F5 Q4 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Quartr
Provided by Quartr
October 28, 2024

There are 15 speakers on the call.

Operator

Good afternoon, and welcome to the F5's 4th Quarter Fiscal 20 24 Financial Results Conference Call. Also, today's conference is being recorded. If anyone has any objections, please disconnect at this time. I'll now turn the call over to Ms. Susanna Doolong.

Operator

Ma'am, you may begin.

Speaker 1

Hello, and welcome. I'm Suzanne DuLong, F5's Vice President of Investor Relations. We're here with you today to discuss our Q4 fiscal year 2024 financial results. Francois Loco De Nous, F5's President and CEO Frank Peltzer, F5's Executive Vice President and CFO and Cooper Werner, our SVP of Finance and incoming CFO, will be making prepared remarks on today's call. Other members of the F5 executive team are also here to answer questions during the Q and A session.

Speaker 1

A copy of today's press release is available on our website at f5.com, or an archived version of today's audio will be available through January 27, 2025. We will post the slide deck accompanying today's webcast to our IR site at the conclusion of our call. To access the replay of today's webcast by phone, dial 877-660-6853 or 201-612-7415 and use meeting ID 1374-9373. The telephonic replay will be available through midnight Pacific Time, October 29, 2024. For additional information or follow-up questions, please reach out to me directly at s.dulongf5.com.

Speaker 1

Our discussion today will contain forward looking statements, which include words such as believe, anticipate, expect and target. These forward looking statements involve uncertainties and risks that may cause our actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by these statements. We have summarized factors that may affect our results in the press release announcing the financial results and in detail in our SEC filings. In addition, we will reference non GAAP metrics during today's discussion. Please see our full GAAP to non GAAP reconciliation in today's press release and in the appendix of our earnings slide deck.

Speaker 1

Please note that F5 has no duty to update any information presented in this call. During today's call, Francois will speak to our Q4 highlights, our strategy and growth opportunities and our expectations for FY 'twenty five. Frank will then review the details of our Q4 and FY 'twenty four results, and Cooper will speak to our outlook for FY 'twenty five. I will now turn the call over to Francois.

Speaker 2

Thank you, Suzanne, and hello, everyone. We delivered a record Q4 across a number of metrics, including $747,000,000 in revenues, which is up 6% year over year and above the high end of our guidance range. Q4's top line growth is the result of strong software performance, including 19% software revenue growth. Just as importantly, we delivered Q4 non GAAP EPS of $3.67 a beat of $0.17 above the top end of our guidance range, highlighting our improving operating margins in addition to top line strength. Q4 was the cap to a fiscal year during which the F5 team outperformed our plan even with a challenging macro backdrop to start the year.

Speaker 2

In FY 2024, we delivered revenue at the top end of our guidance. We also outperformed our initial expectations for software revenue, delivering 11% software growth compared to FY2023. And we demonstrated continued operating discipline, generating 14% non GAAP EPS growth for the year. These results speak to the power of our solutions, the strength of our operating model and the resilience of our business. In a relatively short period of time, we have substantially reshaped F5 from a hardware centric single product company into a security and software leader in today's hybrid multi cloud world.

Speaker 2

Our transformation has redefined F5's world beyond the data center, increasing our value to customers, diversifying our revenue and expanding our total addressable market. The change is evident in several important metrics. In FY 2017, software contributed $122,000,000 or just 13% of our product revenue. Today, software is $735,000,000 58 percent of our product revenue. In FY 2017, subscriptions represented just $24,000,000 or 20 percent of our software revenue.

Speaker 2

Today, they total $624,000,000 85 percent of our software revenue. And finally, in FY 2017, our recurring revenue was $1,100,000,000 or 52% of our total revenue. And today, it is $2,100,000,000 76% of our total revenue. The growing percentage of our business is coming from existing software customers, providing us with very good visibility to a large portion of our revenue for the coming year. As a result of our large software renewal opportunity, improving systems demand trends and our growing pipeline, we expect revenue growth to accelerate in FY 2025.

Speaker 2

We expect FY 2025 revenue growth in a range of 4% to 5% from FY 2024. This is ahead of the expectations we outlined when we first shared our FY 2025 outlook a year ago. In addition to top line growth, we expect to drive continued operating margin leverage. As a result, we expect to deliver 5% to 7% earnings growth in FY 2025. On a tax neutral basis to FY 2024, the midpoint of this range reflects 10% EPS growth.

Speaker 2

Beyond the visibility we have into our recurring revenue and pipeline for FY 2025, we remain confident in F5's long term growth prospects for several reasons. These include F5's alignment with robust and sustainable industry trends and the effectiveness of our go to market strategies. I will speak first to the industry trends. 1st, hybrid multi cloud environments are now the norm and will remain so. According to our latest state of application strategy report, nearly 90% of customers are operating across multiple environments with the benefits of choice clearly outweighing the challenges of managing apps across different deployment models.

Speaker 2

2nd, applications and the APIs that connect them are becoming increasingly distributed, which means traditional single environment solutions are not capable of managing and securing them. 3rd, the number of application instances continues to grow. In fact, it is projected to grow from roughly 2,000,000,000 today to 6,000,000,000 by 2029. 4th, APIs are rapidly proliferating, creating new challenges and risks for application owners. A recent F5 survey found that nearly 1 third of customer facing APIs lack fundamental protection.

Speaker 2

5th, applications and APIs require more security and delivery services today than they used to. In 2016, organizations deployed a minimum of 2 app services to ensure an app remained performant and secure. Today, that number has grown to 13 on average and 27 in total. And finally, the emergence and eventual widespread adoption of AI and AI powered applications will accelerate and further complicate all of these trends, while also leading to new demands related to data ingestion and optimization of GPU environments. Individually, these dynamics are driving new complexity, cost and security risks for customers.

Speaker 2

The fact that they are all happening simultaneously is creating significant challenges for the IT teams managing them. You have heard us describe the confluence of these dynamics as the ball of fire and we continue to believe that F5 is uniquely positioned to address it. The powerful industry dynamics I just outlined are contributing to our ability to drive growth through our land, expand and renew go to market motions.

