I can understand the skepticism and concern by original post on F5's ability of doing stateful inspection at wire-speeds as they are often perceived as just an ADC or Load balancer appliance. However the F5 platform was designed and has delivered as network fabric a full proxy architecture since 2004. So, stateful, in fact even "full state" performance is not an issue for F5. TMOS is it's strong suit moving forward in security architectures as the security service simplification and consolidation is occurring rapidly at this real estate position. F5 is even wirespeed in our WAF product ASM, where most peers are not deployed inline as they fail to be as fast as stateful Firewalls and the F5 WAF.
Equally impressive is what F5 is doing in Carriers with application classification with PEM.
For more AFM proof and customers
Here is how Interop used us as FW
Video of same
Here are other customers talking about it.