F5 : Q2 2026 Earnings Presentation

Published: 2026-04-28 17:53:50 ET FFIV

Published on 04/28/2026 at 05:53 pm EDT

PERIOD ENDING March 31, 202C

Published April 28, 2026

We deliver and secure every app.

F5 specializes in application delivery and security. Our solutions are backed by three decades of expertise to ensure that every app is fast, available, secure, and ready for the AI-era.

GAAP to non-GAAP presentation

In addition to financial information prepared in accordance with U.S. GAAP, this presentation also contains adjusted financial measures that we believe provide investors and management with supplemental information relating to operating performance and trends that facilitate comparisons between periods and with respect to projected information. These adjusted financial measures are non-GAAP and should be considered in addition to, but not as a substitute for, the information prepared in accordance with U.S. GAAP. We typically exclude certain GAAP items that management does not believe affect our basic operations and that do not meet the GAAP definition of unusual or non-recurring items. Other companies may define these measures in different ways. Further information relevant to the interpretation of adjusted financial measures, and reconciliations of these adjusted financial measures for historical data to the most comparable GAAP measures, may be found on F5's website at https://www.f5.com in the "Investor Relations" section. A reconciliation of non-GAAP guidance measures to corresponding GAAP measures is not available on a forward-looking basis due to the high variability and low visibility with respect to the charges which are excluded from thesenon-GAAP measures. For additional information, please see the appendix of this presentation.

Today's

speakers

François Locoh-Donou

Chairman, President, C CEO

Business Overview

Cooper Werner

EVP C Chief Financial Officer

Results C Business Outlook

François Locoh-Donou

GAAP s non-GAAP results

GAAP results

Q2FY2C

Q2FY25

Revenue

$812M

$731M

Gross profit

$661M

$590M

Gross margin

81.4%

80.7%

Operating profit

$179M

$159M

Operating margin

22.1%

21.7%

Tax rate

21.9%

15.0%

Net income

$148M

$146M

Non-GAAP results

Revenue

Q2FY2C

Q2FY25

$812M

$731M

Gross profit $680M

$607M

Gross margin 83.7%

83.1%

Operating profit $274M

$233M

Operating margin 33.8%

31.9%

Tax rate 21.5%

18.1%

Net income $223M

$201M

EPS $3.90 $3.42

EPS $2.58 $2.48

See appendix for GAAP to non-GAAP reconciliation

Q2FY2C performance highlights

Total revenue growth Y/Y

+2C%

Systems revenue growth Y/Y

+22%

Product revenue growth Y/Y

+17%

Software revenue growth Y/Y

Consecutive quarters of double-digit product revenue growth

+14%

Non-GAAP EPS growth Y/Y

See appendix for GAAP to non-GAAP reconciliation.

Our strong Q2 performance reflects growing hybrid multicloud demand

Digital resiliency C sovereignty

Enterprise AI

Hybrid multicloud adoption is increasing demand across F5's core markets

During Q2, we…

Captured robust international demand for digital sovereignty initiatives.

Converted hybrid multicloud adoption into meaningful systems and software growth.

Capitalized on heightened demand for best-in-class security solutions.

Built on AI momentum, with another standout quarter for AI wins.

We are raising our FY2C outlook

Previous outlook

+5% to C%

FY26 revenue growth Y/Y

Updated outlook

7% to 8%

FY26 revenue growth Y/Y

Three forces are reshaping how our customers operate

Hybrid multicloud adoption

Enterprises are building for flexibility across every environment

Threat landscape expansion

Attacks are increasingly

AI- and agentic-powered translating to higher volumes with greater variation

AI inference inflection

Organizations are connecting apps and APIs to AI models and inference calls are becoming a part of how applications run

Three forces are reshaping how our customers operate

Hybrid multicloud adoption

Threat landscape expansion

AI inference inflection

Workloads span:

On-premises Private cloud

Multiple public clouds

+90%

of enterprises run hybrid multicloud today across an average of 19 locations.

The era of checkbox security is over.

AI applications require

best-in-class security

to match both the volume and the

sophistication of AI-driven attacks.

of enterprises run inference themselves, using more than 7 models on average.

78%

AI agents moving into production, and enterprises are adapting apps for agent interaction.

Driving more compute, more data delivery, and more security to protect inference.

