Good morning, everyone. Thank you for coming to the conference. I'm Samik Chatterjee, and I cover hardware and networking stocks at JP Morgan. I have the pleasure of hosting the F5 team for the next session. Cooper Werner, who's the EVP and CFO of the company; Kunal Anand, Chief Innovation Officer. Thank you both for coming to the conference, and thank you to the audience as well. Cooper, maybe this is for you, but Kunal, feel free to chime in if you have a view here. What we're starting, and primarily asking all of our companies to do, is initially sort of give their—give us their take on the macro at this point, because I think if you look at the stock market, I mean, it seems like that's the biggest top-of-mind concern for investors at this point. When you think about sort of the macro outlook, particularly going into the back half of the year, how likely or how likely do you see a significant slowdown or a recession? And particularly if you're starting to sort of plan around those scenarios and how you run your business. Great. Thank you. Before I respond, I just want to get our safe harbor on record. Please note that our discussion today may contain forward-looking statements which involve uncertainties and risk. Our actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied by these statements. Please see our SEC filings for more information on these risk factors. Okay. To address the question of the day, yeah. When we laid out our guidance earlier in April for the quarter and the back half of the year, effectively, we said that we were being somewhat prudent with our annual guide. We raised our revenue guidance by 50 basis points for the year, but that was really on the strength that we've been seeing in the business in the first half of the year. The conservatism was really just more recognizing that there's still some degree of uncertainty with the macro, but we have not actually seen any indicators in our own business of any slowdown. You know, this is both for our most recent quarter and through April. The business velocity remains kind of at our expectations. The things that we track closely just to get the earliest indicators if there was any change in demand are things like our weekly commits, you know, are we delivering what the sales team's expectations are on a weekly basis, linearity through the quarter. We've got pretty good patterns historically on what linearity would look like in a given quarter. And then beyond that, just general pipeline and close rates. and then, of course, meeting with our sales teams and our quarterly business reviews and just hearing kind of what they're seeing on the street level with their customers. It was a very orderly quarter last quarter in terms of prosecuting the demand that we saw, and that's continued right up through April. The prudence is really just tied to uncertainty, but it hasn't translated into anything that we're seeing. From where I sit, I just—I don't have any visibility around any kind of real erosion to the demand environment. Okay. Okay. Good. I mean, part of that uncertainty stems from tariffs. How are you managing or navigating sort of the unpredictability of tariffs as well, as much as managing the levels that you see today versus yesterday? Just give us a sort of lay of the land, what you're doing on that front. Yeah, of course. So, you know, we've spent a lot of time kind of digesting all of the news cycles and kind of inspecting where we might have exposure from a cost perspective. Thankfully, the majority—the tariffs, if there were tariffs that apply to our business, it would be on the hardware side of our business. The majority of our products are manufactured in Mexico and are USMCA compliant. So our cost exposure is pretty immaterial. It's mostly around peripherals that we might ship from tariff-impacted countries, but it's in the low single-digit millions, is what we've kind of sized our exposure at. We think we can manage that just through efficiencies that we've identified in our manufacturing process. No real near-term impact to the business. From a demand perspective, we also haven't seen any indicators of an impact in terms of pull-in. You know, I think that customers have a reasonable view as to what, you know, our pricing practices are. We haven't announced any price changes to our pricing practices, and so the business that we've been seeing has been kind of within our expectations with our pipeline. Our sales teams hadn't identified any material cases of pull-in related to tariffs. Okay. So on the topic of pull-in, but maybe putting tariffs aside, just the VIPRION and the iSeries hardware refresh cycle where you do have sort of end-of-support on some of them coming up. What are you seeing in terms of the driver for the refresh cycle, and why shouldn't we interpret that as pulling, pulling forward some of the system-level demand? Yeah. So, you're referencing the end-of-software support dates we have on our VIPRION and iSeries families, which VIPRION goes end-of-software support in April of 2026, and iSeries goes end-of-software support in January of 2027. Collectively, those two product families are well over half of our customers' installed base. That's a sizable opportunity in terms of tech refresh, and we're seeing that come through in the numbers this year. That's driving a lot of the growth that we're seeing. We don't look at it as pull-in. If anything, it's been deferred demand where customers had been prolonging their existing installed base and sweating assets beyond kind of what their normal replacement cycles would be. We're finally starting to see customers kind of get caught up on their capacity. That is where some of the strength that we are seeing on