In the coming year, F5 Networks will commit more resources to its partners than ever before, as the application delivery networking vendor sets its sites on bigger pieces of the security infrastructure, data center and cloud computing pies.

At F5 Networks' Agility conference in Chicago, where more than 560 partner representatives and 275 customers are in attendance, F5 has championed partners as the big push behind its march to $1 billion in revenue -- a milestone it expects to reach as its fiscal year ends in September.

What's coming next, said Steve McChesney, vice president, channel sales, Americas, is more from F5 in the areas of partner planning, partner marketing, partner services and partner-led profitability. Several key programs, including F5's current accreditation program and forthcoming certification offering, are designed to better equip partners taking F5 products into all pieces of the data center sale, from storage to security.

According to McChesney, F5's average deal size through partners is nearly $100,000 -- more than double of what it was a decade ago, and 10 percent larger than the previous year. McChesney urged partners to embrace the full gamut of F5 resources, including DevCentral, F5's user community portal for helping partners share best practices, built software and hear from F5 engineers.

DevCentral, said McChesney, offers access to more than 80,000 users and 500 pieces of sample material to "jumpstart" F5 projects.

Overall, F5 partners have a rich opportunity to have business transformation conversations with users on a cloud migration path. Using industry research from Enterprise Strategy Group and other sources, Dean Darwin, F5's vice president, worldwide channels identified three trends happening with customers on a worldwide basis.

First, he said, server virtualization is becoming ubiquitous, even if 58 percent of organizations have virtualized less than one third of their servers. Second, IT-owned workloads still dominate the customer landscape, and 59 percent of customers have not yet virtualized any mission-critical applications. Third, dynamic IT is still more a vision than a reality.

But those trends still reflect the reality of how channel partners need to engage customers. F5, said Darwin, solves a lot of the problems customers have at the application layer -- a point made repeatedly by other F5 executives at Agility -- and partners need to bring F5 products in as business conversations, not as product resale.

"The selling lanes have changed," Darwin said, referencing financial legend Warren Buffett's thought that "only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked."

Coming rapidly into focus, Darwin said, are that large VARs and systems integrators are building their own cloud offerings, and are looking to partner with cloud providers, such as Rackspace, as cloud services agents.

That makes all the sense in the world for F5's channel, Darwin said, because its products and services fit between so many different data center disciplines.

"And they are absolutely getting into the ring when it comes to security," he added, referencing a push by F5 to become better known as a security infrastructure player as much as it is an application delivery networking vendor.

"F5 can be a door opener for a lot of discussions," he said. "The closer you get to the application, the healthier you're going to be and the more business discussions you're going to have."

Tim Abbott, solutions architect at Trace 3, a security solution provider and F5 partner based in Irvine, Calif., said Trace 3 had in the past positioned F5 before as a load balancer, or for its Global Traffic Manager (LTM) capability in the BIG-IP platform, or any one or several capabilities the F5 product set offers. The upsell opportunity, with more customers looking to make their data centers more efficient, is enormous.

"We're only scratching the surface with their customers on all the features it can provide," he said.

Trace 3 sells the entire F5 portfolio and has seen its F5 sales grow nearly 40 percent year-over-year. F5's positioning -- for partners to focus on the business transformation that comes from optimizing applications -- is spot-on, Abbott said.

"Who cares about servers, they care about the applications," he said. "When you're virtualizing an infrastructure, you're asking what applications are you trying to virtualize and how are you making that application better to the customer. Once you figure out what applications you want to virtualize, you'll get the funding. If you can make the app faster, the doors are open. Once those doors are open, I can sell you the F5 product."

Next: F5's Vendor Partnerships Bear Fruit

Partners said that another big piece of F5's appeal is how its products can fit with those of data center-focused vendors with a big stake in the cloud computing move.

Rackspace, for example, told F5 partners Thursday it will be doing more to encourage joint F5-Rackspace solution sales.

Robert Fuller, vice president of worldwide channels, and John Engates, CTO, at Rackspace, said that hosted cloud provider will grandfather F5 partners into the tier equivalent, in Rackspace's channel program, of their F5 Unity partner program status -- an announcement that brought applause from the F5 crowd.

"Let's bridge that into the Rackspace program, so you get the high-level compensation," Engates said.

The companies will partner in other ways, too. F5 plans to credit the F5 portion of a solution hosted at Rackspace toward an F5 partner's partner tier attachment, Fuller said. There will also be joint sales development between the two companies, and payment acceleration options that let VARs draw from future compensation payments by Rackspace to offset upfront costs.