Speaker 3

We are landing new customers by winning competitive entry opportunities, targeting competitive takeouts and leveraging and expanding our strong channel relationships. Our biggest growth opportunity, however, comes from the potential to expand our footprint and wallet share across our base of approximately 20,000 customers. At times, this means expanding as an app's utilization grows over time. At others, it means leveraging the synergies and power of F5's platform to create a strong unified security posture, simplify multi cloud complexity or streamline operations.

Speaker 2

The power of this expand motion is evident in the early success of our F5 distributed cloud services. We launched this platform in February of 2022 and now have more than 800 customers on it, 1 third of whom are new customers to F5. And finally, we are growing as we successfully renew and expand with existing customers. This motion has been a powerful driver for our business and is a testament to the value F5 delivers. Our sales and customer success teams are focused on ensuring it remains so.

Speaker 2

The relative success of these motions is further evidence of F5's differentiated ability to tame the ball of fire for our customers. We do this across 3 vectors, app and API security, simplification and standardization and automation. 1st, app and API security. FI delivers the most effective and comprehensive app and API security platform in the industry. We enable our customers to consolidate point products targeting specific threats onto a single integrated platform with a suite of best in class capabilities.

Speaker 2

As an example, during Q4, a global integrated energy company selected F5 distributed cloud services, web application firewall and API protection to enhance and streamline its multi cloud application security across 2 major public cloud platforms. Previously, the customer had been running 2 distinct cloud native WAF and API gateway solutions. The customer selected F5 Distributed Cloud Services following a comprehensive evaluation, which included 2 competitive offerings. F5 won based on its superior ability to provide a unified security posture, effectively defending against advanced threats and delivering comprehensive API security. 2nd, simplification.

Speaker 2

F5 enables the hybrid multi cloud flexibility our customers' businesses demand with the simplicity their IT operations require. Only F5 delivers solutions that extend across public clouds to the edge and customers on premises environments. Our solutions simplify connecting desperate infrastructure environments and the applications deployed in and across them. As an example, during Q4, F5 Distributed Cloud Services was selected by the largest mobile provider in a Southeast Asian country to simplify a complex IT challenge. Following a merger with another large mobile provider, the customer faced complications arising from overlapping IP addresses between their core business applications and retail branches.

Speaker 2

Overlapping IP addresses can cause connectivity issues and operational inefficiencies, especially when different systems and networks emerged. F5's multi cloud networking technology provided virtual IPs and translation services, which allowed the new entity to easily manage IP conflicts across 500 branches.

Speaker 3

And

Speaker 2

3rd, standardization and automation. F5 solutions enable more cost effective and scalable IT operations. We streamline customers' operations with consistent policies, comprehensive automation and rich analytics. This enables customers to consolidate vendors and tool sets, rationalize operational silos and automate lifecycle management of their on premises deployments. As an example, during Q4, a large Australia based multinational bank and financial services organization selected F5 to reduce operational overhead and to refresh, consolidate and modernize its application infrastructure.

Speaker 2

Automation enabled by F5 Velos hardware and software eliminated tens of thousands of lines of hard to maintain custom code. F5 Automation is also enabling application self-service, streamlined certificate management and hit less upgrades. The new S5 enabled practices have improved security and reliability of the customers' applications, while eliminating massive amounts of manual processes and labor. These three points of strong differentiation combined with the well established role F5 plays embedded in the flow of application traffic enables us to address the ball of fire for our customers in ways our competitors cannot. Before I pass the call to Frank, as I have the last several quarters, I will speak to the opportunity we see emerging with AI use cases.

Speaker 2

As we discussed earlier this year, 2024 was the year of AI infrastructure build outs in preparation for AI apps. AI driven use cases already are driving significant investment and new application and infrastructure requirements across computes, storage and networking layers. In networking specifically, AI factories have extremely high data and throughput demands. F5's initial opportunities in AI are concentrated on 3 networking use cases. The first is AI data ingestion requiring high performance traffic management for AI model training and retrieval augmented generation or RAG.

Speaker 2

Over the last several quarters, we have highlighted customers leveraging F5's industry leading traffic management capabilities to optimize data ingestion. During Q4, we had another example of a customer choosing F5 for data ingestion, A global conglomerate with businesses across IT, Automotive, Media and Financial Services chose F5 to optimize data ingest for its AI model training. The customer's AI factories are collecting information and telemetry to power its connected vehicle business. In this deployment, F5 is providing high performance load balancing between the customer's enterprise storage clusters and their AI factories. The second AI use case we are focused on is AI factory load balancing, where we are optimizing the performance and scalability of AI factories with advanced traffic management.

Speaker 2

Just last week, we announced our exciting collaboration with NVIDIA to enable high performance software ADC on AI infrastructure. There are 2 important pieces of this news. First, we have enabled BIG IP NEXT to run-in Kubernetes. Enterprises and service providers building AI factories are driving strong demand for advanced semiconductors such as GPUs. AI workloads that run within this infrastructure are running on Kubernetes.

Speaker 2

F5 BIG IP NEXT for Kubernetes brings our market leading networking, traffic management and security capabilities to these modern environments. 2nd, we partnered with NVIDIA to ensure that BIG IP NEXT for Kubernetes works seamlessly with NVIDIA BlueField 3 DPUs. When combined with BIG IP NEXT for Kubernetes, these DPUs effectively become AI accelerators, increasing the performance and security of training and inference workloads, delivering superior AI driven customer experiences. The first two AI use cases I have just highlighted are ADC opportunities, a market where we have been the leader for the last 2 decades. The 3rd AI use case we are focused on leverages web application firewall and API protection or WAP for secure AI inferencing.

Speaker 2

We have deployments supporting this use case today and expect it will become more prevalent as enterprises begin to leverage AI inferencing at scale over the next 18 to 24 months. As you can see with these examples, F5 is not just adapting to the AI revolution, we are actively shaping it, providing the critical infrastructure that enables our customers to harness the full potential of AI safely and efficiently. Our sales, engineering and product teams have identified multiple additional AI use cases where F5 is likely to have a significant role to play. In addition, we continue to implement generative AI solutions across our portfolio, leveraging AI to help customers with their policies and configurations. To conclude, we are confident that F5 is entering fiscal year 2025 with an industry leading converged portfolio tightly aligned with significant industry trends and customer demand.

