F5 Inc
F5 powers applications from development through their entire lifecycle, across any multi-cloud environment, so our customers—enterprise businesses, service providers, governments, and consumer brands—can deliver differentiated, high-performing, and secure digital experiences.
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17.0% overvaluedF5 Inc (FFIV) — Q3 2025 Earnings Call Transcript
AI Call Summary AI-generated
The 30-second take
F5 had a very strong quarter, with its product sales growing at the fastest rate in 14 years. The company is benefiting as big companies modernize their data centers and prepare for AI, which is driving demand for both its hardware and software. Management raised its full-year profit forecast, signaling confidence that these good results can continue.
Key numbers mentioned
- Q3 Revenue grew 12% to $780 million.
- Product Revenue grew 26% year-over-year.
- Systems Revenue grew 39% year-over-year.
- Non-GAAP EPS was $4.16 per share, reflecting 24% growth.
- Q4 Revenue Guidance is a range of $780 million to $800 million.
- Full-Year Revenue Growth is now expected to be approximately 9%.
What management is worried about
- Some new software projects declined in Q3 as some opportunities shifted to hardware.
- The subscription base coming up for renewal in FY '26 originates from a period of roughly flat software sales, creating a headwind for growth from renewals that year.
- Certain high-performance systems deals, including those with FIPS compliance demands, carry a slightly lower gross margin profile.
What management is excited about
- The initial customer response to the F5 Application Delivery and Security Platform (ADSP) is very positive, winning deals that consolidate multiple vendor point solutions.
- Innovations in "AI for ADC" and "ADC for AI" are enhancing customer experiences and opening new market opportunities.
- Early wins securing AI workloads, such as for AI data delivery and AI factory load balancing, represent net new insertion points for F5.
- The pipeline for Q4 reflects continued strong demand for data center modernization and hybrid multi-cloud architectures.
- The tech refresh cycle for legacy hardware is expected to drive strong activity through 2026 and beyond.
Analyst questions that hit hardest
- Timothy Long (Barclays) - Hardware Sustainability & Software Pipeline: Management gave a detailed breakdown of durable hardware drivers but was less specific on software, noting a decline in new projects and a shift of some opportunities to hardware.
- Michael Ng (Goldman Sachs) - Software Growth in Fiscal '26: The response was defensive, outlining headwinds from a flat prior-year renewal base and tempering expectations to "mid-single digits" growth next year before a potential reacceleration.
- Ryan Koontz (Needham & Company) - Competitive Price Increases: Management responded by contrasting their "reasonable" increases with competitors' "much more aggressive pricing strategies" that have upset customers, framing it as a competitive benefit.
The quote that matters
Our exceptional Q3 results highlight the strength of our business and F5's strong alignment with important secular trends.
François Locoh-Donou — President and CEO
Sentiment vs. last quarter
Omit this section as no direct comparison to a previous quarter's transcript or summary was provided in the context.
Original transcript
Operator
Good afternoon, and welcome to F5 Inc.'s Third Quarter Fiscal 2025 Financial Results Conference Call. Today's conference call is being recorded. If anyone has any objections, please disconnect at this time. I will now turn the call over to your host, Ms. Suzanne DuLong. Thank you. You may begin.
Hello, and welcome. I'm Suzanne DuLong, F5's Vice President of Investor Relations. We are here with you today to discuss our third-quarter fiscal year 2025 financial results. Francois Locoh-Donou, F5's President and CEO; and Cooper Werner, F5's Executive Vice President and 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&A session. A copy of today's press release is available on our website at f5.com, where an archived version of today's audio will be available through October 27, 2025. We will post the slide deck accompanying today's webcast to our IR site at the conclusion of today's call. To access the replay of today's webcast by phone, dial (877) 660-6853 or (201) 612-7415 and use meeting ID 13754228. The telephonic replay will be available through midnight Pacific Time, July 31, 2025. For additional information or follow-up questions, please reach out to me directly at s.dulong@f5.com. 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've summarized factors that may affect our results in the press release announcing our financial results and in detail in our SEC filings. In addition, we will be referencing 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. Please note that F5 has no duty to update any information presented in this call. During today's call, Francois will speak to our Q3 highlights and our strategy and growth opportunities. Cooper will then review the details of our Q3 results and our outlook. I'll now turn the call over to Francois.