our year-over-year growth rate is coming from. There is not really any pull-in that is associated with those refresh cycles. It is more of just kind of modernizing their data centers. What we are seeing beyond just the normal tech refresh is we are seeing some increase in demand related to capacity expansion and preparing data centers for how applications are expected to grow over time. Things like AI are adding a new dimension of growth related to our systems business. It is still pretty early, and it is, you know, a little bit of an exercise trying to assess how much of the demand is coming related to preparation for AI. Clearly, we are seeing growth beyond just normal tech refresh. We are also seeing kind of an uptick in our competitive takeout opportunity. We've got some competitors that have invested less in innovation, and the quality of the support that we're hearing from our customers is also less than what our customers would expect. We are seeing a lot of interest from customers in coming to F5, and we think that represents a share gain opportunity over time. Okay. Maybe just following up, I mean, how do you expect that then curve of the refresh cycle to play out, particularly if iSeries has a January 2027 sort of end-of-software support? That's a fair amount of time between now and then. When you've gone through these sort of, similar dynamics in the past with some of your products, is it really sort of just ramping, and probably you see a peak more closer to that January 2027? Yeah. So all customers kind of have their own timeframes in terms of their planning. You've got some customers who want to get well ahead of these end-of-software support dates. Other customers may choose to kind of run right up into those software support dates. You actually have other customers that may, you know, go beyond those dates because we still do offer maintenance on those products. That's one of the more difficult things to predict, the shape of that demand curve. We expect that we're going to see strength at least through FY 2026 and into FY 2027. It's really just a question of how fast customers move forward with some of those refreshes. Through next year will kind of give us a better indicator of whether that opportunity goes well into FY 2027 or if it starts to kind of tail off. Okay. Okay. Got it. I'm going to take it back to compare to what at some point—at one point in time, your expectations for systems revenue was, was that you would be in sort of a steady decline in that business. I know that hasn't been reiterated for a while, but when we certainly see a year like this year where you're guiding to double-digit growth, I mean, does that change overall your thinking in terms of what the long-term drivers for the system business are? Does that change sort of how should investors think about the system business and the sustainability of some of the growth rates versus this decline that you had at one point thought it would go into? Yeah. You're right. Our messaging that we've had around our systems business is that we think the market is kind of a low to mid-single-digit decliner, but we think that we can do better than that just by continuing to take share. If you look at kind of what's implied in our systems business right now, back to kind of what a normalized level was back in 2018 and, you know, fiscal year 2018, fiscal year 2019, kind of pre-COVID, it's right in that kind of low single-digit decline on a CAGR basis. Clearly, we're seeing a lot stronger growth in this year's numbers. We've talked about some of the newer dimensions of potential inflection on that growth rate. It's a little bit early for us to say that this is kind of a new expectation, you know, especially around AI-driven demand. It's very early. It's something we're watching closely. Between, you know, the potential for AI demand and some of the competitive takeout opportunities where we may be able to take a little bit greater share than we had in earlier years, there is potential that that market may be a little bit healthier for us than we had previously signaled. Okay. Got it. Since we are on the topic of AI, maybe just outline how you think about how F5 is associated with the enterprise adoption of AI or sort of AI adoption by the enterprises and how F5 can help on that front. I think enterprises are still in more of a foundational phase when it comes to AI today. We roughly see about three different use cases related to AI. One is sitting in front of data stores that organizations have. For those that don't quite know, in order to get the most utility out of these large language models that are out there, enterprises have found success infusing it with their own enterprise data. What customers have begun to do is put F5 technology in front of those data stores to help with scaling and to help with the information retrieval that's eventually going into these large language models. The second area is securing access and securing the information that's going to and from those large language models, whether they're locally hosted or in the cloud. For that, that's where we introduced the F5 AI Gateway to effectively sit between these applications and APIs as well as these large language models, whether they're deployed somewhere else or locally. Last but not least is around load balancing, specifically load balancing these AI clusters. How does information get to these clusters and then intra load balancing as well? We recently announced the GA of what we're calling BIG- IP Next for Kubernetes that runs on NVIDIA's BlueField 3 GPUs, which now gives organizations the ability to do delivery and security within an AI factory or inside of an AI superpod. We really think that those