Countrywide, myCIO.com and Upside Choose F5 Networks to Help Maintain Their Online Advantage.

Business/High Tech Editors

SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug. 30, 2000

F5 Networks, Inc. (Nasdaq:FFIV), the leading provider of Internet traffic and content management (iTCM) products, today announced that Countrywide Home Loans (NYSE:CCR), Inc., myCIO.com, Inc., a Network Associates, Inc. (Nasdaq:NETA) business, and Upside Media have selected F5 Networks' iTCM products to support their online e-Business initiatives.

These leading companies leverage F5 Networks' products to help their business-critical sites stay competitive -- delivering reliable, fast online service to their customers.

Countrywide Home Loans, Inc. (www.countrywide.com) was founded in 1969. Countrywide, a national leader in residential finance, produces, purchases, sells and services loans for single-family homes. In addition to helping people secure mortgage loans or refinance existing homes, Countrywide's web site is a bountiful resource center for homeowners and prospective buyers. To keep its comprehensive site operating smoothly, serving as a 24x7 financing tool for house hunters and homeowners, Countrywide employs F5 Networks' BIG-IP(R) Controllers to manage its expansive server farm and applications.

"Countrywide reaches out to the community by giving customers choices; enabling people to interact with us in the way that's most productive and comfortable to them -- face-to-face, by browser, by phone, by wireless device, or any combination of the above," said Richard Jones, Chief Technology Officer for Countrywide Home Loans. "Customers who interact with us online need the assurance that their sensitive financial and personal information is always available and secure. With F5 Networks' products supporting our network, customers have dependable, secure, and fast access to our site and to their accounts."

myCIO.com (www.mycio.com), one of the world's first infrastructure ASPs, leverages leading technologies from Network Associates to deliver managed security application services via the Internet. myCIO.com is committed to providing continuous, uninterrupted protection against the growing number of security threats to critical e-Business networks. To ensure that its distributed data centers and applications are always available and deliver the highest quality of service to customers, myCIO.com uses F5 Networks' BIG-IP and 3-DNS(R) Controllers to manage local and wide-area Internet traffic.

"Every morning we have thousands of customers who access our site to check for security and virus updates, so web site uptime and providing a seamless connection is critical to the success of our business," said Duran Holycross, Manager of IT Operations at myCIO.com. "F5 Networks' 3-DNS Controller acts as our primary DNS server and also handles the global load balancing between our multiple sites-- all in one box-- to maximize site reliability and performance. 3-DNS saves us approximately 20 to 30 hours a week with its point and click GUI interface and also helps us save on data center space, which is at a premium right now."

UpsideToday (www.upside.com), a division of Upside Media, is a daily business information site covering the people, companies and capital shaping the digital era. UpsideToday offers up-to-the-minute news, opinionated columnists, market analysis, new company profiles and selected in-depth articles from its print magazine, UPSIDE. To uphold its superior reputation for providing insider views on the business of technology, UpsideToday takes advantage of BIG-IP to ensure high availability of its site and to allow readers to quickly access the content they are looking for.

"As a trusted source of technology information, UpsideToday maintains its edge by utilizing the most effective new technologies to make our editorial content easy to access," said Gini Talmadge, President and Group Publisher, Upside Media. "We turned to F5 Networks' BIG-IP Controllers to provide high quality service and the most productive web experience possible. F5's products give us the added insurance we need to deliver on this goal."

"Most businesses using the Web to gain a competitive edge and streamline efficiencies are deploying mission-critical applications," said Steve Goldman, Senior Vice-President of Sales, Marketing, and Services at F5 Networks. "This escalates the requirement that their Internet sites are highly dependable, responsive, and mirror the quality service and dependability that they're already known for. F5 helps businesses maximize their sites' ROI and optimize their web-based applications to make sure that they're always delivering the right content, always available, and always fast."

About F5 Networks

F5 Networks is the leader in Internet Traffic and Content Management (iTCM). Our award winning integrated suite of high-performance best of breed products provide an end-to-end solution for automatically and intelligently managing Internet content and traffic-- globally. Our products remove bandwidth congestion and optimize the availability and speed of mission-critical Internet servers and applications, including web publishing, content delivery, e-commerce, caching, firewalls and more. F5 Networks helps companies avoid the risk of being burdened with ill-performing networks that do not meet end user expectations, while enabling network administrators to better control and predict the performance of their e-Business infrastructure. Our products are widely deployed in large enterprises, the top service providers, financial institutions, government agencies, healthcare, and portals throughout the world. The company is headquartered in Seattle, Washington, and has offices in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, New York, Phoenix, San Diego, San Francisco, Toronto, Washington, D.C., Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Korea, Germany, Singapore, Sweden and the United Kingdom. F5 Networks is located on the web at www.f5.com.

F5 Networks (Nasdaq:FFIV) Internet Traffic Management products support a wide range of operating systems and hardware platforms including those from: Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq:SUNW), Hewlett Packard (NYSE:HWP), Compaq (NYSE:CPQ), Microsoft (Nasdaq:MSFT), Apple (Nasdaq:AAPL), IBM (NYSE:IBM) and Intel (Nasdaq:INTC). F5 products work with leading IP-based applications, including legacy host, mainframe, Java, CORBA-based, and client/server applications from vendors such as SAP (NYSE:SAP), BAAN (Nasdaq:BAANF), Novell (Nasdaq:NOVL), Oracle (Nasdaq:ORCL), and PeopleSoft (Nasdaq:PSFT).

This press release may contain forward looking statements relating to future events or future financial performance that involve risks and uncertainties. Such statements can be identified by terminology such as "may," "will," "should," "expects," "plans," "anticipates," "believes," "estimates," "predicts", "potential" or "continue" or the negative of such terms or comparable terms. These statements are only predictions and actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in these statements based upon a number of factors including those identified in the Company's filings with the SEC.