Storage ace NetApp was another F5 vendor partner at Agility touting greater vendor alignment between the two channels. Jim Sangster, senior director of solutions marketing at NetApp, said he's seeing the opportunity for NetApp storage and F5 infrastructure sales to expand, with more customers looking for seamless migration paths to cloud.

"The discussion around the applications is really what it's all about," Sangster told partners.

F5 networks this week traded up 12% higher following reports that the company retained Goldman Sachs to represent the company in the wake of apparent buyout offers. In the past, F5 has surfaced as a potential acquisition target among the tech giants such as IBM , Cisco and Juniper . As is generally the case, neither Goldman nor F5 would comment. Although no deal has arisen from any previous such talks, here are reasons as to why F5 Networks might well consider a sell-off this time. Consider the following:

1. Difficult Application Delivery Controller Market: According to Gartner, F5 Networks has remained a market leader and has seen market share gains in the ADC market in the past few years.  Also, according to past reports, the ADC market was expected to grow at a CAGR of 12.5% during 2013-2018 period. However, given that F5’s product revenue growth has averaged around 6% only in the past 3 years, they shall be overly optimistic if they assume a 10% growth for the next 5 years. According to their model, they expect F5’s product revenue to grow at an average rate of approximately 5% during this period. This is a sharp decline as compared to F5’s product revenue growth of 29% between 2010-2012.
2. Cloud based services may well disrupt the ADC market: Until a few years ago, before the popularity of cloud based services, they were clear about the fact that the ADC market size was directly proportional to the number of web applications being deployed. However, more and more applications are being deployed in the public cloud, where there is less need for a traditional load-balancer. For example, Amazon uses elastic load balancing , which is used to distribute incoming application traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 instances in the cloud, for applications using Amazon web services. Although F5’s load-balancer is customisable and is built on high-performance hardware, Amazon’s ELB is a bit different and it completely abstracts the hardware. Further, the plus point for an Amazon ELB is that it wipes out the hassle of installing and customizing a dedicated hardware for load balancing, which is a must in case of BIG-IP based products. Going ahead, cloud based load-balancers may well disrupt the traditional application delivery controller market, which can largely affect F5’s revenue growth. This is one key reason as to why they forecast F5’s product revenue to grow in mid-single digits and not experience double digit growth over the next 5 years.
3. F5 Networks stock has relatively under-performed of late: Over the past one year, the company’s stock has hovered between a high of $134 and $86. For most of the time, the stock remained below the levels of $110. This can be attributed to a weak guidance for the coming quarters and a roughly flat revenue growth during this period. Further, the company also lost a patent battle against Radware which took a bite of its earnings during this period.
4. The upcoming product refresh cycle can provide the much needed revenue growth: Though the company hasn’t provided the details of the upcoming product refresh cycle, F5 Networks is on its way for the hardware upgrade of its current line up of products. This upgrade holds the potential to boost the company’s short-term products revenue. F5’s high cash and no debt position, along with its short-term revenue growth prospects, makes it an attractive acquisition target at this time. The company can command a relatively higher premium if it sells-off itself at this point of time.

For information, please refer to our complete analysis for F5 Networks

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F5 Networks is buying startup Volterra for about $500 million for its distributed cloud services expertise. The deal will strengthen F5’s leadership position in enterprise application security and delivery, according to the company.

Application delivery specialist F5 Networks revealed its plans to acquire Volterra, a four-year old startup with an edge-as-a-service platform, for about $500 million.

The definitive agreement, announced Thursday afternoon, will involve F5 acquiring all issued and outstanding shares of privately held Volterra for approximately $440 million in cash and approximately $60 million in deferred consideration and assumed unvested incentive compensation to founders and employees, according to the two companies.

The deal will strengthen F5’s leadership position in enterprise application security and delivery. Together with the Volterra platform, F5 will be building a secure, app-driven edge platform -- Edge 2.0 -- with “unlimited scale” for enterprises and service providers, F5 said in a statement.

[Related: F5 Networks’ NGINX Portfolio Won’t Slow Down ‘Modern’ App Developers]

“Current edge solutions are simply inadequate for today’s enterprise customers. It’s time to break out of closed edge systems that only perpetuate the pain of building, running, and securing apps,” said François Locoh-Donou, president and CEO of F5 in a statement. “With Volterra, they advance their Adaptive Applications vision with an Edge 2.0 platform that solves the complex multi-cloud reality enterprise customers confront.”

