F5 is an application delivery and security company focused on helping organizations keep apps and APIs fast, available, and secure across on-premises, cloud, edge, and hybrid multicloud environments. Its F5 Application Delivery and Security Platform unifies traffic management, policy enforcement, security, analytics, and automation across hardware, software, SaaS, and cloud-native deployment models.
The portfolio spans established BIG-IP deployments, the newer BIG-IP Next architecture, F5 Distributed Cloud Services, F5 NGINX software, AI security offerings, and purpose-built systems such as F5 rSeries Appliance and F5 VELOS Chassis System. F5 serves enterprises and service providers that need consistent delivery and protection for traditional, modern, and increasingly AI-enabled applications.
Offerings, Capabilities, and Integrations
F5 delivers application delivery and security capabilities that cover traffic management, load balancing, application and API protection, secure access, network security, DNS, observability, and centralized policy control. Its approach is built to support mixed environments where legacy applications, cloud-native services, APIs, and AI workloads must operate under consistent performance and security standards.
F5 supports deployment in physical, virtual, SaaS, and managed cloud service form factors. Its offerings are designed to work with CI/CD workflows, Kubernetes-based environments, multicloud architectures, and broader partner ecosystems for automation, analytics, and cloud operations. This makes F5 relevant to teams that need to standardize delivery and security controls without forcing all applications into a single infrastructure model.
Products and Services
- F5 Application Delivery and Security Platform: A converged platform for application delivery and security that unifies policy, visibility, and control across on-premises, cloud, edge, and hybrid multicloud environments.
- F5 BIG-IP: F5’s core application delivery and security portfolio for traffic management, availability, access, and protection of business-critical applications and APIs.
- BIG-IP Next: The next-generation BIG-IP software architecture, built to extend core application delivery and security services with greater automation and modern operational alignment.
- F5 Distributed Cloud Services: SaaS-delivered networking, security, and application operations services for deploying, connecting, securing, and operating workloads across distributed environments.
- F5 NGINX: A suite for modern application and API delivery that supports load balancing, reverse proxying, ingress, API connectivity, management, and security for cloud-native environments.
- F5 AI Guardrails: AI runtime security software that provides data protection, governance, observability, and policy enforcement for AI models, applications, and agents.
- F5 AI Red Team: An automated AI security testing offering that simulates adversarial attacks, exposes vulnerabilities, and produces actionable remediation insights for AI systems.
- F5 rSeries Appliance: A next-generation hardware platform for BIG-IP services with API-first architecture, automation support, SSL offload, and consolidated application delivery performance.
- F5 VELOS Chassis System: A high-performance chassis platform built for large-scale application delivery, security, and resilient handling of demanding high-throughput workloads.
- NGINX One: A SaaS-enhanced NGINX offering that combines core NGINX data plane software with observability, management, and security capabilities.
- BIG-IQ Centralized Management: A centralized management platform for BIG-IP that provides orchestration, analytics, compliance support, and policy consistency across physical and virtual deployments.
Target Customers
F5 targets organizations that run mission-critical applications and APIs across complex environments. Its core buyers include networking, infrastructure, platform engineering, security, and operations teams that need to balance performance, resilience, governance, and risk across hybrid multicloud estates.
The company is especially relevant to large enterprises, service providers, and public sector organizations, as well as businesses in regulated and digitally intensive industries such as financial services, healthcare, ecommerce, manufacturing, and technology. It also appeals to organizations modernizing application portfolios, standardizing API security, or building AI-enabled services that require stronger runtime protection and traffic control.
Cloud Integrations and Marketplace
- AWS Marketplace: F5 maintains a direct presence in AWS Marketplace, including seller listings for F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition and F5 Distributed Cloud Services, giving customers cloud-based procurement options for application delivery and security.
- Azure Marketplace: F5 has an established Azure Marketplace presence spanning BIG-IP Virtual Edition, F5 Distributed Cloud Services, Customer Edge, and related management and NGINX offerings for Azure deployments.
- Google Cloud Marketplace: F5 has a verified presence tied to Google Cloud, including marketplace availability for F5 NGINXaaS for Google Cloud and broader F5 solutions supporting multicloud application delivery, security, and AI-related connectivity use cases.
Key People
- François Locoh-Donou: Chairman, President, & CEO
- Tom Fountain: Chief Operating Officer
- Cooper Werner: Chief Financial Officer
- Chad Whalen: Chief Revenue Officer
- Kunal Anand: Chief Product Officer
- John Maddison: Chief Marketing Officer
- Alvina Antar: Chief Digital Officer
- Christopher Burger: Chief Information Security Officer
- Michael Montoya: Chief Technology Operations Officer
- Angelique M. Okeke: Executive Vice President and General Counsel, and Interim Chief People Officer
Key Facts
- Headquarters: Seattle, Washington, United States
- Employees: 6,578
- Annual Revenue: $3.09 billion
- Parent Company: None
- Subsidiaries: 20+ subsidiaries, including Shape Security, Inc., NGINX International Ltd., F5 Networks Australia Pty Ltd., F5 Networks Canada, Ltd., and F5 Government Solutions LLC.
- Publicly Listed: NASDAQ: FFIV
Analyst Recognitions
- Gartner: 2025 Gartner Innovation Guide for Generative AI Engineering — Emerging Visionary in the Emerging Market Quadrant. 2025 Gartner Market Guide for Edge Distribution Platforms — Representative Vendor.
- Forrester: The Forrester Wave™: Bot Management Software, Q3 2024 — Strong Performer.
- IDC: IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Web Application and API Protection Enterprise Platforms 2024 Vendor Assessment — Leader.