Thank you, Suzanne, and hello, everyone. Our exceptional Q3 results highlight the strength of our business and F5's strong alignment with important secular trends. Customers are modernizing their data centers, adopting hybrid multi-cloud architectures and scaling to meet growing application capacity and performance needs. Our Q3 results demonstrate F5's position at the forefront of these transformative shifts. We delivered 12% total revenue growth, including 26% growth in product revenue, our strongest in 14 years. This performance is a testament to our team's execution, our continued innovation, and the enormous trust the largest enterprises and service providers across the globe place in F5. F5's unique ability to deliver and secure every application, every API anywhere, on premises, in the cloud, at the edge, and across hybrid multi-cloud environments is a significant competitive advantage. It powered strong demand across both hardware and software deployment models in Q3. Our systems revenue grew 39%, fueled by data center modernization, increased capacity requirements and adoption of our latest generation of hardware. Our software revenue grew 16%, driven by hybrid multi-cloud architecture adoption, which is contributing to continued strong software subscription renewals and expansions. We continue to operate the business with discipline. Combined with our strong revenue performance and continued operating margin leverage, we delivered exceptional EPS results in the quarter, reflecting 24% growth year-over-year. Looking ahead, our Q4 pipeline reflects continued strong demand in support of future forward architecture, data center modernization and an increasing range of application delivery and security services. As a result, we expect Q4 revenue in a range of $780 million to $800 million, implying approximately 9% revenue growth for FY '25. Cooper will provide a detailed overview of our Q3 performance and our outlook shortly. Before that, I will highlight early traction with our F5 application delivery and security platform. I will also recap recent-centric innovations and speak to some of our latest wins supporting AI workloads and infrastructure. We expect the long-term structural shift driving data center modernization will persist, continuing to reshape how companies invest in their IT infrastructure. Managing a skyrocketing number of applications and APIs across increasingly distributed environments is creating enormous challenges for IT teams. And preparing for and implementing AI is only making it worse. At F5, we have made it our mission to dramatically simplify this complex array of operational and cybersecurity challenges with the F5 application delivery and security platform. While there are platforms for endpoints, for network access, and for cloud workloads, before the F5 ADSP, there was no platform that fully converges high-performance traffic management with advanced application and API security capabilities across hybrid and multi-cloud environments at scale. The F5 ADSP is unique in that it enables customers to, a, consolidate multiple delivery and security point solutions for applications and APIs on F5, leveraging a single platform with best-in-class capabilities, b, consistently deploy delivery and security across their hybrid multi-cloud environments via hardware, software, and SaaS form factors; and c, dramatically simplify operations and reduce manual efforts by leveraging AI-powered analytics, insights and policy management. With these powerful benefits, it's no surprise that the initial customer response is very positive. In Q3, we won a number of deals that demonstrate the power and the benefit of F5's platform approach. For example, a North American health insurer chose F5 distributed cloud services and BIG-IP, consolidating multiple security and delivery vendors across both its on-premises and SaaS environments. Leveraging our unique hybrid multi-cloud approach, F5 is significantly reducing operational complexity while also providing enhanced security and improved API visibility. In another example, an airline in our EMEA region selected F5 to modernize its application delivery and security posture. Already an F5 BIG-IP customer, they faced escalating application growth and challenges, securing a rapidly growing base of APIs across multi-cloud environments. After extensive competitive evaluation, they consolidated both their on-premises and SaaS environments on F5, replacing their incumbent SaaS provider and deploying F5 distributed cloud services with comprehensive WAAP and secure multi-cloud networking. F5 is enabling the airline to securely connect and manage more than 100 B2B applications across multi-cloud environments, ensuring scalability, security and operational efficiency. In a final example, a South American service provider consolidated all of its multi-cloud and on-premises security services on F5. Through discovery during the sales process of what was initially a WAF-only opportunity, our team learned the full scale of the customers' challenges. The customer embraced the benefits of a unified F5 approach, consolidating their WAF, bot protection, and API security on F5 distributed cloud services. F5 is streamlining their