Speaker 2

Because of our unmatched Layer 4 through 7 functionality and expertise, we are unique in our ability to address escalating application and API complexity. We bring consistent industry leading security. We simplify hybrid multi cloud complexity and we streamline operations with standardization and automation. Now I will turn the call to Frank. Frank?

Speaker 4

Thank you, Francois, and good afternoon, everyone. I will review our Q4 and FY 'twenty four results before I pass the call to Cooper, who will elaborate on our Q1 and full year FY 'twenty five outlook. We delivered strong Q4 revenue of $747,000,000 with a mix of 52 percent global services and 48 percent product revenue. Global service revenue of $388,000,000 grew 2% in line with our expectations. Product revenue totaled $358,000,000 up 10% year over year due to strong software growth.

Speaker 4

Systems revenue totaled $130,000,000 down 3% year over year. I will note that demand for systems improved over the course of the quarter, which Cooper will speak to more when discussing our FY 'twenty five outlook. Software revenue totaled $228,000,000 representing 19% growth year over year. Our solid execution and renewals drove subscription based software revenue of $204,000,000 or 89 percent of total software revenue, growing 23% year over year. Rounding out our software revenue, perpetual license software contributed $24,000,000 As Francois mentioned, the percentage of our revenue that is recurring continues to grow, thereby enhancing our revenue visibility.

Speaker 4

During Q4, 78% of our total revenue came from a combination of subscription based revenue and the maintenance portion of our global services revenue. This is up from 76% a year ago. Shifting to revenue distribution by region. Revenue from the Americas grew 9% year over year, representing 58% of total revenue. EMEA delivered a strong quarter with 4% growth, representing 26% of revenue.

Speaker 4

Meanwhile, APAC declined 3%, representing 16% of revenue. Looking at our major verticals, enterprise customers delivered a very strong quarter, representing 72% of Q4 product bookings. Government customers represented 18% of product bookings, including 8% from U. S. Federal.

Speaker 4

Finally, service providers represented 10% of Q4 product bookings. Our Q4 operating results were strong, reflecting our continued operating efficiency improvements. GAAP gross margin was 80.8%. Non GAAP gross margin was 83%. Our GAAP operating expenses were $412,000,000 Our non GAAP operating expenses were $363,000,000 Our GAAP operating margin was 25.6 percent Our non GAAP operating margin was 34.4 percent Our GAAP effective tax rate for the quarter was 18.8 percent Our non GAAP effective tax rate was 19.5%.

Speaker 4

Our GAAP net income for the quarter was $165,000,000 or $2.80 per share. Our non GAAP net income was $217,000,000 or $3.67 per share. I will now turn to cash flow and balance sheet metrics, all of which remain very strong. We generated $247,000,000 in cash flow from operations in Q4 on strong net income and cash collections in the quarter. CapEx was $6,000,000 DSO for the quarter was 47 days.

Speaker 4

Cash and investments totaled approximately $1,080,000,000 at quarter end. Deferred revenue was $1,800,000,000 up 1% from a year ago period. In Q4, we repurchased $100,000,000 worth of F5 shares at an average price of $206 per share. Over FY 'twenty four, we repurchased $500,000,000 worth of F5 shares at an average price of $177 per share. Our share repurchases represented 66 percent of our annual free cash flow in FY 2024, exceeding our commitment to use at least 50% of our free cash flow for this purpose.

Speaker 4

As announced in the earnings release, our Board of Directors has authorized an additional $1,000,000,000 for our common stock repurchase program. This new authorization is incremental to the $422,000,000 remaining in the existing program and as of today brings the total available under the authorized stock repurchase program to $1,400,000,000 Finally, we ended the quarter with approximately 6,560 employees. I will now recap our FY 'twenty four results. Our FY 'twenty four revenue of $2,820,000,000 was up slightly from FY 'twenty three and at the top end of our initial revenue guidance for the year. These results speak to the strength of our business, particularly given the revenue growth headwind we faced in FY2024 due to the elevated backlog fulfillment in FY2023.

Speaker 4

Global Services revenue grew 4% to $1,540,000,000 representing 55 percent of total revenue for the year. Product revenue representing 45% of revenue declined 5% year over year. Within product revenue, our FY 2024 systems revenue totaled 537,000,000 dollars While this represents a decline of 20% compared to FY 'twenty three, our underlying systems bookings grew year over year. Software revenue of $735,000,000 grew 11% compared to FY 'twenty three. This is up from our initial expectation of flat to modest growth as a result of continued strong renewals performance in addition to a stronger new business trend compared to FY2023.

Speaker 4

Software represented 58% of our FY2024 product revenue and software subscriptions represented 85% of our FY 2024 software revenue. Let's take a closer look at the components of our annual software revenue. Our software revenue is comprised of 3 elements: 1, SaaS and managed services 2, term based subscriptions and 3, perpetual software licenses. I'll expand on each of these starting from the top down. Our SaaS and managed services, which is the portion of our software recognized ratably over the duration of the subscription term, delivered $193,000,000 in revenue in FY 2024, a decline of 5% year over year, largely as a result of planned legacy offering retirements and transitions.

Speaker 4

FY 2024 SaaS and Managed Services annualized recurring revenue or ARR of $182,000,000 is down from $198,000,000 in FY2023, primarily as a result of planned churn related to retiring legacy offerings offset by continued growth in our core SaaS and managed services offerings. I'll speak first to our legacy offerings represented by the gray bar in our accompanying charts. There are two portions of our legacy offerings. The first is discontinued SaaS and managed service offerings. The second is Silverline managed services, which we continue to work to transition to F5 distributed cloud services.

Speaker 4

The vast majority of the legacy AR decline from FY2023 to FY2024 is related to planned churn associated with discontinued offerings. During FY2024, we transitioned a modest amount of Silverline managed services to F5 Distributed Cloud Services. We noted last year that the Silverline transition would be back end weighted over the course of FY 2024 and FY 2025. The green portion of the bar represents our core SaaS and managed services, which includes F5 Distributed Cloud Services, our high end bot defense point solutions and our recently launched NGINX as a service offering. F5 Distributed Cloud Service delivered strong growth off a relatively small base, offset by churn within our high end bot defense solution.

