F5 2024年度报告

François Locoh-Donou President, CEO, and Director, F5, Inc. TO OUR SHAREHOLDERS, CUSTOMERS, AND PARTNERS: In 2024, our world faced substantial challenges including ongoing conflicts and violence in the Middle Eastand Ukraine, increasing geopolitical tensions, persistent high interest rates, climate-related disasters, and tradefragmentation. For our customers—the largest enterprises, service providers, and government entities across theglobe—this environment led to budget uncertainty and extreme spending caution, characteristics that definedF5’s demand environment for 2023 and the start of 2024. F5’s technology underpins the applications that keep businesses running and enable millions of consumers tobank, shop, communicate, and manage their day-to-day lives. Our software, hardware, and software-as-a-service(SaaS) solutions ensure applications worldwide are performant and secure. As a result, we have a first-hand viewto the mounting IT infrastructure complexity facing our customers: the number of applications their businessesdepend on is growing, the services required to keep those applications secure and performant are expanding,and the environments their IT teams operate across are increasing. In addition, cybersecurity risks are escalatingand the power of AI and everything it brings with it, including more infrastructure complexity and security risk, isupon them. Individually, any one of these dynamics would be a challenge for our customers’ IT teams. The fact that they areall happening simultaneously means that the status quo is untenable. At F5, we foresaw this mounting complexity,which we describe as the “Ball of Fire,” and for the last several years, we have been investing and innovating toensure we are ready to address it for our customers. F5 is the only company capable of securing, delivering, and optimizing any application and any API, regardlessof its location or environment—be it in a data center, any one of the public clouds, or at the network edge. Withcustomers worldwide increasingly leveraging hybrid multicloud strategies—sharing data and applications acrosson-premises data centers, private cloud storage, and public cloud platforms—F5’s capabilities stand apart. Amidst a complex web of environments and solutions, F5 empowers our customers to establish a consistentsecurity posture across all their applications, enhancing security, streamlining operations, and reducingcosts. Moreover, we are unifying our solutions to provide customers with unprecedented levels of visibility,manageability, and automation. Today, F5 is differentiated in three critical areas: First, in application and API security. F5 delivers the most effective and comprehensive application and APIsecurity platform in the industry. We enable our customers to consolidate point products targeting specificthreats onto a single, integrated platform with a suite of best-in-class capabilities. In 2024, several industryexperts acknowledged F5’s leadership including IDC, who recognized F5 as a WAAP (web application firewalland API protection) leader, noting F5’s capabilities exceeded all other players in the space. SecureIQLab,TrustRadius, KuppingerCole, and Gartner also recognized F5’s WAAP capabilities in 2024. Second, by enabling simplification. F5 enables the hybrid multicloud flexibility our customers’ businessesdemand with the simplicity their IT operations require. Only F5 delivers solutions that extend across publicclouds, to the edge, and customers’ on-premises environments. Our solutions simplify connecting disparateinfrastructure environments and the applications deployed in and across them. And third, by delivering standardization and automation. F5’s solutions enable more cost-effective and scalableIT operations. We streamline customers’ operations with consistent policies, comprehensive automation, andrich analytics. This enables customers to consolidate vendors and toolsets, rationalize operational silos, andautomate lifecycle management of their on-premises deployments. While we were confident that hybrid multicloud environments would become the norm and that our portfolio wasuniquely suited to address our customers’ escalating hybrid multicloud challenges, given the macro environmentand customers’ persistent spending caution, we guided for fiscal year 2024 revenue that was down slightly year-over-year. Over the course of the fiscal year, customer budgets and spending began to stabilize. By the endof the year, customers were moving forward with delayed technology refreshes and modernization projects,and they were choosing F5 because of our unique value proposition and strong alignment with their hybridmulticloud strategies. Proudly, I can say that we delivered $2.8 billion in fiscal year 2024 revenue, representing year-over-year growth,driven by 11% software revenue growth and 4% global services revenue growth which offset 20% systems revenuedeclines. In addition, as a result of our revenue performance combi