Founded in Santa Clara, Calif., Volterra owns a platform that lets enterprises build, deploy, secure and operate applications and data in a uniform fashion across all public and private clouds and edge compute environments.

“The need to deliver rich digital experiences has meant that more and more of their customers are asking for expanded security and reliability features that are seamlessly integrated across their clouds and edge deployments,” Ankur Singla, Volterra‘s founder and CEO said in a blog post on the announcement. “As part of F5, they will have access to industry-leading app security capabilities to augment their unique SaaS-based networking, security and app management platform. They also get immediate access to a top-tier go-to-market team that has the deep industry experience in the app delivery and security market.”

Prior to starting Volterra, Singla founded and let software-defined networking company Contrail, which was purchased by Juniper in 2012 for $176 million.

As a result of the deal, F5 is expanding its total revenue growth expectations for its fiscal years 2021 and 2022. F5 is also repeating its commitment to $1 billion in share repurchases in the next two years, including a $500 million accelerated share repurchase in fiscal year 2021.

Given its better prospects, they believe Ciena stock (NYSE: CIEN), a network hardware, software, and services provider, is a better pick than its sector peer, F5 Networks stock (NASDAQ NDAQ : FFIV), an application security and cloud networking company. Investors have assigned a higher valuation multiple of 3.7x revenues for FFIV compared to 1.5x revenues for CIEN due to F5’s superior revenue growth and profitability. The decision to invest often comes down to finding the best stocks within the parameters of certain characteristics that suit an investment style. The size of profits can matter, as larger profits can imply greater market power. In the sections below, they discuss why they believe that CIEN will offer better returns than FFIV in the next three years. They compare a slew of factors, such as historical revenue growth, stock returns, and valuation, in an interactive dashboard analysis of F5 vs. Ciena CIEN : Which Stock Is A Better Bet? Parts of the analysis are summarized below.

FFIV stock has seen little change, moving slightly from levels of $175 in early January 2021 to around $175 now, while CIEN stock has seen a decline of 20% from levels of $55 to around $45 over the same period. In comparison, the S&P500 index saw an increase of about 25% over this roughly three-year period.

Overall, the performance of FFIV stock with respect to the index has been lackluster. Returns for the stock were 39% in 2021, -41% in 2022, and 21% in 2023. Similarly, however, the decrease in CIEN stock has been far from consistent. Returns for the stock were 46% in 2021, -34% in 2022, and -13% in 2023. In comparison, returns for the S&P 500 have been 27% in 2021, -19% in 2022, and 23% in 2023 - indicating that FFIV and CIEN underperformed the S&P in 2022 and 2023.

In fact, consistently beating the S&P 500 - in good times and bad - has been difficult over exact years for individual stocks; for heavyweights in the Information Technology sector, including AAPL, MSFT, and NVDA, and even for the megacap stars GOOG, TSLA, and AMZN. In contrast, the Trefis High Quality Portfolio, with a collection of 30 stocks, has outperformed the S&P 500 each year over the same period. Why is that? As a group, HQ Portfolio stocks provided better returns with less risk versus the benchmark index, less of a roller-coaster ride, as evident in HQ Portfolio performance metrics.

Given the current uncertain macroeconomic environment with high oil prices and elevated interest rates, could FFIV and CIEN face a similar situation as they did in 2022 and 2023 and underperform the S&P over the next 12 months - or will they see a strong jump? While they expect both stocks to move higher in the next three years, they think CIEN will fare better.

1. F5’s Revenue Growth Is Better

• F5’s revenue growth has been better, with a 6.2% average annual growth rate in the last three years, compared to 0.6% for Ciena.
• FFIV revenues rose from $2.4 billion in fiscal 2020 (fiscal ends in September) to $2.8 billion in 2023, led by services and product revenue growth due to increasing demand and entry into new markets.
• For Ciena, revenue increased from $3.5 billion in fiscal 2020 (fiscal ends in October) to $4.4 billion in 2023, led by continued growth in Global Services Platform Software and Services, while the Networking Platforms business also saw a rebound in fiscal 2023.
• Supply chain issues weighed on the company’s overall performance in the exact past, and it still remains a concern.
• Ciena expects its routing and switching business to grow faster in the coming years and drive the overall top-line growth.
• If they look at the last twelve-month period revenues, Ciena fares better with sales growth of 14% vs. 5% for F5.
• Our F5 Revenue Comparison and Ciena Revenue Comparison dashboards provide more insight into the companies’ sales.
• Looking forward, they expect Ciena to see better sales growth than F5. They forecast F5’s top-line to expand at a CAGR of 3.4% to $3.1 billion in three years, while Ciena will likely see its sales rise in a mid-single-digit average annual growth rate to $5.3 billion over this period, based on Trefis Machine Learning analysis.

