Lonely Planet decided in 2008 to institute "agile business methodologies" across the business, Kennedy said. "That's helped us to innovate and bring out new products" quickly, he said.

Today, Lonely Planet is a maker of apps and e-books in addition to physical books, Kennedy said. Through partnerships, its content is available on Nokia Maps and Microsoft Bing Travel. And Lonely Planet now also has a large presence on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, he said.

Lonely Planet has completely overhauled the way it creates and publishes content, Kennedy said. "Previously you made a book and then you digitised it." Now, authors enter their writing into a CMS system on the road and Lonely Planet distributes it across several channels at once. "You create a book from it, you create an app, you put it on the website [and] you sell it to a partner."

Kennedy said adopting F5 equipment played "a very important part" in making digital content secure and fast for readers. Lonely Planet initially used F5 for application performance management and search engine optimisation, he said. The travel guide has recently added F5 firewall capabilities to help secure its intellectual property.

F5's application delivery controller (ADC) helped to reduce the number of servers Lonely Planet was using, Kennedy said. It's also added more intelligence to the system, allowing Lonely Planet to better analyse traffic. "It kind of proved itself from day one. We actually see it more as part of the application stack rather than a piece of network gear that sits there."