Ex-IBM networking head Andrew Coward joined F5 as head of strategic alliances with a mission to tame agentic traffic.

A year after leaving his role as GM of software networking for IBM, Coward announced his new position on LinkedIn, writing that he had been working with private equity and venture capital firms in the interim “to understand which companies are well placed to succeed in infrastructure and networking.”

Coward’s conclusion was that relentless bot traffic has officially surpassed human web activity, forcing a major reinvention of enterprise websites and digital infrastructure. To remain visible in AI recommendation engines, organizations, he argued, have to reconfigure their platforms to prioritize structured information over the more human-centered aesthetics of website design and video content.

“They want hard facts, structured in the right way and delivered at speed. So enterprise websites need refactoring and rebuilding to serve this new type of (bot) customer. Block the bots, and your product is as invisible as if you had blocked Google. Don't optimize for bots, and you never make their recommendation engine. The danger of personal information being leaked or transferred as bots communicate is profound,” Coward wrote.

Coward claimed F5 has a product portfolio “adaptable to this new bot paradigm, the trust of customers to manage application traffic at massive scale, and a clear AI investment strategy.”

His role at the cloud delivery firm will focus on driving “the partnerships necessary to make the enterprise shift to the second AI wave as painless as possible.”

“This means ensuring compatibility across the enterprise stack; it means end-to-end testing of complete systems; and it means bringing F5's customers a migration and mitigation plan that encompasses the entire AI ecosystem.”

F5’s new alliance head joined IBM in 2021to build the company’s networking business in the wake of its 2019 Red Hat acquisition. He also oversaw the IBM acquisitions and integrations of HashiCorp, Pliant, and Volta Networks.

Prior to IBM, Coward’s career included VP stints at Lumina Networks, Brocade, CarrierIQ, and Juniper Networks.

It remains unclear who, if anyone, replaced Coward at IBM, despite a year passing since his exit from the tech giant.