operations, eliminating multi-vendor complexity and reducing costs by consolidating across all of its on-premises and multi-cloud environments. These examples underscore the significant value F5 delivers to customers through our ADSP. While there is still work ahead to unlock the full potential of the platform, we are confident that our ongoing innovation will enable us to deliver even greater benefits to our customers. Over recent quarters, we have been unveiling a suite of groundbreaking customer-centric innovations that showcase the power of the F5 ADSP while also highlighting how we are leveraging advanced AI technologies to enhance customer experiences and drive business growth. These innovations fall into two categories. The first is AI for ADC. These are innovations that leverage AI to reduce the operational complexity of delivering and securing applications in a hybrid multi-cloud world. These innovations empower customers to unlock the full potential of F5, simplifying deployment and accelerating their ability to scale F5 solutions seamlessly. The second is ADC for AI. These innovations highlight how we are applying our strength in delivery and security to enable AI-driven applications. During Q3, we continued to make advances in both of these categories. In AI for ADC, we introduced advancements to our F5 AI Assistant. Our goal is to make the F5 AI Assistant an indispensable member of every NetOps and SecOps team. We are systematically building it around a simple, powerful loop, understand what's happening, prioritize what matters, and act to solve it. To dramatically improve our customers' ability to understand potential threats and streamline prioritization, we are integrating technology from our Fletch acquisition. This integration will enable the F5 AI Assistant to provide a real-time contextualized view of the threat landscape, along with proactive, actionable recommendations that help cut through the noise. But insight without action is incomplete. That's why we enabled the assistant to act, starting with its new ability to generate rules from a simple prompt. This translates customer intent into secure performance code, making it easier for more customers to harness and leverage F5's unmatched programmability. This complete loop from deep understanding to automated action is how we move our customers from reactive firefighting to proactive control. In ADC for AI, we announced expanded capabilities for our F5 AI Gateway to prevent data leaks and deliver cutting-edge AI data protection. Additionally, we introduced new functionality for F5 BIG-IP SSL Orchestrator to classify and defend encrypted data in motion and block unapproved AI use. Through industry-leading technology partnerships, F5 is also providing integrated, secure, and streamlined solutions to support complex emerging AI ecosystems. We recently announced advances with two of our AI-focused partners. In June, building on our prior work with NVIDIA, we announced we are expanding F5's performance, multi-tenancy, and security capabilities for large-scale AI infrastructures. We are leveraging BIG-IP Next for Kubernetes running natively on NVIDIA BlueField-3 DPUs. Feedback from customers who have tested the solution has been very promising. One customer reported an 18% increase in HTTP throughput, an 11x improvement in time to first byte, and a 190x boost in network energy efficiency. Another customer reported a 20% improvement in GPU utilization. We believe this level of performance improvement could be meaningful to customers looking to scale and enhance the performance of their AI infrastructures, and we continue to work towards validating the solution with customers and NVIDIA. With customers leveraging F5 to move incredible amounts of data at high speed to and from data stores for AI modeling and inference, our work with storage partners is also critical. In July, we announced that we are deepening our alliance with MinIO, advancing our AI application and data delivery solution to manage training and inference-driven data growth. These innovations and partnerships highlight F5's role in enabling AI-driven applications. Today, dozens of leading enterprises are deploying F5 to ensure AI workflows operate flawlessly, scale seamlessly and remain resilient against evolving threats. These AI use cases represent net new insertion points for F5 and leverage technology and expertise built over decades. Today, customers are leveraging F5 across three primary AI-related use cases. The first is AI data delivery. In these use cases, customers are deploying F5 in front of data stores to ensure secure high-throughput data ingestion for AI model training and inference. F5 is enforcing policy-based controls and eliminating bottlenecks, enabling performance delivery of massive data sets while safeguarding sensitive information. The second is AI runtime security. In these use cases, F5 is protecting AI applications, APIs, and models with F5 WAAP and AI Gateway. F5 prevents abuse, data leakage, and attacks like prompt injection while ensuring full visibility and control over how AI models and applications interact across environments. The third is AI factory load balancing. In these cases, F5 is optimizing traffic both across and