2. F5 Is More Profitable

• F5’s operating margin declined from 23.1% in 2019 to 15.0% in 2022, while Ciena’s operating margin contracted from 14.5% in fiscal 2020 to 8.8% in 2023.
• Looking at the last twelve-month period, F5’s operating margin of 14.6% fares better than 8.8% for Ciena.
• F5’s margin metric has been weighed down due to a rise in component costs.
• Our F5 Operating Income Comparison and Ciena’s Operating Income Comparison dashboards have more details.
• Looking at financial risk, F5 fares better. F5 is a debt-free company, while Ciena’s debt as a percentage of equity is around 24%. However, Ciena’s 22% cash as a percentage of assets is higher than 13% for F5, implying that F5 has a better debt position and Ciena has more cash cushion.

3. The Net of It All

• We see that F5 has seen better revenue growth and is more profitable.
• Now, looking at prospects using P/S as a base, due to high fluctuations in P/E and P/EBIT, they believe Ciena will offer higher returns in the next three years.
• Also, if they compare the current valuation multiples to the historical averages, CIEN fares better. F5 stock is trading at 3.7x revenues compared to its last five-year average of 4.3x. In comparison, Ciena stock trades at 1.7x revenues vs. the last five-year average of 2.2x.
• Our F5 Valuation Ratios Comparison and Ciena Valuation Ratios Comparison have more details.
• The table below summarizes their revenue and return expectations for both companies over the next three years and points to an expected return of -12% for FFIV over this period vs. a 31% expected return for CIEN, based on Trefis Machine Learning analysis – F5 vs. Ciena – which also provides more details on how they arrive at these numbers.

While CIEN stock may outperform FFIV, it is helpful to see how F5’s peers fare on metrics that matter. You will find other valuable comparisons for companies across industries at Peer Comparisons.

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Despite the stock performing well over the past five months, F5, Inc.'s (NASDAQ:FFIV) returns in 2023 are still only in line with broader indices. This is counter to my expectation of poor performance due to:

• Declining product sales in the face of backlog headwinds.
• Depressed margins as a result of investment in new product lines.
• Questionable prospects for new product lines.

While system sales are expected to drop sharply going forward and F5's new businesses have so far demonstrated limited traction, margins have rebounded sharply due to F5's focus on expenses. This, along with a modest valuation, has helped F5's stock perform strongly in the second half of 2023.

Market

F5 stated on its fourth quarter earnings call that the demand environment has shown signs of stabilization, particularly amongst enterprise customers. F5's hardware orders reportedly rebounded in the fourth quarter, supporting this view. In terms of verticals, technology and financial services customers were areas of strength, offset by service provider weakness. Service providers are delaying asset purchases and prioritizing spending.

F5 expects continued growth in FY2024, driven by automation and generative AI. F5 also believes that customers will be forced to begin investing in application infrastructure again. Given the boom in hardware spending over the past three years it is not obvious that this will be the case though. Some customers have obviously delayed purchases due to financial pressure, but I would be surprised if this represents a majority, or even a significant minority of customers.

F5

F5 provides a range of solutions that help to deliver, secure and optimize applications and APIs across any environment. It has both hardware and software offerings, many of which have come through acquisitions. F5 is still in the process of integrating these solutions into a converged solution though.

This is change that has been necessitated by the growing importance of the cloud and edge computing, which has changed how applications are developed and deployed. While F5 has positioned itself to remain relevant, there is a large amount of uncertainty regarding what extent acquisitions will offset structural headwinds to F5's legacy business.

F5's Distributed Cloud Services offering now has over 500 customers, more than a 200% increase YoY. Penetration has predominantly been within F5's existing customer base so far though, with only 29% of Distributed Cloud customers new to F5. WAF and multi-cloud networking are F5's first two distributed cloud solutions. CDN capabilities were also recently added through the acquisitions of Lilac, and F5 has a backlog of other services it wants to add to the platform.

F5 is seeing continued adoption of NGINX amongst larger enterprises for their cloud and Kubernetes workloads. Customers are also leveraging NGINX for app layer security for containers. NGINX serves modern, container-native and microservices-based applications and APIs.

