F5 (FFIV) Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference 2026 summary

Industry trends and AI opportunity

• Hybrid/multi-cloud is used by 90% of organizations, spanning an average of 22 environments; application-layer attacks rose 140% YoY.

• AI workloads are increasing indirect ADC demand through greater bandwidth and capacity needs; direct opportunities include data delivery, runtime security and AI factory load balancing.

• AI data delivery is the most mature direct use case; AI factory load balancing is the most nascent and uses BIG-IP capabilities on NVIDIA DPUs.

• Direct AI use cases generated roughly $50 million of bookings in H1; indirect demand was a major systems growth driver, while financial institutions and government agencies showed early AI security momentum.

Demand and systems refresh

• Pipeline health and creation rates remained strong; digital sovereignty is driving data center capacity investment in Europe and Asia-Pacific, including for workloads retained on-premise.

• Customers are expanding capacity during refresh cycles to support workload growth, including AI demand, and are moving to higher-performance appliance tiers.

• iSeries software support ends in Q2 FY2027; refresh demand is accelerating ahead of the date, with a demand surge expected near the deadline followed by a long tail.

• Competitive takeouts are benefiting from continued systems and software innovation, competitors’ aggressive pricing, stronger support and more flexible commercial models.

Software and platform adoption

• Software growth outlook is mid-single-digit for FY2026 and double-digit for FY2027; FY2027 growth is expected to be more back-end weighted due to renewal timing.

• Renewal expansion is supported by higher customer consumption and broader portfolio adoption; SaaS ARR is expected to grow in FY2026, with that growth contributing in FY2027.

• Existing-customer expansion and new use cases are expected to drive most software growth; new logos continue, but most revenue comes from current customers.

• Distributed Cloud serves over 1,700 customers; adoption among the top 1,000 reached 33%, up from 24% a year earlier, and customers using multiple modalities grow 25% faster.