within AI factories. In AI, performance is measured in terms of token throughput. By intelligently distributing AI traffic to maximize GPU utilization, F5 AI factory load balancing directly increases token generation, reduces time to first token, and lowers cost per token. In Q3, we secured several new AI wins. In an AI data delivery use case, a government institution in our EMEA region needed to dramatically accelerate data ingestion for its AI platform, but its existing infrastructure could not meet the throughput and traffic modification demands. The core challenge was processing data at 100 gigabits per second while performing intensive SSL decryption and inserting critical data for audit trails. To solve this, they placed high-performance F5 BIG-IP hardware in front of their S3 data stores. BIG-IP is able to perform SSL decryption at line rate while preserving critical data for auditing and policy enforcement. This combination of hardware-based encryption, intelligent traffic modification, and robust traffic management allowed the institution to meet its demanding performance goals and build a scalable foundation for future AI workloads. In an AI factory load balancing use case, an e-commerce provider based in our APAC region strategically deployed F5 BIG-IP and NGINX in key layers of their GPU-as-a-Service cloud platform. They use high-performance BIG-IP hardware to manage and secure the main entry point to their infrastructure, while F5 NGINX is embedded directly in front of each AI cluster to enforce fine-grained authentication and authorization. This ensures that as their cloud scales, performance and security scale with it, enabling them to provide a foundational AI resource for their customers. Collectively, these successes underscore F5's expanding leadership in the hybrid multi-cloud landscape and the tangible value our platform approach delivers to customers, empowering them to simplify operations, enhance security, and accelerate innovation across their environments. Now I will turn the call to Cooper to elaborate on our Q3 results and our Q4 outlook.
Thank you, Francois, and hello, everyone. I will review our Q3 results before I elaborate on our Q4 and FY '25 outlook. As Francois noted, we delivered a strong Q3, growing revenue 12% to $780 million, reflecting a mix of 50% global services revenue and 50% product revenue. Global Services revenue of $392 million grew 1%, while product revenue of $389 million grew 26% year-over-year. Our software revenue grew 16% year-over-year to $208 million as customers continue to expand consumption and adopt additional capabilities across our platform. Our subscription-based software revenue grew 19% year-over-year to $185 million, representing 89% of our total software revenue. Perpetual license software totaled $23 million, down slightly year-over-year. Systems revenue totaled $181 million, up 39% year-over-year, with strength driven by tech refresh and data center modernization, including customers preparing for AI as well as competitive takeouts. Revenue from recurring sources contributed 73% of our Q3 revenue. Our recurring revenue consists of our subscription-based revenue and the maintenance portion of our global services revenue. Shifting to revenue distribution by region. Our teams drove growth across all theaters. Revenue from the Americas grew 13% year-over-year, representing 55% of total revenue. EMEA delivered 6% growth, representing 26% of revenue, and APAC grew 21%, representing 19% of revenue. Looking at our major verticals, enterprise customers represented 70% of Q3's product bookings. Government customers represented 15% of product bookings, including 5% from the U.S. Federal. Finally, service providers represented 15% of Q3 product bookings. Our continued operating discipline contributed to our strong Q3 operating results. GAAP gross margin was 81%. Non-GAAP gross margin was 83.1%. Our GAAP operating expenses were $435 million. Our non-GAAP operating expenses were $381 million. Our GAAP operating margin was 25.2%. Our non-GAAP operating margin was 34.3%, an improvement of more than 80 basis points year-over-year. Our GAAP effective tax rate for the quarter was 10.8%. Our non-GAAP effective tax rate was 14.4%. This includes a discrete benefit associated with the filing of our annual federal income tax return during the quarter. Our GAAP net income for the quarter was $190 million or $3.25 per share. Our non-GAAP net income was $243 million or $4.16 per share, reflecting 24% EPS growth from the year-ago period. I will now turn to cash flow and balance sheet metrics, all of which were very strong. We generated a record $282 million in cash flow from operations in Q3. CapEx was $9 million. DSO for the quarter was 42 days. Cash and investments totaled approximately $1.44 billion at quarter's end. Deferred revenue was $1.96 billion, up 10% from the year-ago period. In Q3, we repurchased $125 million worth of F5 shares at an average price of $256 per share. As of the end of Q3, we had $1 billion remaining on our authorized stock repurchase program. Year-to-date, we have repurchased shares equivalent to 52% of our annual free cash flow. Finally, we ended the quarter with approximately 6,540 employees. I will now speak