Speaker 4

The second portion of our software revenue comes from term based subscriptions, which are recognized largely upfront as product revenue with a portion deferred and recognized ratably as global services revenue over the subscription term. These include new renewal and TruForward revenue for both annual and multiyear subscriptions of BIG IP and NGINX. In FY 2024, revenue from term based subscriptions contributed $430,000,000 to our software revenue, up twenty 2% year over year as a result of continued strong renewals and expansion performance as well as growth in new software business compared to FY2023. The 3rd and final component of our software revenue is perpetual software licenses, which contributed $112,000,000 in software revenue, up 3% year over year. Several years ago, we began breaking out our security related revenue annually.

Speaker 4

This year, our total security revenue, which includes standalone security, attached security and security related to maintenance revenue was approximately $1,100,000,000 or 41 percent of total revenue. Standalone security revenue totaled $460,000,000 representing 36% of product revenue. I will now turn to our FY 'twenty four operating performance. GAAP gross margin in FY 'twenty four was 80.2%. Non GAAP gross margin was 82.8%, up 132 basis points from FY 'twenty three.

Speaker 4

Our GAAP operating margin for FY2024 was 23.4 percent and our non GAAP operating margin was 33.6%, up 337 basis points from FY2023 as a result of continued operating discipline. Our GAAP effective tax rate for the year was 18.5%. Our non GAAP effective tax rate for the year was 19.2%. GAAP net income for FY2024 was $567,000,000 or $9.55 per share. Non GAAP net income was $794,000,000 or $13.37 per share, representing growth of 14.3% over FY 'twenty three.

Speaker 5

I will now pass the call to Cooper to speak on our outlook. Cooper? Thanks, Frank, and hello, everyone. Francois outlined our FY 2025 outlook at the start of the call. I'll recap it now with some additional color.

Speaker 5

I will also provide our outlook for Q1. With the exception of revenue, my guidance comments reference non GAAP metrics. I'll start with FY 2025. First, our FY 2025 outlook assumes continued macro stability, but does not assume a significant improvement to the macro environment. It also does not assume substantial growth in our customers' IT budgets.

Speaker 5

In FY 2025, we expect to deliver 4% to 5% revenue growth over FY 2024. Similar to FY 2024, we anticipate our FY 2025 revenue will be relatively back end weighted. We expect low single digit revenue growth across the first half of the year and mid single digit revenue growth in the second half. Our stronger second half expectations are based on the visibility we have to the sizable renewal base coming up during that period and our consistently strong renewal performance over time. Taking a closer look at the components of FY 2025 revenue, I'll start with software.

Speaker 5

Our expectation for FY 2025 software revenue has improved from our initial view a year ago. At the beginning of our fiscal year 2024, we guided to flat to modest software growth in FY 2024 and shared our expectation that software would grow by double digits from that level in FY 2025. Against the much improved 11% software growth outcome in FY 2024, we now expect FY 2025 software to grow in the upper single digits year over year. Looking at systems revenue. As Frank referenced in his comments related to Q4, we have recently seen an improvement in systems demand as customers begin to refresh older states and we drive momentum from competitive takeout opportunities.

Speaker 5

As a result, we expect systems revenue will grow mid single digits in FY 2025. And finally, we expect global services revenue will grow low single digits in FY 2025. From an operating perspective, we expect to deliver gross margin improvements resulting in FY 2025 non GAAP gross margin in a range of 83% to 84%. We also expect to drive continued operating expense discipline resulting in FY 2025 non GAAP operating margin of approximately 35%. Seasonally, we expect operating margin in the low 30% range for the first half of FY 2025, moving to the upper 30s in the second half.

Speaker 5

We expect our typical seasonal low for operating margin in Q2, reflecting the combination of payroll tax resets and costs associated with a large customer event in February. We expect our FY 2025 non GAAP effective tax rate will be in a range of 21% to 23%. We expect to deliver 5% to 7% non GAAP earnings growth. On a tax neutral basis to FY 2024, the midpoint of this range reflects 10% EPS growth year over year. Finally, we intend to continue to use at least 50% of our annual free cash flow towards share repurchases in FY 2025.

Speaker 5

I will now speak to our outlook for Q1 of FY 2025. We expect Q1 revenue in the range of $705,000,000 to $725,000,000 We expect non GAAP gross margin of approximately 83%. We estimate Q1 non GAAP operating expenses of $343,000,000 to $355,000,000 We expect Q1 share based compensation expense of approximately $55,000,000 to $57,000,000 We anticipate Q1 non GAAP EPS in a range of $3.29 to $3.41 per share. With that, I'll pass the call back to Francois.

Speaker 2

Thank you, Cooper. Before we conclude, I will provide an update on our executive team. I am pleased to announce that Kunal Anand will lead our product organization as Chief Innovation Officer. After a thorough search that included interviews with leaders from across our industry, it was clear that Kunal had both the experience and perspective required for the role. Through his prior experience leading the technical and security teams at Imperva, Kunal brings deep domain expertise and technical knowledge across cloud, security, networking, SaaS and AI.

Speaker 2

His entrepreneurial mindset will be a tremendous asset as we execute the next phase of our portfolio roadmap, and I am excited to work with him in his new role. I will also take this opportunity to express my sincere and heartfelt thanks to Frank for his leadership during his time at F5. For the record, I want to share with you all that Frank informed me recently when I asked how I could have been a better boss that his real name is Frank, not Frank. In all seriousness, Frank, you have been a true partner and friend and I cannot thank you enough for the impact you have had on this team and our business. And Cooper, I am looking forward to working with you more closely in your new role as CFO.

Speaker 2

As we enter FY 2025, we see a more stable environment overall. Importantly, customers no longer have architectural ambiguity. Most believe that hybrid multi cloud architectures will be the norm for the foreseeable future in part because they enable organizations to choose the best environment for each application. This is good news for F5 because it means customers must also select partners capable of taming the inherent complexities, risks and costs that come with the benefits of hybrid multi cloud architectures. We have firmly entered the era of AI and hybrid multi cloud, which will characterize the next decade of our industry.

