Nokia, F5 Refine Alliance

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. and SEATTLE -- Nokia (NYSE: NOK), the world leader in mobile communications and F5 Networks (NASDAQ: FFIV), the leading provider of Application Traffic Management solutions, today announced a new reseller agreement enhancing their relationship to more effectively compete in an evolving marketplace, better differentiate their respective product offerings, offer new bundled solutions to wireless customers, and minimize costs. Under the terms of the agreement, all of Nokia's business divisions will have access to F5's full suite of Application Traffic Management products for resale in bundling and integration opportunities. The new agreement will become effective in the third quarter of calendar 2003. Intelligent traffic management continues to play an increasingly important role in enterprise security, reliability and overall business performance and we're pleased to continue our partnership with F5," said Scott Blaine, Nokia's general manager of the F5 Networks relationship. "This refocused way of working together will allow us to easily bundle F5's traffic management products with Nokia's security products for a highly optimized solution. Customers will benefit through this broader reseller agreement, which will give us the ability to easily incorporate F5 products into solutions from any Nokia division, allowing customers to turn to Nokia as their one-stop solutions provider." As part of the agreement, F5 intends to complete custom development work by mid-year on its traffic management products to support integration with Nokia's NetAct, a solution for monitoring, measuring and configuring the wireless network. The integration between F5 products and NetAct will help simplify and streamline the deployment of the Nokia-F5 solution bundles for wireless carriers. "Nokia Networks is bundling F5's BIG-IP(R) products for Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) load balancing to build increased high availability, security and scalability into our wireless customers' networks," said Olavi Mertanen, director of Product Business Management for Nokia IP Mobility Networks. "Additionally, the integration between F5 products and NetAct will complement the new reseller agreement and benefit our wireless carrier customers by ensuring that our solutions work seamlessly together." Nokia Corp. F5 Networks Inc.