to our Q4 outlook. With the exception of revenue, my guidance comments reference non-GAAP metrics. As Francois noted, visibility into our Q4 pipeline and customer demand remains strong. We expect Q4 revenue in the range of $780 million to $800 million, implying 6% growth at the midpoint. We expect growth driven by tech refresh demand, data center modernization and adoption across our ADSP platform in support of customers' hybrid multi-cloud architectures. We expect non-GAAP gross margin in a range of 84% to 84.5%. We estimate Q4 non-GAAP operating expenses of $376 million to $388 million. We expect Q4 share-based compensation expense of approximately $57 million to $59 million. We anticipate Q4 non-GAAP EPS in a range of $3.87 to $3.99 per share. As we look ahead to Q4 and beyond, we see customers increasingly leveraging both the breadth of our solutions across our portfolio and the flexibility only F5 offers to deploy in any form factor. As evident in our strong systems performance this year, customers' holistic hybrid multi-cloud approach spans hardware, software, and SaaS deployments, and they are increasingly investing in high-performance hardware to address factors, including resiliency, data sovereignty, and AI readiness. With that backdrop, I will recap the implications of our Q4 guidance on our fiscal year 2025 outlook. Our Q4 revenue guidance implies revenue growth of approximately 9% for FY '25. This is up from our prior guidance for growth of 6.5% to 7.5% and reflects robust systems revenue growth and software growth at or around 10% for the year. As implied by our Q4 guidance, we continue to expect FY '25 non-GAAP gross margin in a range of 83% to 84% and non-GAAP operating margin at or around 35%. We are adjusting our expected FY '25 non-GAAP effective tax rate to a range of 18.5% to 19.5% from the prior range of 20% to 22%. This change reflects the one-time benefit recorded in Q3. Our Q4 guidance implies FY '25 EPS in a range of 14% to 15% growth, up from our prior guidance of 8% to 10% growth. The increase is driven by the improvement in our revenue outlook and the benefit from the tax rate change. Finally, we expect our share repurchases for the full year to be at or above 50% of our free cash flow. With that, I'll turn the call over to Francois.
Thank you, Cooper. F5 delivers and secures every app and API anywhere, on-prem, cloud, edge, or hybrid environments. We lead in solving today's toughest business challenges. Our F5 application delivery and security platform is the first in the industry, offering consistent policies, full visibility, and AI-driven insights. We are enabling customers to modernize data centers, embrace hybrid multi-cloud, and scale for rising performance and security demands in an AI-driven world. Operator, please open the call to questions.
Operator
Our first question comes from Tim Long with Barclays.
Two, if I could. First, on the hardware side. Could you talk a little bit about, obviously, a lot of strength here, a lot of things going on with maybe tariffs and pull-ins and end of life and good competitive environment. So can you kind of break down, you talked about the applications and the reasons there, but some of the other factors that maybe contributed and how you think the sustainability of that will be going into next year? And then second, on the software side, could you just touch on kind of pipeline and how you're thinking about renewals and new deal activity heading into the end of the fiscal year?
Tim, I'll begin with your question about hardware, and then Cooper will address the second question. The hardware team's performance was exceptional, showing a 39% year-on-year growth. There are two main factors to consider. First, we have the tech refresh, which is influencing our business. As some platforms are reaching end-of-life in the next 12 to 24 months, we expect this to drive strong tech refresh activity this year. However, there are additional trends at work. When we break down our hardware revenue, the portion not linked to tech refresh is actually growing even faster than other hardware categories. The driving forces behind this growth include ongoing secular trends, particularly revolving around hybrid cloud, data centers, and AI. In the hybrid and multi-cloud space, many customers are adopting hybrid architectures and modernizing their data centers to prepare for future application growth. This trend is positively impacting our hardware business. Additionally, in the financial services sector, increasing regulations demand better resilience, pushing customers towards stronger on-premises infrastructure that they can manage. Lastly, in AI, we're witnessing investments in both active AI use cases and readiness for future AI developments, as customers aim to efficiently manage large quantities of data moving between storage and AI models. Overall, these trends in the hardware sector appear to be quite sustainable. Looking ahead to next year, we anticipate continued strong growth, albeit at a more modest rate than this year. Importantly, we have not observed any pull-in effects so far in hardware, nor have we experienced impacts from tariff discussions on either hardware or software. Now, I’ll hand it over to Cooper.