Speaker 2

F5 is emerging as an important player in this new era. We are developing robust SaaS capabilities and presence and establishing ourselves as an emerging leader in the cloud WAP market. Our unique strength lies in our ability to secure any app, anywhere. F5 has an outsized impact on the world. This year alone, we worked with 2,000 partners across 138 countries to deliver extraordinary experiences for more than 20,000 S5 customers.

Speaker 2

Together with those customers, we secured, delivered and optimized millions of apps and APIs that power the world. Our work allows billions of people to live their lives day in and day out. People across the globe can shop, bank, fly, drive and live more securely, thanks to F5. Last quarter alone, distributed cloud services blocked more than 2,300,000,000 attacks. I offer my humble and deep thanks to our employees, partners, customers and shareholders.

Speaker 2

It is truly an honor and a privilege to lead a company that plays such an important part in building a better digital world. Operator, please open the call to questions.

Operator

Thank you. We will now be conducting a question and answer session. Our first question comes from the line of Shamek Chatterjee with JPMorgan. Please proceed with your question.

Speaker 6

Thanks for taking my question and congrats on the strong results here. I guess I had a couple of questions on software. So maybe just to start off here, Francois, Frank, very strong results in software in the quarter. Just wondering if you can sort of detail out for us a bit more in terms of the composition of that between sort of did the outperformance really come from renewals or was it more true ups? Where did you see sort of the strength coming in from?

Speaker 6

Or anything that you can parse out in terms of what you're hearing from the enterprises in driving some of that upside that you saw in the quarter? And then I have a follow-up. Thank you.

Speaker 7

Sure, Suneet. Thanks so much. It's Frank. And let me start with that one and see if

Speaker 3

Cooper or Francois has anything to add. So in the quarter,

Speaker 7

as you know, when we talked about the to add.

Speaker 3

So in the quarter, as

Speaker 7

you know, when we talked about our updated guidance when we were sitting with you in July and what we expect to do for the quarter or for the full year would sort of imply the specific number. We actually obviously outperformed that number. And it came from really 2 strong factors. 1, the expansion that we saw within the existing renewal base of customers as they were coming up for their next generation of contracts, It was quite impressive kind of across the board and we had a few big ones within there. And the second was actually new business activity from projects that have been delayed once people had gotten through their architectural design, they were ready to move forward on some of their software engagements.

Speaker 7

And that was a factor at the beginning of the year that we did not expect to necessarily see in FY 2024, which we did end up seeing in the back half, particularly in Q4. So both of those were really great see and resulted in a strong upside in software for the quarter and obviously improved our outlook for FY 2025.

Speaker 8

Yes. And I'll add, this is Cooper. On the expansion revenue opportunity, we've got really good visibility as to the consumption that our customers have within some of these multiyear contracts. And so that came through as expected. But what we also see was maybe a little bit better performance in terms of consuming new offerings when they did renew those agreements.

Speaker 8

And so there's kind of 2 different forms of expansion that we see. And so the consumption based expansion really kind of landed in line with our expectations. And then we saw some incremental opportunity as customers are consuming more of the portfolio in their 2nd generation multiyear subscriptions.

Speaker 6

Got it. And for my follow-up, maybe this is more of a broader question, just given the guide that you outlined for software where you're sort of calling for a high single digit growth after the strong growth you had in fiscal 'twenty four here. I mean the broader perception, I think, still remains that enterprises are pretty early in their AI adoption cycle. Why just I wanted to understand the sort of thinking in terms of software growth deserating a bit, particularly in terms of how to think about how much conservatism is in that number versus should we be really thinking of a deseration this early in the cycle if you really lever to sort of the enterprises and their investment cycle around AI? Thank you.

Speaker 3

This is Samik. I'll take this one. Look, I'll come to AI in a moment, but the guidance we're giving here is really driven by the macro trend of enterprises adopting a hybrid and multi cloud posture. And so if you pull way off, I mean, at the time where everybody thought that all applications will go into a single public cloud, we saw a number of companies optimize for a world where all apps would be in the cloud and where all apps would consume app security and delivery services as fast. We at a time, we did not optimize for that world.

Speaker 3

We optimized for a world that would be hybrid and multi cloud. And today, that's what we're seeing. We're seeing that more than 90% of our customers are in hybrid and multi cloud environment. And that's generating a number of tailwinds that are serving the business that we have optimized for. Specifically, we're seeing a lot of customers do automation on prem to get the benefits of the cloud in their private cloud environment.

Speaker 3

We're seeing applications becoming increasingly distributed over multiple infrastructure environments. We're seeing a large proliferation of APIs that need to be secured. We're seeing more need for security services for each application. And all of these aspects of implementing hybrid and multi cloud architectures are benefiting S5 and that is why we're seeing outperformance in the consumption of existing software agreements as well as customers starting new software projects with us. It's also having a positive impact.

Speaker 3

As you saw, we're saying that our hardware will actually grow next year. And this is also in part because customers are comfortable with the hybrid multi cloud architectures. They're comfortable that they will be in their data centers for the foreseeable future. And so any hesitation that existed in the past around refreshing existing hardware estate, we have seen any of that hesitation fade away with customers having full confidence in their current architectures.

Speaker 6

Sanjay, any comments on sort of why should there be an acceleration particularly with AI still being a major driver of investment for the enterprises?

Speaker 3

So in terms of our guidance for next year, it's early in the year and we'll see how the year plays out. But of course, we want to remain prudent with our guidance overall. AI, we are in the very early days of deployments of AI, but we're seeing opportunities for F5 both in hardware and in software. And the positive news on that is these opportunities are new insertion points for F5. So if you step back, F5 over the last 2 decades has really mastered the expertise of securing and delivering a critical network and application traffic across data centers and clouds.

