One current time-saving feature allows a pilot to ask for a single page from a lengthy PDF pilot manual, eliminating the need for the entire document to download. "It has certainly saved us on WAN costs and has saved us a ton of money in terms of lowering incoming pilot complaint calls" to the help desk, he said. "The need to push more performance out to pilots is always a consideration."

F5 will also announce Enterprise Manager 1.2, a software revision on its EM3000 hardware, starting at $49,995.

F5 competes in the application acceleration market primarily with Citrix Systems Inc. and Cisco Systems Inc., said Zeus Kerravala, an analyst at Yankee Group Research Inc. in Boston. "A lot of companies offer application performance. But F5 offers application-specific solutions that are pre-configured for Oracle and other applications instead of making the enterprise customer figure out how to do it...by providing a generic solution for all applications," he said.

Kerravala said F5 also deserves credit for making a quick migration with Swan Labs technology into its own Traffic Management Operating System software.