F5, Inc. Common Stock Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference 2026

Thank you, Mike, for having us, and maybe before I jump into the mega trends, let me just get on record our safe harbor provision. Our discussion today may contain forward-looking statements which involve uncertainties and risks. Our actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied in these statements. Please see our SEC filings for more information on these risk factors. Mike, I think we talked a bit about this at our investor event. The world runs on applications today. And applications require performance and security and scalability like we've never seen before. And I think we today are really operating at the nexus of three mega trends that are shaping the architectures around us. The first is really around hybrid and multi-cloud. So 90% of organizations today have a hybrid multi-cloud architecture. They operate across, on average, 22 different environments.

This creates incredible complexity for large organizations trying to manage this hybrid multi-cloud. The second is an expanding threat landscape. Frontier AI is fundamentally changing the way we think about security, the focus around application security. In today's world, the relationship between vulnerabilities found and when they need to be patched to avoid exploitation has shrunk quite dramatically. F5 sits at the front door of these applications. We have seen the application layer attacks increase 140% over the last year. The third mega trend is AI, and specifically AI inference. Today's organizations are either building or preparing for a large number of AI-powered applications. We sit at a really important place. The indirect use cases for AI drive additional bandwidth through our products, and as a result, increased demand for them. We also are very specifically pursuing a set of direct use cases.

We have three of those. We go after the data delivery opportunity, where we can sit in front of data stores. We pursue a set of things around AI runtime security. Today's applications require additional security to really both protect against these AI threats as well as use AI capabilities to do that. The third is around AI factory load balancing. Here, this is really around GPU optimization for the AI factories that the world is building. When you put these three together, they layer on top of each other and create just an incredible demand environment.

Yeah. I think it's been a very healthy demand environment over the past several quarters, is what we've been seeing. Our pipeline health has been very strong. Pipeline create rates continue to remain very high. I think what we've been seeing some new growth vectors over the last several quarters emerge, and we've talked a lot about some of them on the systems side of the business. Digital sovereignty has become top of mind for large enterprises across Europe, and we're seeing that now across Asia-Pacific as well. There's been kind of a renewed focus on building out data center capacity in these environments. AI is also driving a need for digital sovereignty, as more of these workloads customers want to retain on-premise. We're seeing more capacity built out supporting that.

But then also just in general, as Tom said, that customers are preparing for they're seeing today and they're preparing for continued growth in their workloads driven specifically by AI. And so as part of the refresh that we've been seeing, we've been seeing a lot of expansion in capacity, which is kind of a new phenomenon when you look back to prior refresh cycles. And so all these trends that are kind of driving new vectors of growth, in addition to the typical software and refresh-related growth that we're seeing have given us that confidence to take our guidance up throughout this year and give us a pretty good outlook on momentum heading into FY 2027.

Yeah, that's one of the big things that differentiates F5 is that we allow customers to run their applications in any environment. And several years ago, it wasn't the popular move to continue to invest in data center capabilities, but we really felt long-term customers were going to find themselves in the hybrid multi-cloud world and having the right efficacy of their delivery and security solutions, both in data center-based environments as well as cloud-based environments, was going to become paramount, and we're seeing that play out now. And so it's been driving not just growth on the capacity that we're seeing, but it's also manifesting as broader expansion across the rest of the portfolio as customers are preparing for that hybrid multi-cloud world.

Yeah. We have an end of software support date that is in our Q2 of 2027. Those customers that do not refresh their legacy iSeries infrastructure, they will still be under customer support, but what they will not get is the software updates. In this environment, in the post-Mitos world, that has become more front and center with our customers is ensuring that they are running on the current supported versions of software to make sure that they are getting the updates that they need in response to new vulnerabilities. I think what you are seeing is customers are refreshing in a more orderly fashion than they had in prior cycles, where some customers had an appetite to sweat their infrastructure and maybe would not refresh until beyond those dates. We are seeing, I think, a little bit more of an acceleration to that refresh motion.

Now, having said that, there is a long tail of refresh that will still happen after that end of software support date. There are customers that maybe have equipment that has a lower risk profile in their view, and just based on the timing of their own budgets, they may still refresh beyond those dates. What you see is a little bit of a surge in the demand as you get closer to that date, and then you will see kind of a long tail slope on the remaining refresh motion.