Sure, I'll provide some insights into the software trends we are observing. We previously mentioned that we had a significant renewal base expected in the second half of the year, which has given us excellent visibility. In this quarter, we experienced strong expansion related to that renewal base. This growth is manifesting in two main ways. Firstly, customers are increasing their consumption during their previous subscription period. At the time of renewal, this elevated consumption translates into a higher contract value, along with further expansion across our portfolio. We are noticing the development of new use cases at the time of renewal, which contributes to the growth in our software segment. When we discuss new projects, we refer to either entirely new customers or new software initiatives where the customers had not engaged with our software before. While this segment has shown increases year-to-date, it saw a slight decline in the third quarter. This shift aligns with what Francois mentioned regarding customers' preferences for supporting their applications amidst heightened regulatory scrutiny, a focus on resiliency, and a general demand for improved performance. As a result, some opportunities that would typically have closed in software have shifted to hardware. Overall, we remain optimistic about the year ahead, with a solid foundation for the fourth quarter. Based on the expansion trends we've observed and continue to monitor, we feel confident about our outlook for Q4.
Operator
Our next question comes from Meta Marshall with Morgan Stanley.
This is Mary on for Meta. I had a question on gross margins. Are there any reasons for why gross margins came in at the lower end of the range despite the upside on revenue?
Yes. So it was pretty slightly at the low end of the range. That was really driven more by some of the high-performance use cases on the systems business. We had some deals that had FIPS compliance demands, which tend to have a slightly lower gross margin profile. And then just broadly, the strength in the systems business, in general. Of course, hardware has still a very high gross margin profile, but it's not quite as high as software. And so that was the other dynamic that really was behind our gross margins. But as you see from our guidance for Q4, we expect gross margins to improve in the current quarter.
Operator
Our next question comes from Michael Ng with Goldman Sachs.
I just have two. First, on the hardware piece. It's encouraging to hear that you expect systems revenue to be up next year. In the past, you've talked a little bit about how much of the installed base was on the legacy iSeries and VIPRION. I was just wondering if you could talk about where you are today and how much of that systems refresh we should expect over the next couple of years? And then second, just on software, kind of relatedly, could you see software revenue growth in fiscal '26, just given the very strong term renewals that we've seen this year?
Michael, thank you for your question. I'll begin with hardware and then ask Cooper to address the second part. Regarding hardware, we have some end-of-software-support dates coming up in 2026 and early 2027. We expect strong refresh activity to continue throughout 2026 and beyond, as customers tend to refresh even after these support dates. Not all of the installed base will be refreshed by those deadlines, so we anticipate robust activity over the next 18 months. Additionally, there is a segment of our hardware business that is influenced not just by tech refreshes, but also by ongoing trends such as hybrid multi-cloud architectures, data center modernization, and growing investments in AI readiness and use cases. We believe these trends are more durable than cyclical. We are looking forward to these developments and will monitor how they unfold over time. For now, we are quite optimistic about the momentum we’re seeing beyond the tech refresh in our hardware business.