Speaker 3

It turns out that that expertise in managing, securing and optimizing critical application traffic is very much needed for AI workloads where there is significant movement of data between the device and storage tiers or between storage tiers and GPU clusters. And so we are finding insertion points for those early companies that are building AI factories. We are finding insertion points with our big IT hardware platform fronting some of these storage tiers or sitting between storage tiers and GPU clusters. It's early days in terms of the volume of deals because at the moment there are very few companies doing that, but we will see how that opportunity develops over time. And we are also seeing opportunities potentially in software inside of these GPU clusters.

Speaker 3

And the partnership we just announced with NVIDIA is a manifestation of that opportunity of marrying our software with the world's most advanced semiconductor technology to create AI factories that scale better and more efficiently for customers. So we see opportunities in AI. That being said, we have not really baked very significant contribution from AI in our FY 'twenty five guidance because our current belief system is that these opportunities will develop over time and it's more of a 2026 and beyond where we would see meaningful revenue contribution from these opportunities.

Speaker 6

Okay. Thank you. Thanks a lot for taking my questions.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Meta Marshall with Morgan Stanley. Please proceed with your question.

Speaker 9

Great. Thanks. On systems revenue maybe being better than expected as we head into fiscal 2025, do you see that more as share gains or kind of more of accelerated refresh on this part of your customers? And I guess just related to that as a follow-up customer, I would think that kind of share gains come in a healthier spend environment where people are willing to kind of entertain making more decisions about their enterprise IT. And so just what are you seeing in terms of as your customers are talking about fiscal 2025 or calendar year 2025, just what are they kind of thinking about in terms of sales cycles or kind of spend cycles?

Speaker 9

Are you seeing any kind of any improvement there? Thanks.

Speaker 8

Yes. I'll start, Meeta and then Francois, if you want to follow-up. I'd say the strength we're seeing on systems is both from competitive replace opportunities. We had really good success, especially in the latter half of FY twenty twenty four, displacing some of the competitor states and some of the customers that we're bringing on to F5. And then we are also starting to see a more material tech refresh of our installed base with our customers.

Speaker 8

And this goes back to the long period we've had where a lot of our customers were sweating their infrastructure. We're starting to see our customers have a little bit better certainty around their budgets and they're starting to move forward now with reinvesting in their hardware infrastructure. And so that's a trend that we think will likely continue to play out over the next several quarters and that's kind of behind our mid single digit growth outlook for the hardware business. I

Speaker 3

mean, I'll just add that. Yes, we do continue to gain share from the data we look at. We continue to gain share in the traditional ADC market. We have been quite successful at picking out certain competitors where customers have not been satisfied with their either performance or commercial approach to the relationship. And so we've had gainshares on that.

Speaker 3

But I think there is a perhaps a more macro effect here that customers have become, from what we can see, quite comfortable with their hybrid multi cloud architectures. And as a result, they're really comfortable with moving forward with refreshing their state. And they're comfortable deploying these new hybrid multi cloud projects that sometimes it's hardware and software combined across the estate of applications.

Speaker 9

Great. Thanks guys.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Michael Ng with Goldman Sachs. Please proceed with your question.

Speaker 10

Hey, good afternoon. Thank you for the question. I wanted to ask about the cadence of subscription revenue. Obviously, very strong in the quarter. As we head into, I guess, the first half of next year and the December quarter, it seems like there's an implied decline in subscription revenue sequentially.

Speaker 10

I was just wondering if you could speak to some of the dynamics there, whether that was the outperformance of things like true forwards in the September quarter or the timing of term base, but any color about that and how that kind of plays out through the rest of fiscal 2025 would be very helpful. Thank you.

Speaker 8

Yes. Thanks, Michael. This is Cooper. Yes, it is really more about the timing of the renewal base and the strength that we saw in Q4. So we had a really strong performance with expansion on that renewal base.

Speaker 8

But we had said all along last year that the renewal base that was coming up was more back end loaded and that's the same for FY 2025. We have a sizable renewal base. It's larger in FY 2025 than it was in FY 2024. But the renewal base tends to be more weighted to the second half of the year. And so it's any implied deceleration on the software growth, it's really just more about the timing of when these renewals come up for negotiation.

Speaker 8

And just as a reminder, on the term based licenses, that revenue is recognized largely upfront under ASC 606. And so you do get a little bit of a variability on the revenue that's reported from those sales. So we think broadly it's a very strong opportunity for us in FY 2025.

Speaker 10

Great. Thanks, Cooper. And just as a quick follow-up, you had an expansion of the renewal base in the September quarter that was better than expected. I guess, are you assuming a similar level of expansion of the renewals that come up in fiscal 2025 or smaller or bigger? Thank you.

Speaker 3

Yes. So we adjusted our assumptions

Speaker 8

a little bit on renewals to just take into account the continued strength we've had. I mean, every year that base gets bigger. And so we have to take that into account when we're setting our guidance. But we have been very consistent in terms of both renewing and driving expansion. So that is something that we're factoring in the growth outlook.

Speaker 8

And then from the new side of the software business that also increased we're looking at the new software as being flattish year over year, but that's against an improved FY 'twenty four result from the new software projects that we closed for our customers.

Speaker 6

Thank you

Speaker 10

very much, Cooper.

Speaker 6

Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Amit Daryani with Evercore ISI. Please proceed with your question.

Speaker 11

Yes. Good afternoon. I have two questions as well. I guess maybe to stop with Francois, can just talk a little bit more about the big IP next for Kubernetes? You've talked about it a little bit already, but just talk about which customer base do you think this will resonate more with?

Speaker 11

Is it sort of the hyperscalers that are deploying more of the NVIDIA AI solutions right now? Or do you think it's going to be more with enterprises over time? So where do you think this product will gain more traction? And any way to think about how big this opportunity could be for F5 as you go forward?

Speaker 3

Right. Okay. So let me start a little bit on that solution. So the idea behind for Kubernetes is really what we're doing here is taking our traffic management software, which we have refactored for Kubernetes environment, and we're marrying that with NVDF's GPU to provide key benefits to customers building AI factories. The number one benefit is really increasing utilization of GPUs, in part because we do traffic management and so we can get data to GPUs faster, in part because we also enable these single GPU cluster to serve multiple AI workloads or AI models, what we call multi tenancy in the industry.