three opportunities are very meaningful. Okay. Do you mind just giving us maybe one more layer down when you think about these three use cases where you're seeing sort of the most appetite from customers today and which would be sort of more, I would, I guess, more sort of staggered in terms of ramping up maybe a bit later with the enterprises? Yeah. It's interesting when we look at it because I think each of these fit a different persona and a different use case. For instance, the first one around object retrieval and information retrieval, you're squarely talking to a CIO who's worried about scale, who's worried about uptime and availability of core systems and core information in their networks. We typically see that across enterprises today. It's one of the more surprising things for us in the conversations that we've had around organizations who have collectively put BIG- IP and our systems in front of those data stores. It's what informed our partnership with NetApp that we announced. The second use case around securing access is speaking more to a CISO. They're truly worried about governance. They're truly worried about information security. That is something that we see cutting across all enterprises. We announced the AI Gateway, and we're seeing early wins right now, which is very promising. At the same time, I think it's very telling of the moment that we're in, which is a lot of companies are experimenting with these large language models, but they do not have the security and the governance that they need to properly lock that down. The third domain, which is around this work around load balancing, I think there are two things that are just fundamentally important, which is performance related to these AI factories and these AI workloads. The other is energy efficiency. What we're finding is through early customer validation, we're seeing that we're able to deliver that for organizations, which is improving the time to first token, which is essential in these AI workloads. How fast do these models produce output? Also, the energy consumption, the fact that energy consumption over time can go down because a lot of the networking work that would typically happen on these GPUs is now getting done before the data even gets to the GPU, which increases the lifespan of these GPUs and allows them to take on more work. Okay. Okay. Fair. Maybe just asking it, going about it in another angle, which is now when you think about these use cases, translating it back to your product portfolio, how does it translate back to hardware versus your software demand? I mean, look, I think for these AI workloads, systems is definitely something that organizations are looking for. They want high performance, and that's something that they get with the coupling of hardware and software. Okay. Got it. On the last call, you talked about AI for ADCs, and using AI to enhance the product offering and customer experience. Can you talk about the significance of those investments and what's the early feedback from customers? We announced a bunch of capabilities over the last several months. Going back more than six months now, we announced our F5 AI Center of Excellence, which is effectively our own organization within F5 that is doing the things around AI, like building, training, fine-tuning models, which allowed us to put out capabilities in the market that our customers are absolutely loving. We released something called our AI Assistant for our distributed cloud customers, and the attachment's been phenomenal. More than 50% of our customers are using our AI Assistant today. More than 50% of our—sorry, to scope it specifically, our distributed cloud customers are using that AI Assistant today. That has been extremely interesting to watch and observe and see how they're leveraging that solution. It speaks to, I think, the broader challenge that I think every enterprise has, which is the complexity of the environments, and needing to get help when it comes to building policies, rules, understanding what's going on. For our BIG- IP customers, we announced that we're bringing that AI Assistant to BIG- IP later this year. We also announced at the beginning of the year, work around iRule, which is a programmability construct that we have for BIG- IP. Basically, we're allowing customers to generate these iRules using natural language and AI. This is where we're leveraging AI for ADC of how do we make our life easier or the life easier for our customers. Got it. Got it. You talked about the Gateway product and how it sort of helps in these security use cases, particularly around AI. Distributed Cloud product, I mean, can you just talk about whether there's a relevancy for enterprises in relation to AI with the Distributed Cloud offering that you have? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, when you think about it right now, every organization is on some AI journey or AI curve. We talked about it earlier around how the world is predistributed, data is everywhere, and data is needed to get the most value and utility out of these models. A lot of organizations are not able to move their data for compliance reasons or security reasons, which means that data on-prem is likely going to remain on-prem. That data is not going to get transmitted somewhere else. If you think about it fundamentally, we're not bringing data to the AI model. We're going to have to bring these AI models to the data, or we're going to need to find a newer way to bridge that level of connectivity. What we built with Distributed Cloud, we have a capability in there for multi-cloud networking. What we're finding right now is organizations are leveraging multi-cloud networking, and they're building