Hybrid multicloud adoption driving demand across multiple vectors

We are taking an already a strong refresh cycle and leveraging it into significant

opportunities for expansion, competitive displacement, and platform consolidation

New use case attach, expanding footprint and wallet share

Higher-capacity systems

Higher-performance systems

Refresh plus expansion

Unmatched breadth and depth across on-prem, software, and SaaS

Investment in hybrid multicloud translating into market share gains

Competitive displacement

Easier to operate at scale

Improving performance and security

F5 replacing point products with a unified approach

Platform consolidation

Hybrid multicloud adoption driving demand across multiple vectors

We are taking an already a strong refresh cycle and leveraging it into significant

Energy s Utilities

An energy and utilities provider and existing BIG-IP customer needed to secure APIs with better visibility and automation across data center, cloud and edge environments.

They selected Distributed Cloud Services to simplify their approach and standardize API protection across their full footprint with simpler management.

Platform consolidation

opportunities for expansion, competitive displacement, and platform consolidation

Healthcare Services

A large healthcare services organization

refreshed hundreds of legacy systems.

They expanded the scope to support an

AI-driven consumer engagement platform.

F5 became the control point for secure, low-latency traffic and data movement across applications, storage, and their GPU server environment.

F5 provided a more resilient foundation for both sensitive internal workloads and new AI interactions at scale.

Refresh plus expansion

Energy

F5 displaced a long-standing incumbent at a Fortune 100 energy company whose environment had hit scalability limits.

The customer needed a platform that could scale into cloud while maintaining strong on-premises performance.

F5 modernized traffic management and simplified operations, improving reliability and creating a clean path for long-term cloud adoption.

Competitive displacement

Three forces are reshaping how our customers operate

Hybrid multicloud adoption

Enterprises are building for flexibility across every environment

Threat landscape expansion

Attacks are increasingly

AI- and agentic-powered translating to higher volumes with greater variation

AI inference inflection

Organizations are connecting apps and APIs to AI models and inference calls are becoming a part of how applications run

Threat landscape expansion driving customer wins

We are capitalizing on heightened demand for best-in-class application and

API security solutions both on premises and across cloud environments

Software and managed service provider

Customer needed to standardize application and API security across a rapidly expanding hybrid multicloud estate built through acquisition.

They lacked a consistent way to enforce front-door and API protections across their multiple public cloud environments and on-premises.

With F5, they deployed a single policy and management layer with security enforced locally in every environment, supporting strict privacy, audit, and healthcare requirements. F5 enabled faster regional expansion with stronger security and improved data sovereignty alignment.

Three forces are reshaping how our customers operate

Hybrid multicloud adoption

Enterprises are building for flexibility across every environment

Threat landscape expansion

Attacks are increasingly

AI- and agentic-powered translating to higher volumes with greater variation

AI inference inflection

Organizations are connecting apps and APIs to AI models and inference calls are becoming a part of how applications run

AI inference inflection accelerating demand for application delivery and security across AI use cases

We are capturing AI demand via hybrid multicloud adoption and across three primary AI use

cases for F5, creating net new insertion points and new security requirements

F5's solution

F5 solves AI training and inference throughput bottlenecks traditional infrastructure cannot handle, deploying in front of data stores to ensure secure, high-throughput data ingestion for AI model training and inferencing.

The opportunity

Multimodal data growth pushing terabit-scale ingestion. Organizations need sustained, end-to-end, high-throughput data pipelines across network, storage, and application delivery.

AI data delivery

F5's solution

F5 safeguards AI applications, APIs, and models from abuse, data leaks, and attacks like prompt injection.

F5 also delivers real-time threat defense, red

teaming models, and robust guardrails.

The opportunity

Organizations moving quickly on generative AI. Security and compliance become bottlenecks to deployment and ROI.

Agentic systems raise the stakes, accessing and acting on sensitive data, driving demand for stronger runtime controls and guardrails.

AI runtime security

F5's solution

F5 optimizes traffic and GPU utilization both across and within AI factories, increasing token throughput, reducing time-to-first token, and lowering per-token costs.

The opportunity

As AI deployments scale, intelligent traffic distribution across models, clusters, and GPUs is critical, creating new demand for load balancing both across and within the AI factory.

AI factory load balancing

AI inference inflection accelerating demand for application delivery and security across AI use cases

We are capturing AI demand via hybrid multicloud adoption and across three primary AI use

Major manufacturer

A major manufacturer and existing BIG-IP customer needed to support operations and establish a digital twin of their manufacturing environment.