Speaker 3

And so who are the customers who will benefit from that? It would be, of course, all service providers that provide GPU as a shared infrastructure or shared service to a number of customers. It would be enterprises that are building even their own AI factories, but want to maximize the utilization of GPUs. And you know GPUs are expensive resources today. So it's going to be generally either enterprises or service providers that are building AI factories at significant scale.

Speaker 3

So that's really who we're targeting with this joint solution. Now I want to be clear that we are early days. We have a validated technical architecture with NVIDIA. We're starting to get interest from the folks we speak to who are building these factories and who see a significant opportunity to improve the efficiency and the utilization in their factories. But there's a number of questions around the go to market model that we have not yet answered.

Speaker 3

And so we also see that opportunity as materializing more in FY 'twenty six and beyond. But that said, it could be a pretty significant opportunity for F5, F5, assuming that the go to market model works and that we find a way to embed this software technology on a large number of NVIDIA DPUs over time.

Speaker 11

Got it. That's really helpful. And then if I can just get a clarification on the software growth, right, which I think you folks have talked about high single digits in fiscal 2025 is the right way to do it. Is it fair to think that software growth, just like we have talked about the top line, will be a bit more muted, maybe mostly in the front half and then ramps up in the back half? And we're going to understand this because you do have a very tough compare in the March quarter where you had some term license deals on

Speaker 7

the software side. So just any kind of

Speaker 11

cadence on the first half versus back half on software and how to think about that would be helpful. Thank you.

Speaker 8

Yes. So we provided some context on the overall revenue growth seasonality

Speaker 6

for

Speaker 8

the year where we said it would be kind of low single digit growth in the first half of the year and mid single digit second half. And really the leading contributor to our overall growth is software. So you can kind of get an idea that the software growth will also probably be stronger in the second half. And again, that's tied to that larger renewal base that we have coming up in the second half of the year. And so we'll see how that plays out over the course of the year.

Speaker 8

But a lot of these opportunities, as we said, they can be pretty material in size. So in any given quarter, there's going to be some variability up or down in the growth rate. And so we wouldn't prescribe too much emphasis on an individual quarter's growth outlook. But broadly the upper single digit growth we feel really good about for software. And again, as Francois noted earlier, we have pretty good line of sight to about 2 thirds of the footprint of where that software is going to be coming from because this business we've already contracted.

Speaker 8

So that gives us a lot of confidence in the outlook for the year.

Speaker 11

Got it. Thank you very much.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of James Fish with Piper Sandler. Please proceed with your question.

Speaker 12

Hey guys, nice quarter. Just curious as going back to Meta's prior question around systems, you guys have talked in the past about potential price increases and clearly your largest competitor in that space changed their packaging and pricing. So how are you guys thinking about a potential price increase for some of your legacy systems or the maintenance itself given kind of that change? And is that included in sort of the growth rate around mid single digits for systems, especially when this is a segment that Francois back in, I think, 2017 or 2018, you talked about it as kind of a mid single digit decline kind of segment. So just additional color would be great, guys.

Speaker 3

Yes, Jim. So yes, we our view of the segment, Jim, in general has been that the unit demand in that segment over time would decline at the sort of mid single digit decline rate. And Evertz, you're looking at since we made those statements in 20 7, 2018 and you kind of drive a trend line across the segment, I think you would see that roughly has kind of materialized. Now that could change over time. There are a couple of things that could change that.

Speaker 3

One is, again, this commitment we're seeing to hybrid multi cloud architectures from customers and kind of the strength of their on prem deployments and plans, including some data center build out. And 2 is AI, where we are seeing some opportunities in hardware in front of the storage tiers. As you probably have seen that we announced recently also a partnership with NetApp to accelerate the joint deployments that we're doing in AI for these opportunities. So I think those are a couple of factors that may change our view on the segment. But for the time being, what we've said about this mid single digit decline is our view.

Speaker 3

In terms of price increases, we have announced modest price increases for this year, for the beginning of the year, and we've had price increases in the past as a result of changes in supply chain. And so we monitor both the competitive environment and the price performance value that we want to give to our customers and we make adjustments based on that and we will continue to do that in the future. Got it. And just

Speaker 8

to clarify those price increases, when we say beginning of the year, that's calendar year,

Speaker 11

if those go into effect.

Speaker 12

Do you guys care to quantify how much that price increase is? And then Francois, building off of what you just said as well as your AI commentary before in terms of those 3 buckets, Is there a way to think about when to expect each of those tailwinds to come in if there's any sort of difference on timing or if we should think about them all coming in kind of together at the same time?

Speaker 3

So the price increase in hardware, Jim, is in the single digit percentages. And as it relates to the AI opportunity, in terms of quantifying things, Jim, the first opportunity that we see that is immediate is with big IP hardware sitting between an AI app and the storage tier or between the storage tier and the GPU cluster. And those are deployments that we're seeing right now. We have won already a handful of opportunities where we're doing that. Those opportunities are with large enterprises building AI factories or service providers also building AI factories, and we've seen that both in the U.

Speaker 3

S. And internationally. We're not planning on that being a very significant contributor to revenue in 2025, but we're starting to see more deployment and we'll see how fast they scale. But that's the opportunity that's the most immediate. The second opportunity then is in software, and that's where we are going into the GPU clusters.

Speaker 3

Our partnership with NVIDIA is about that, and it's about improving the efficiencies of the GPU clusters using F5 traffic management software. I think that opportunity from a timing perspective is really 2026 and beyond because there's still a lot of go to market and commercial work to be done before we are ready to go into production with these solutions. Thanks guys.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Simeon Leopold with Raymond James. Please proceed with your question.

Speaker 13

Great. Thank you for taking the question. First, I just want to see if I can clarify how you've updated the cadence forecast. On the last earnings call, you had indicated the first half of fiscal twenty twenty five would be relatively flat with strength in the second half of the year. Now you've given us this forecast for the Q1 that at the midpoint it's about 3% year over year growth.

Speaker 13

I think you're implying that the second quarter should be somewhat similar year over year growth. And so you've essentially guided up from the prior quarter's flat first half rather than implying that Q2 should be down a lot to compensate for the 3% growth in the first half? And then I've got a quick follow-up, if you can just clarify that guidance comment first.