this interesting fabric across their application layer. It doesn't matter if it's on-prem, in the cloud, across multiple environments. They're able to now connect these applications, APIs, and these AI workloads together. We think that there is absolutely a play around what we can provide there. Okay. I mean, is the Distributed Cloud opportunity sort of, I guess in the three pillars that you outlined already, do you see it as a fourth pillar or is the magnitude a bit, sort of lower in terms of near-term contribution than the other, particularly on the system side? I think it's just obviously different, compared to the high-performance systems. This is speaking more to connectivity. It's not going to be around, sitting in front of data stores directly. It's going to be about bridging the different environments. I view it more as a broader connectivity play rather than a just specific AI play. Okay. Yeah. Fair. Maybe talk about the competitive landscape, the way you see it today, particularly relative to traditional competitors that you've had in the space, Citrix and Radware. And then we can go into sort of the more sort of public cloud competition, but maybe let's talk about the traditional competitors that you've had in the space. Yeah. I mean, where we've been focusing on is, is obviously a bunch of innovation around, I would say, modernizing what would be a traditional ADC. When we look at our competitors, Citrix, Radware, et cetera, they've spent a lot of time in ADC, but relatively one-dimensional in their capabilities. What we've been focusing on is bridging both delivery and security together. I think for the longest time, ADC has been synonymous with things like load balancing, traffic management. What we've been able to do with our, with a lot of investment and, and obviously a lot of, a lot of work is bridging a lot of the security use cases along with the load balancing and traffic management. That includes application security, API security, bot protection. We really believe that the infusion of security and delivery is fundamentally important. For us, we think that that investment and building out that platform play is a core differentiator as it relates to our traditional competitors. Then there is the sort of modern players. Let's take, you know, the hyperscalers as an example. Many of them have things like load balancing. Some of them have web application firewall. For those organizations that use those technologies, those are limited to just that cloud. Now, 90% of the enterprises that we cater to are sitting across three or more different enterprise environments. That could be multiple clouds. That could be on-prem. For them, when they try to leverage something like, you know, a hyperscaler's load balancer or a hyperscaler's WAF, that is limited to just that environment. They're not able to extend that to other environments. For us, the competition there is for us playing in a hybrid multi-cloud space, which when we go in and have a conversation with a CIO or a CISO is more appealing rather than them adopting lots of different point solutions and trying to figure out how to make that work. Okay. Got it. Got it. Fair. Coming back to some of the recent trends, and you did have a softer than anticipated software performance in the last quarter, at least from our standpoint, relative to what we model, versus sort of what was very clearly a strong quarter for hardware. One of the things that always comes up with investors is how can you improve predictability in terms of quarterly software and hardware revenues for investors that follow F5 closely? I know you probably have much more insight, but the predictability on the investor side seems to be a bit lower just given how numbers move around quarter to quarter. Right. Yeah. That is just part of our business model. We are going to have variability in the growth rates on a quarterly basis, and it is really kind of tied to the majority of our software revenue coming through in a renewals motion on these multi-year software contracts that we book with customers. What we have really tried to do is focus investors more on our kind of annualized growth rates because that quarter-to-quarter variability will kind of normalize over a longer-term time frame. I want to just be crystal clear that the lack of a smooth growth trajectory does not equate to a lack of visibility on our perspective. We have good insights as to what the timing and shape of these renewals looks like. We try to give some kind of indicators. You know, going back to last July, we had said that we thought the first half of the year would be closer to flat growth for software just based on the timing of these renewals with stronger growth in the second half. That is pretty much playing out to our expectations with the exception of in Q1, we had an exceptionally strong growth quarter driven by some really healthy expansion across a couple of our larger renewal opportunities. We had said, you know, we're not, that was acute to that quarter's renewal base, and we were not flowing through that expansion, you know, changing our expectations for the rest of the year. From our perspective, Q2 was pretty much in line with what our expectations were. And, you know, we expect to have a very strong growth quarter in Q3. What we could do to make it more smooth would be to reduce our flexibility that we give customers, give them less choice, have every customer go on an annual subscription agreement, and that would smooth the numbers out, but they would be smaller. We think that the better opportunity for us is to give customers choice that leads to them growing faster with F5. We'll take the kind of ups and downs on the quarterly growth