They deployed BIG-IP as the production traffic layer across their GPU server environment, improving availability and offloading encryption.

AI factory load balancing

cases for F5, creating net new insertion points and new security requirements

Global payments

A global payments company needed a more resilient way to move rapidly growing AI data between storage and compute as they scaled training and retrieval workloads.

F5 improved performance and resiliency while displacing both an in-house solution and a competitor, positioning us at the center of the customer's AI infrastructure strategy.

AI data delivery

Industrial automation

An industrial automation firm needed a scalable way to assess risk and govern a growing number of AI applications and models.

They chose F5 based on the depth of our red teaming insights and stronger integration with their existing security stack.

AI runtime security

We continue to innovate, creating greater value for customers

AI-powered capabilities in Distributed Cloud WAF

Replaces manual policy tuning with automated, outcome-based threat blocking

F5-trained model helps customers stay ahead of increasingly sophisticated AI-driven attacks that are growing in both speed and complexity

Agentic BOT Defense

Extends our industry-leading bot defense to autonomous AI agents, a new and

fast-growing category of traffic

Enables customers to confidently adopt agentic AI while ensuring only verified, trusted agents reach their applications

F5 AI Remediate

Closes the loop between our AI Red Team and AI Guardrails products

Collapses the path from vulnerability discovery to runtime protection from days

or weeks into minutes

F5 Insights for ADSP

Provides deeper visibility across application estates

Enables customers to identify and resolve issues faster, with less guess work

Cooper Werner

Revenue mix

$900

$800

$700

$731

$780 $810 $822

$411

$414

$410

$812

Year/Year change

+11%

Total revenue growth

Revenue $ in millions

$600

+12%

Y/Y

+2C%

$337

Y/Y

+1C%

$389

Y/Y

+11%

Y/Y

+22%

Y/Y

+22%

$500

$400

$300

Y/Y

$200 +3%

$100

Y/Y

+2%

$394

+1%

Y/Y

$392

+2%

Y/Y

$396

+4%

Y/Y

$412

$401

Q2FY25 Q3FY25 Q4FY25 Q1FY26 Q2FY26

product growth

consecutive quarters of double-digit product growth

Totals may not add due to rounding.

Global Services

Product revenue mix

$181

$179

$186

$218

$226

$158

$208

$184

$192

$229

$400

Revenue $ in millions

$300

$200

$100

$337

$389 $414 $410 $411

Year/Year change

Software

+2C%

Systems

Q2FY25 Q3FY25 Q4FY25 Q1FY26 Q2FY26

Totals may not add due to rounding.

Systems

Software revenue mix

$250

$200

Revenue $ in millions

$150

$100

$50

$208

$138

$192

$184

$158

$20

$165

$164

$19

$185

$27

$198

$23

$30

$229

Software subscription revenue growth Y/Y

of Q2FY26 total software revenue from subscriptions

Q2FY25 Q3FY25 Q4FY25 Q1FY26 Q2FY26

Subscription software revenue includes term subscriptions, both multi-year and annual, as well as

Totals may not add due to rounding. SaaS C managed services and utility-based revenue..

Recurring revenue (subscriptions, SaaS s managed services, and maintenance)

70%

$5C4M

Recurring

revenue

30%

Q2FY26

Recurring revenue includes term subscriptions, SaaS C managed services, utility-based revenue and the maintenance portion of our global services revenue.

Revenue contribution by geography

Y/Y growth by region Q2FY2C

50%

53%

55%

54%

57%

2C%

32%

2C%

29%

31%

18%

1C%

17%

19%

17%

+19%

Growth APAC

+22%

Growth EMEA

+3%

Growth Americas

Q2FY25 Q3FY25 Q4FY25 Q1FY26 Q2FY26

Totals may not add to 100% due to rounding.

Americas

Customer verticals as a % of product bookings

C4%

23%

13%

73%

19%

15%

20%

11%

24%

CC%

from U.S. Federal included

C9%

70%

Q2FY25 Q3FY25 Q4FY25 Q1FY26 Q2FY26

Totals may not add to 100% due to rounding.