Speaker 8

Yes. Thanks, Simon. So yes, we did update our expectation for the first half of the year to be low single digit growth. And so you've got the guidance for Q1 and so we'll leave it to you to make an assumption around Q2. But probably what you're seeing is some of the strength that we're seeing on the expansion front of the renewals, it's a little bit of a factor on the software side and then the strength we're seeing in systems where we're we had said we expected it to grow for the year, but we haven't put an expectation against that growth rate and now we're seeing mid single digits and you can assume we'll start to see some of that benefit sequentially in the first half of the year.

Speaker 13

Great. And then, I just wanted to see if we could talk a little bit about how, the verticals perform relative to your expectations In that in the past, you've had meaningful seasonal benefit from the U. S. Federal, which was on a dollar basis decent and certainly a nice percentage, but other public sector was basically flattish sequentially this quarter. Just wondering, it sounds to me like your enterprise was the positive surprise that offset others, but how did your verticals perform relative to expectations when you guided?

Speaker 13

Thank you.

Speaker 7

Sure, Simon, it's Frank. Let me take that one. So, you're absolutely right. The enterprise was the strong sector in the quarter and was above our expectations and that's what led to the outperformance. U.

Speaker 7

S. Fed as a percentage was maybe not quite a size, but when you map out the dollars, there was some sort of the expectations that we had, they largely lived up to. And then service provider, as we said all year, as a sector has been a little weaker on the demand side. We've had a few specific service providers where we've had a lot of success with. But as a broad industry, it has not come back.

Speaker 7

There still serve a lot of constraint on demand there. So this largely performed as we expected with the exception of enterprise, which came in stronger than we expected at the beginning of the quarter. Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Sebastien Najee with William Blair. Please proceed with your question.

Speaker 14

Thanks for squeezing me in. Two quick ones here. Just the first one, can you give us a sense for how much of your growth each quarter is coming from new customers? It just would be helpful to get your view on how much growth in 2024 can you improve competitive share gains? And then how much new customers are expected to contribute to growth in fiscal year 2025?

Speaker 14

And then my second question, just so it's out there, is around the new BlueField NVIDIA announcement. What are you serving as an alternative to here? Are you replacing a native NVIDIA load balancer? And if so, what is the risk for them to build a more competitive offering and drive that higher utilization internally with their own solution? Thank you.

Speaker 3

Thank you, Sebastian. Let me start with the first part of your question, which is new customers. Thank you. So Sachin, we win of course, we win a number of new customers every single quarter with every part of our portfolio with BIG IP, with NGINX and with distributed cloud services. In fact, we saw, for example, the distributed cloud services last year at this time, we had about 500 customers.

Speaker 3

Now we have over 800 customers with distributed cloud services. So we have seen a lot of traction with distributed cloud with new customers, including customers that have never purchased anything from a side. We also win a number of new customers in competitive takeout opportunities with our ADC solutions. However, the majority of our growth comes from existing customers and that was true in 2024 and it will be true also in 2025. And it comes in the form of expansion in existing agreements that we have signed with our customers and it comes in the form of cross selling multiple product families into existing customers.

Speaker 3

And the trends we're seeing with customers deploying hybrid multi cloud architectures, we're seeing more opportunity for us to go into existing customers who have purchased multiple point solutions over time and consolidate these point solutions onto F5 as a platform today because we have built a single software stack that includes all the security and delivery needs that large enterprise customers need. So one of the ways that we grow into existing customers is consolidating functions and application services onto SI. As it relates to the second question on the BlueField 3 with NVIDIA, Look, there will be our view of this is we provide a very compelling way of addressing the issue of GPU utilization in GPU cluster. It's an issue for the whole industry. GPUs are expensive and scarce resources.

Speaker 3

And the expertise in Layer 4 to 7 traffic management and security that F5 has and that is factored for Kubernetes environment is unique. Nobody else in the industry has that expertise. Nobody else in our industry has those capabilities. And NVIDIA, of course, recognizes that, which is why we have spent a lot of time with them building this technical solution together. That being said, of course, I'm sure that others in the industry will look to address this issue over time.

Speaker 3

And I'm sure that it will be there will be competition. It will be a solution that is contested over time. But we think we are early in the market. We think we have a solution that is compelling. And we know that the 2 decades of expertise that we have amassed in high performance traffic management and security directly applies to these AI workloads and that no one brings that expertise to the table today or frankly in the foreseeable future.

Speaker 3

So we're pretty confident about the differentiation in the technical solution. The work that is ahead of us is figuring out what are the go to market and commercial models that will work for customers in the field.

Speaker 14

Helpful. Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. Due to time constraints, we'll take our last question from Matt Dzor at Needham. Please proceed with your question.

Speaker 14

Great. Thanks for taking the question and congrats on the great results guys. On the go to market, I guess, just quickly, as you turn the page to fiscal 'twenty five, any changes in sales comp incentives, especially as you start to more cross sell NGINX 1? And any changes to the partner program as you think about fiscal 2025? Thanks, guys.

Speaker 3

So on the partner program, so we have a pretty strong program. I mentioned earlier that we work with 2,000 partners across the globe that are all involved in our Unity program. And frankly, I have been very pleased with the way our partners have embraced the growing portfolio at F5 and have contributed to wins with distributed cloud with NGINX and of course with our big IT product family. This year, in terms of incentives for our sales force, of course, we're going to continue to win in hybrid multi cloud architecture and incent our teams to cross sell the portfolio of F5. We have a number of customers.

Speaker 3

It's a diminishing number, but a number of customers that today have only one product family for F5. And we think a big opportunity for F5 is to cross sell our 2nd or third product family into these customers. And our incentives to our sales teams increasingly go to that cross selling the portfolio. And of course, we have been working hard with our teams in research and development in building the technical synergies across the portfolio that make it easier for the sales team to cross sell and make it easier for our customers to consume multiple product families from F5 because they see tremendous value from doing so and doing so across all their application infrastructure environments.

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Earnings Conference Call
F5 Q4 2024
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