rates that come along with that because longer term, it's a better software outcome for F5. Got it. Got it. One of the questions that stems from what Kunal was saying in terms of high-performance systems and demand relative to AI is when we now think about a lot of the investments for enterprise going forward, incremental investments will be towards AI, and that puts in a lot of high-performance systems. Does that automatically cannibalize some of the appetite to spend on the software offerings from F5? Do you see any cannibalization happening on that front? We have not seen any signs of cannibalization to date. You know, most of the increased demand that we're seeing related to AI is on the hardware side, but it's mostly new use cases. It's either for AI, direct AI capabilities that customers are rolling out or growth in their apps that are driven by AI, that is leading to additional capacity needs in the data center. We're not really seeing a shift in customers' architectures for how they support their hybrid multi-cloud environments. No indicators that we can see to date as to where software is shifting back to hardware, related directly to AI. Okay. Staying on software, the revenue growth this year in fiscal 2025 is expected to be low double digits, following a similar year in fiscal 2024, and then you had 0% growth in fiscal 2023 in the software revenue. As we look through a cycle and particularly think about the software revenues through a cycle, like how do you reassure investors that there's enough there to drive double-digit growth consistently in software revenues? Right. You're referencing what we call kind of a math headwind related to that 2023 software where growth was flat because we saw pressure on new projects related to more of a macro downturn in customer budgets. That does flow through on that renewal cycle for next year. What offsets that are the increased rates of expansion we've been seeing with customers. We're seeing more and more customers that are expanding into new use cases and new functionality across our portfolio at the time of renewal. That's where we have an opportunity to kind of drive growth in spite of that math headwind. I'll also, you know, point out that that same math headwind becomes a tailwind in FY 2027 where you see a growth cycle on our FY 2024 numbers that comes up for renewal in FY 2027. Long term, we believe that the software revenue opportunity is a double-digit grower on a CAGR basis. There, you know, any given year, you may see a little bit of a fluctuation up or down just based on some of those cycles. Broadly, we think the opportunity is only increasing based on the expansion that we're seeing across the portfolio. Okay. I mean, clearly on the software side, there's a lot of reliance on renewals and customers coming back and sort of raising capacity overall. That does tend to sort of lead to concerns about your TAM growth being limited and it's being driven by a set of customers that you're renewing. Yes, you're expanding with them, but the pool of new customers coming in seems to be relatively more modest relative to the renewals that you're addressing. Like overall, how do you think about the TAM growth on this front and what can you do to sort of accelerate TAM growth? Yeah. So the TAM, we actually think is, you know, has a very healthy growth rate. It's just that a lot of the new projects come through with customers that we've already contracted with. We don't want to conflate the renewal opportunity as being just a cyclical opportunity. The growth in a lot of the new workloads that customers are seeing in their estates, they're very often building that into capacity expansion or new use cases at that time of renewal. We are seeing a lot of new business opportunity come in either as net new projects or new customers or new functionality with existing customers. You want to be careful not to just separate them as either business that we're winning or business that we're recontracting. The growth is really coming on both dimensions. Okay. Okay. Maybe, just going into smaller pieces overall, one, you talk about competitive displacements, but give us sort of what you're thinking in relation to how much more there is in terms of headroom on the competitive displacements because that is coming up a lot more on your commentary as well in terms of where the share gains are coming from. Yeah. So we've always had competitive displacements. That's, you know, part of our revenue opportunity, you know, going back, you know, several years. I think what we've seen is, an increased appetite by, by some of our competitors' customers to move towards F5. And, you know, that really started showing up in the numbers more in this past year, past kind of four quarters. We think it's, it's pretty early. You know, we're, we're just kind of scratching the surface in terms of not just winning some of those accounts, but then the follow-on opportunity. Most accounts aren't going to replace their entire estate on the initial buy, right? So they're going to replace part of their environment. They do the work to standardize on F5, and then they, in a more cadence fashion, replace the rest of their estate. We think that this kind of increased rate of competitive takeout opportunity is probably a multi-year cycle, and we feel like we're still kind of in the early innings of that opportunity. Would you care to sort of outline between Citrix and Radware, like where are the bigger share gains coming from? Yeah. Citrix is definitely the bigger opportunity. Just they've got a larger installed base in general, and so I would put that opportunity kind of at the top of the list. Got it. Got it. Okay. And then again, maybe following up, fair