While F5's ADC business will continue to face headwinds, the company continues to invest in it, and as a result, expects to take a share in both hardware and software form factors. F5 aims to provide on-prem deployments with the benefits of the cloud (multi-tenancy, rapid upgrades, etc.) while lowering total cost of ownership. F5's rSeries and VELOS platforms represented more than 80% of Q4 systems bookings. rSeries is designed on a new microservices-based platform layer and an API-first architecture. It supports BIG-IP app delivery and security services and aims to lower costs through consolidation. VELOS is a next-generation chassis system that aims to provide performance and scalability in a single ADC. Customers can scale capacity by adding modular blades in a chassis, without disrupting users or applications.

Security is an important part of F5's business, contributing approximately 1.1 billion USD revenue in FY2023. F5 was disappointed with the performance of its most advanced anti-bot and anti-fraud managed service solutions this year, which it attributed to customer spending caution and budget scrutiny. F5 has reportedly seen good traction with its lower-end Distributed Cloud anti-bot offering though, as well as from security on NGINX.

AI

Like most edge computing companies, F5 is counting on AI inference workloads to provide a tailwind. Organizations will need to support inference across datacenters, public clouds and the network edge, which F5 believes it is positioned to support. While inference could begin to create incremental demand in 2024, I think it is still too early for this to be material for companies like F5.

F5 also expects the use of AI to accelerate growth in the number of applications and APIs, which would naturally be a tailwind for F5's business. The number of applications is likely to be limited by demand rather than supply though. Applications require users and organizations must acquire these users, the real bottleneck to growth in most cases.

Financial Analysis

F5's fourth quarter revenue was 707 million USD, a 1% increase YoY, with 54% of revenue coming from services and 46% from product. Services revenue grew 9% on the back of high maintenance renewals and price increases. Service revenue is likely to moderate going forward as F5 laps price increases and spending on upgrades versus maintenance normalizes. Product revenue increased 7% YoY, with systems revenue down 25% due to lower backlog related shipments.

Backlog has now returned to normal levels, which will present roughly a 180 million USD revenue headwind in FY2024.

BIG-IP and NGINX term subscriptions were up 9% in FY23. SaaS (includes Distributed Cloud) and managed services only increased 2% though. F5 has stated that it is seeing solid momentum from its Distributed Cloud business, but this isn't apparent in public data. Some of this is the result of planned revenue churn. Managed services include F5's legacy Silverline offering as well as some legacy SaaS solutions. F5 is currently in the process of migrating customers from its Silverline solution to the Distributed Cloud offering, which is creating headwinds. The company is also abandoning some legacy SaaS offerings from the companies it acquired. This process involves 65 million USD ARR in total, half of which is from offerings that F5 is retiring completely. The process is expected to be completed over the next year. F5's perpetual license software revenue was also down in FY2023, although the company attributed this to an unusually strong prior year.

F5 expects customer caution to continue in FY2024 but also believes that customers will need to begin replacing assets again in the next year. Software is expected to provide flat to modest revenue growth due to headwinds from the transition of SaaS and managed service offerings. Global services revenue is expected to return to low-single-digit growth as F5 laps price increases. As a result, FY2024 revenue is expected to be flat to down low-single-digits YoY. F5 expects to return to mid-single-digit revenue growth in FY2025 though.

While F5 has suggested that supply chain issues have largely resolved and delivery times normalized, F5's product margins remain depressed. How much if this is due to revenue mix, versus declining system or software margins is unclear though. This is an important trend to watch as F5 needs to maintain high gross profit margins to support investment in its security and distributed cloud businesses.

While gross profit margins remain under pressure, F5's operating profit margins have rebounded sharply in exact quarters, with much of the change driven by improved sales and marketing efficiency.

F5 has been focused on reducing its operating expenses, but given the company's ambitions, it still needs to invest in product development and customer acquisition. How these dynamics play out in coming quarters will have a large impact on F5's share price going forward.

Conclusion

Despite the stock moving around 20% higher over the past two months, F5 still appears reasonably valued, with the company's EV/S multiple towards the lower end of its historical range. Investors need to weigh its valuation against uncertain growth prospects and the potential for margin compression as the company invests in growth initiatives. The fact that software revenue has been fairly flat over the past 15 months and is expected to remain fairly flat over the next 12 months is hardly comforting. The exact drop in sales and marketing expenses also isn't suggestive of a company capitalizing on a large growth opportunity. F5's internal expectations are for long-term software growth in excess of 20%, offset by high to mid-single digit systems revenue decline. If F5's distributed cloud business struggles, the stock could still prove expensive at current levels.