help we can get to attract the top talent out there.
Overall we remain largely unknown on the local scene and I want to change that.