to assume that most of that share gain opportunity comes through on the system side first and then sort of expands into the software domain? I don't know that I'd say it's mostly systems. It's really spread across both systems and software. I would say deployable software. So BIG- IP, you know, software, in some cases NGINX. And then over time, you know, one of the differentiators we have is that we have a true multi-cloud, set of solutions. You know, there's opportunity to expand across the rest of the portfolio where some of the traditional competitors really were more kind of data center and cloud-based, offerings, but didn't really have an offering for SaaS-based, environments. Got it. Okay. Let me take a quick pause and see if anyone in the audience has a question. Any questions in the audience? Thank you very much. It's very insightful. How are you thinking about your equity compensation or incentives for executives and employees? Any change or things you're thinking about differently, with the market environment? Not at this time. We've had a pretty steady equity compensation in terms of percentage of revenue. It's slightly declined over the last couple of years. I will say that as we look ahead to things like AI and the competitive nature of talent acquisition, that's something we will have to consider, to, you know, what's the best way to attract and retain top talent. We see a really exciting opportunity with AI. Kunal outlined several dimensions where we think that we can drive an increased revenue growth opportunity related to AI, but there is a cost to acquiring that talent. It's something that we're spending a lot of time on, in terms of how to attract the best talent. Maybe last three questions here. One, federal spending, a lot of discussions and noise around pullback there. How are you sort of maybe quantifying the risk around it or embedding any risk around it? And what is your exposure to the federal spending specifically? Yeah. So federal is typically in the kind of 5-10% of revenue. That's the, the mix that we get from federal government depending on the quarter. You know, our prioritization is pretty high within federal budgets. So we understand that there is, of course, some uncertainty in terms of various budgets within federal government. In terms of the appetite to reduce waste, our products, we do not really feel are, are exposed to, to that dynamic just because we are not a seat-based model. Most of our solutions are tied to kind of mission-critical, you know, engagements. And you know, we are tied to security as an example. We have not really seen any notable change in demand from federal government. We have not seen any pulling either. That, that's always the question is, you know, with uncertain budgets, do you, you see some pull-in while you have the budget, but we haven't really seen that to date. Okay. You've been building cash on the balance sheet and like now you generate $700 million-$800 million, $700 million to $800 million free cash flow. You're buying back $500 million. There is some cash that keeps building every year on your balance sheet. I mean, how are you thinking about allocation there or allocation priorities on that front? Yeah. So we're still in kind of the same commitment of repurchasing shares greater than 50% of our free cash flow. That's our model that we'll continue to operate with. We want to make sure that we've got flexibility strategically in terms of our balance sheet. I'll also note that about 60% of our cash is held offshore. There are opportunities to bring some of that cash back across, but we want to be mindful in terms of any tax implications that that could have. When you say you want to keep balance sheet for flexibility for strategic actions, M&A being a part of it, I mean, F5 did do a bunch of acquisitions, but you, it's been a while since you did that. Yeah. We've been doing more kind of tuck-in type acquisitions and those have been incredibly successful. We've had what we feel are really good returns in terms of the capabilities that we're able to bring to market quickly with some of these smaller acquisitions. You know, we're constantly kind of surveying the landscape and seeing where there's an opportunity to accelerate our roadmap, in terms of M&A. It's not to say that there might not be larger opportunities that come our way, but those tend to be a little bit fewer and further between. M&A will always be part of our strategic posture. Last one for you. You are one of the few companies I cover that's hitting the rule of 40 at this point. That is always good to see. How do you think about sort of upside on the operating margin from here on? Is it purely a case of continuing to drive operating leverage or is there a ceiling? I mean, you're at a 35% operating margin. Is there a ceiling for a company, of the sort of P&L structure that F5 has? Yeah. I don't know that we characterize it as a ceiling. We do think there's an opportunity to continue to drive operating leverage over time. I think we're always going to be balancing that with what we think the revenue opportunity is. You know, we try to plan relatively conservatively in terms of our assumption on top line and how we then resource the rest of the model to make sure that we're able to continue to drive double-digit earnings growth sustainably over time. You know, we've outlined several vectors of potential inflection in revenue growth over time. We will kind of make that balance in terms of how we resource the business to go after those opportunities. We do think that there is more operating leverage in the model. Okay. Great. I'll wrap it up there, but thank you for coming to the conference and thank you to the audience.