The distributor implements live testing environments in Chile, Peru, Mexico, Ecuador, and Colombia, allowing partners to reduce sales cycles by up to 50% and gain technical mastery of F5’s Distributed Cloud solution. Learn how these controlled environments make it possible to identify risks and validate solutions in real time.
In a technology market where applications are the heart of the business, their security and cloud distribution represent both a challenge and a critical opportunity. To bridge the gap between complex theory and practical implementation, the Licencias OnLine engineering team has built a series of laboratories and live use cases of F5 Distributed Cloud throughout the region.
This initiative, led by pre-sales engineers Hernán Mella from Chile; Jannet Taboada from Peru; Jesús Ugalde from Mexico; Wilson Sigcha from Ecuador; and Diana Palomino from Colombia, seeks to solve a common channel challenge: the difficulty of commercializing abstract solutions without seeing them in operation.
Breaking the barrier of unfamiliarity
The transition from traditional infrastructures to distributed application models has created an entry barrier that is not technological, but rather one of adoption and knowledge. According to experts, channels need to touch the technology in order to trust it.
“A partner does not offer something they do not master, and that is human idiosyncrasy,” explains Ugalde. The objective is to equip partners with technical capabilities and skills so they can confidently respond to market needs.
Along the same lines, Taboada is blunt about the need for these practical environments to demystify the solution: “If they don’t try it and don’t know that it really works, they won’t offer it. Distributed Cloud was always a kind of black box. The first thing to do is to show it to them so that they become convinced.”
A regional deployment with diverse use cases
Unlike theoretical demonstrations or factory labs with predefined configurations, Licencias OnLine has its own F5 Distributed Cloud (XC) tenant, designed to enable real, complex, and fully customizable scenarios by country and by customer.
In this way, working with the distributor makes it possible to prioritize the use of an open environment, where configuration is complete and flexible, without the typical limitations of standard labs, in which the technical path is already defined by lab guides.
“Our XC tenant allows us to adapt the architecture, flows, and use cases to the specific needs of the business, facilitating more realistic tests, higher-value demonstrations, and a deep understanding of how the solution behaves in production scenarios,” explains Sigcha.
• Colombia: Palomino highlights a focus on application modernization, integrating the NGINX line and working on a joint initiative with Red Hat for microservices environments.
• Ecuador: Sigcha focuses on the security of internet-exposed applications and the use of Web App Scanning, a tool that works like a medical check-up to detect vulnerabilities and weak configurations.
• Mexico: Ugalde works on API discovery and protection, something vital given that many modern applications depend on them and developers often lose visibility into how many APIs are active or whether their repositories are secure.
• Chile: Mella shares that they are implementing use cases that include on-premises machines with web applications, where traffic is inspected, without delay, on the Customer Edge device, applying the entire security stack such as WAF and API Protection.
• Peru: According to Taboada, projects are being developed to publish customer applications on the internet using Customer Edge, facilitating proof of concept in real-world situations.
Commercial agility: LOL’s differentiator
The value of this initiative is not only technical, but also commercial. Working with Licencias OnLine and its own tenant makes it possible to enable test environments quickly, flexibly, and aligned with the specific needs of each customer.
Thanks to a fully customizable environment, it is possible to demonstrate exactly the use cases the customer wants to see, adapting the configuration, flows, and architecture to the real business context. This translates into greater agility in the sales process, more relevant demonstrations, and more informed decision-making by the customer.
“Our differentiator is deployment speed,” says Sigcha. “Because we already have the tenant enabled, we can address the business opportunity quickly. And whoever arrives first will most likely carry a lot of weight in the decision.”
In the current scenario, speed is a key factor in reducing sales timelines for projects that are usually lengthy. Regarding this, Ugalde estimates a significant impact: “We are aiming for this type of technology to reduce sales time, probably by 50%, allowing project maturation cycles to drop from six to three months.”
Invitation to the channel
Licencias OnLine’s strategy is clear: to offer added value to its partners across the region. The labs are available at no cost to partners, functioning as an enablement and demand-generation tool.
In this regard, Mella shares a message for partners: “You have a robust engineering team that will support you along the path of getting to know the tool and being able to transfer that knowledge to your customers.” For her part, Palomino extends the invitation to the entire region to take advantage of this resource: “It is an invitation to open up the market through the acquisition of a space not only to do demos, but also to learn.”