On the software side, it’s a bit early to provide guidance for next year, but I can share some dynamics for consideration regarding reasonable estimates from our current perspective. It seems reasonable to expect software growth in the mid-single digits next year, with a potential reacceleration the following year. Firstly, we are still experiencing strong consumption within the renewal motion, which is driven by increased performance, along with new use cases. It’s important to note that this growth is not just repeat business; it comes from new use cases and elevated consumption as part of the renewal and expansion motion. Secondly, we discussed on the last call that the subscription base coming up for renewal in FY '26 mainly originates from our software revenue in FY '23 due to the three-year renewal cycle, and our FY '23 software sales were roughly flat compared to FY '22. This creates a bit of a headwind for that subscription base regarding the renewal and expansion strategy. However, this same issue will turn into a benefit for FY '27, which is why we anticipate a growth rate increase from that point onward. Lastly, we’ve noted some shifting customer preferences regarding deployment models. A significant strength of our ADSP platform is that it offers customers options for deployment. It’s important to remember that hardware and software are not just products; they’re delivery models, with BIG-IP being an actual product. Some customers prefer to deploy BIG-IP in a hardware form factor to meet their growing performance needs. These factors are all under consideration as we look ahead to the next year, and we’ll observe how they unfold.
Operator
Our next question comes from Samik Chatterjee with JPMorgan.
This is Priyanka Thapa on for Samik. Great job this quarter. I got a couple of questions. First of all, on the concept of software next year, what does the new business pipeline for software look like next year? And is that kind of incremental to your expectations of mid-single-digit software growth? And I have a follow-up.
Sure. Thank you, Priyanka. So yes, our pipeline right now, it's healthy. So it's early again. I mean, our pipeline gives you really good visibility into the current quarter and then decent visibility into the next quarter. And so as you get beyond that, that's going to be business that we are surfacing now as we're engaging with our customers. But generally, I would say that as we do our planning for next year, we feel good about new opportunities for software. And again, these are either net new customers or customers that are consuming for the first time in software. So that's kind of factored into some of our thinking around the growth rate for next year. But of course, the majority of our software revenue now comes through that renew and expand motion, which is great for visibility, and that's where we would expect the majority of the growth to come from next year.
Got it. Maybe as a follow-up, Francois, on the AI piece, you mentioned that it's still early days as we're awaiting enterprises to really build out these AI factories. We generally view that phase maybe by the end of 2026, moving into 2027. My question for you is, do you see that adoption timeline actually accelerating as we move more into the world of Agentic? And then generally speaking, how big do you view the opportunity in AI delivery versus AI security? What's going to be more beneficial to you?
Both are excellent questions, and while it's challenging to make significant predictions at this early stage in the market, I believe AI data delivery is likely to be more immediate for us. This aligns with what F5 has always done, such as processing traffic at Layer 7 and securely connecting applications to users. Now, we need to link data stores to applications, which will require new protocols, but F5 is well-positioned for this. As customers demand high performance and scalability, they increasingly turn to F5 due to our capacity to deliver these at high speed and support protocols like MC3 that are relevant to AI and particularly Agentic AI. Regarding AI security, we see a significant opportunity for F5, especially with AI runtime security, which involves safeguarding AI workloads in production. AI Layer 7 security will be crucial, as it requires examining every token to ensure it's directed appropriately and protecting against threats like malicious prompt injection. While this area may take a bit longer to develop than AI data delivery, we are already observing customers becoming increasingly aware of the need to secure their AI workloads and exploring potential solutions. Therefore, we anticipate this market will evolve, although the timing of that evolution is less certain for us.
First, just a clarification on when you talk about tech refresh, I assume you're talking about F5 to F5 legacy to modern product. Second question I have is regarding your modest price increase you've talked about phasing in. Kind of where are you in terms of that making its way through the model? And what's been the customer feedback on that relative to some of your competitors' moves?
When we refer to tech refresh, we're discussing the update of F5. We've also seen success in replacing competitors, which constitutes a different refresh strategy aimed at existing competitive customers. However, that aspect doesn't relate to the specific tech refresh we are mentioning. Regarding the price increases, we did announce one in January, and it's starting to reflect in our numbers. Customer feedback has been reasonable so far. We've observed that some of our competitors have adopted much more aggressive pricing strategies, which have upset many customers, and this has benefited us. We aim to ensure that the value we provide aligns with the price increases we implemented in January. Overall, we feel confident about our position in this regard.
Thank you for joining us today. We look forward to seeing many of you during the quarter and to discussing F5's growing role in the broader hybrid multi-cloud landscape. Thank you.
Operator
This concludes today's conference. You may disconnect your lines at this time, and we thank you for your participation.