Enterprise

Non-GAAP gross and operating margins

Non-GAAP gross margin Non-GAAP operating margin

37.0%

38.2%

34.3%

33.8%

31.9%

90.0% 40.0%

83.1%

84.3%

83.8%

83.7%

80.0% 30.0%

% of revenue

70.0% 20.0%

60.0% 10.0%

Non-GAAP net income and EPS

EPS reflects 21.5% Q2FY26 and 18.1% Q2FY25 non-GAAP effective tax rate

Non-GAAP net income Non-GAAP EPS

$4.16

$4.39

$4.45

Y/Y

$3.90

$3.42

$5.00

+14%

$300

$ in millions

$200

$257 $259

+11%

$243

$223

$201

Y/Y

$4.00

$3.00

$2.00

$100

$1.00

$0 $0.00

Cash flow from operations and free cash flow

Cash flow from operations Free cash flow

$400

$300

$ in millions

$200

$3CC

$400

$300

$200

$348

$274

$24C

$192

$149

$282

$257

$208

$159

$100 $100

$0 $0

Cash and investments

$1,750

$1,500

$1,250

$1,272

$1,442

$1,360

$1,218

$1,464

$ in millions

$1,000

$750

$500

$250

Q2FY25 Q3FY25 Q4FY25 Q1FY26 Q2FY26

Deferred revenue

$1,923

$1,957

$1,999

$2,062

$2,118

$2,500

$2,000

$1,500

+10%

Y/Y

Key insights

Deferred revenue consists predominantly of global services maintenance renewals and also includes term-based software subscriptions.

$ in millions

$1,000

$500

Q2FY25 Q3FY25 Q4FY25 Q1FY26 Q2FY26

We are committed to returning cash to shareholders via share repurchases

Share repurchases ($ in millions) 80%

Key insights

$500

repurchases

$400

$350

$600

$500

$400

$300

$200

$100

of FY26 YTD free cash flow* used toward

We repurchased $100 million in FFIV shares during Q2FY26.

We have used 80% of our $497 million FY26 YTD free cash flow* for share repurchases.

We are committed to using at least 50% of our annual free cash flow for share repurchases.

As of March 31, 2026, there was

$522 million remaining under our authorized stock repurchase program.

FY22 FY23 FY24 FY25 FY26 YTD

*Free cash flow defined as cash flow from operations less capital expenditures

Committed buyback level FY22 - FY25

Cooper Werner

Three forces are reshaping how our customers operate

Hybrid multicloud adoption

Enterprises are building for flexibility across every environment

Threat landscape expansion

Attacks are increasingly

AI- and agentic-powered translating to higher volumes with greater variation

AI inference inflection

Organizations are connecting apps and APIs to AI models and inference calls are becoming a part of how applications run

Our Q3FY2C outlook

Q3FY2C outlook

Total revenue $820 to $840M

Non-GAAP gross margin 82.5% to 83.5%

Non-GAAP operating expenses $406 to $418M

Share-based compensation $68 to $70M

Non-GAAP EPS $3.91 to $4.03

Our updated FY2C outlook

Total revenue

FY25A

FY2C outlook

$3.1B

10% growth

7% to 8% growth

(from 5% to 6% growth previously)

Non-GAAP gross margin

83.6%

82.5% to 83.5%

Non-GAAP operating margin

35.2%

34% to 35%

Effective non-GAAP tax rate

17.8%

20% to 21%

(from 21% to 22% previously)

Non-GAAP EPS

$15.81

18% growth

$1C.25 to $1C.55

(from $15.65 to $16.05 previously)

Capital return as % of annual free cash flow*

55%

At least 50% of annual FCF*

*Free cash flow (FCF) defined as cash flow from operations less capital expenditures

François Locoh-Donou

Three forces are reshaping how our customers operate

Hybrid multicloud adoption

Enterprises are building for flexibility across every environment

Threat landscape expansion

Attacks are increasingly

AI- and agentic-powered translating to higher volumes with greater variation

AI inference inflection

Organizations are connecting apps and APIs to AI models and inference calls are becoming a part of how applications run

Enterprises are consolidating around fewer, more capable platforms

Complete delivery and security

for every app

Deployable anywhere and in any form factor

AI-enhanced operations with unified console cross NetOps, SecOps, DevOps and PlatOps

ADSP open partner ecosystem

Disclaimer

F5 Inc. published this content on April 28, 2026, and is solely responsible for the information contained herein. Distributed via Public Technologies (PUBT), unedited and unaltered, on April 28, 2026 at 21:53 UTC.