F5, INC. (FFIV) Business

Item 1.Business

General

F5 is a multicloud application delivery and security provider committed to bringing a better digital world to life. F5 partners with the world’s largest, most advanced organizations to optimize and secure every application and Application Programming Interface ("API") anywhere, including on-premises, in the cloud, and at the network edge. F5 enables businesses to continuously stay ahead of threats while delivering exceptional, secure digital experiences for their customers.

Our application delivery and security solutions are available in a range of deployment and consumption models. We sell packaged software in perpetual, subscription, and usage-based consumption models. We also sell our solutions in software-as-a-service ("SaaS") and managed services deployment models with subscription and usage-based consumption models. In addition, we sell high-performance systems, or hardware, as well as a broad range of global services including maintenance, consulting, training and other technical support services.

Our customers include large enterprise businesses, public sector institutions, governments, and service providers. We conduct our business globally and manage our business by geography. Our business is organized into three primary geographic regions: Americas; Europe, the Middle East, and Africa ("EMEA"); and the Asia Pacific region ("APAC").

F5 was incorporated in 1996 and is headquartered in Seattle, Washington. Our website is www.f5.com and through a link on the Investor Relations section of our website, we make available the following filings as soon as reasonably possible after they are electronically filed with or furnished to the Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC"): our Annual Report on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, Current Reports on Form 8-K, and any amendments to those reports filed or furnished pursuant to Section 13(a) or 15(d) of the Exchange Act. All such filings are available free of charge. The information posted on our website is not incorporated into this report.

Cyber Incident

On October 15, 2025, we disclosed a security incident in which a threat actor maintained long-term, persistent access to F5 systems, and exfiltrated certain files, referred to as the "Cyber Incident." For further information about the Cyber Incident, see "Risk Factors" included in Item 1A of Part I of this Annual Report on Form 10-K, and "Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations - Cyber Incident" included in Item 7 of Part II of this Annual Report on Form 10-K.

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Strategy and Priorities

We deliver a broad portfolio of solutions to help customers address the complexity and risk in today’s hybrid multicloud IT environments. We are able to deliver on this strategy through our solutions portfolio, specifically our F5 BIG-IP, F5 NGINX, and F5 Distributed Cloud Services product families, which deliver a range of integrated, application and delivery services leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities that support application performance and protect legacy, modern, and AI-powered applications and APIs across the data center, public clouds, and edge locations.

Key components of our strategy include:

Solving multicloud application delivery and security challenges

Our F5 BIG-IP family delivers essential application delivery and security services, ensuring applications operate efficiently and securely. It is optimized for traditional applications whether deployed on premises, in co-located data centers, or in cloud environments. Our F5 NGINX family also delivers essential application delivery and security services but is optimized for modern, container-native and microservices-based applications and APIs. Our F5 Distributed Cloud Services is a portfolio of SaaS and managed services designed for both traditional and modern applications where a SaaS deployment model is preferred. With our comprehensive portfolio, we are the only provider capable of supporting customers’ modern and legacy application delivery and security needs across any environment — on premises, co-located, in a cloud or at the edge.

Transforming how customers experience F5

We continue to leverage and grow our foundational capabilities in data and insights, digital sales, and SaaS-delivered capabilities to deliver consistent world-class customer experiences, including simple, integrated and friction-free consumption of our solutions. We will continue to improve customer awareness and understanding of F5’s portfolio with a focus on both user and buying personas, and business needs. We intend to enhance our digital customer experiences to deliver both growth and efficiency.

F5 is leveraging AI to accelerate the strength of both our current and future offerings. F5 uses AI in its application delivery and security solutions to support performance and efficacy. Today, our customers are able to further benefit from our four-pronged AI strategy. First, our current portfolio is solving security and performance challenges associated with AI model training and inference and in support of AI-driven workloads. We are selling F5 solutions in support of AI data delivery, AI runtime security and AI factory load balancing use cases. Second, we are leveraging AI models in our current data fabric in order to enhance our existing products. Third, we are innovating to create new offerings based on the rapidly evolving application and data security landscapes and the customer needs associated with these changes. Finally, we are pursuing partnerships with global leaders in AI to help deliver and secure AI workloads.

In response to customers' growing preference for a platform approach, in 2025 we introduced the F5 Application Delivery and Security Platform ("ADSP"). The F5 ADSP aims to unify high-performance traffic management with advanced application and API security at scale across hybrid and multicloud environments. Unlike fragmented point solutions, the F5 ADSP is purpose-built to simplify hybrid multicloud complexity. With the F5 ADSP, we aim to leverage the full strength of our broad portfolio with capabilities to enhance security, scalability, and operational efficiency while enabling key capabilities such as policy management, analytics, and automation.

Capturing growth in security and SaaS

We continue to invest in expanding our SaaS-based F5 Distributed Cloud Services. Our F5 Distributed Cloud Services console extends visibility and simplifies management for F5 BIG-IP and F5 NGINX customers. With F5 Distributed Cloud Services, we enable customers to optimize application deployment across public, private, and edge clouds, providing flexibility in location and architecture while reducing the operational complexity of delivering and securing applications.

F5 Products and Solutions

F5’s portfolio of multicloud application delivery and security technologies enables customers to address the challenges of delivering differentiated digital experiences while safeguarding their applications across complex hybrid and multicloud environments. Our infrastructure-agnostic approach ensures customers can create a unified and optimized experience across diverse IT environments. We sell application delivery and security solutions for web application and API protection, hybrid multicloud networking, enterprise AI delivery and security, application migration, application modernization, zero trust architecture and post quantum cryptography readiness. Our product portfolio includes solutions across the following product families: F5 Distributed Cloud Services, F5 NGINX, F5 BIG-IP.

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F5 Distributed Cloud Services. A unified, security, networking, and application management service that enables customers to deploy, secure, and operate their applications wherever they may reside, regardless of platform or architecture. F5 Distributed Cloud Services leverages the F5 Global Network, a purpose-built, cloud-based, global private backbone to deliver performance, reliability, and control across hybrid, multicloud, or edge environments. F5 Distributed Cloud Service offerings are available as packaged software and SaaS-based consumption models and include the following:

•F5 Distributed Cloud Web App and API Protection ("WAAP"). A comprehensive SaaS-based security solution, F5 Distributed Cloud WAAP allows our customers to accelerate time-to-service, lower total cost of ownership, and increase security efficacy on a cloud native platform that is fully integrated across a single policy engine and management console. F5 Distributed Cloud WAAP can be leveraged through multiple deployment options, allowing organizations to simplify security and improve visibility while reducing operational complexity. The solution provides the following F5 application security technologies:

•Advanced Web Application Firewall ("WAF") capabilities through the F5 WAF engine available on BIG-IP and NGINX, allows our customers to quickly apply, secure, and manage uniform comprehensive security policies at scale, across data centers, public or private clouds, and edge computing environments.

•Mitigation against OSI Model Layer 3-Layer 7 application-based and volumetric DDoS attacks through advanced F5 Distributed Cloud DDoS Mitigation, a managed, cloud-delivered mitigation service that detects and mitigates large-scale network, SSL, and application-targeted attacks in real time.

•Enhanced API security, which leverages machine-based learning, auto-discovery, and anomaly detection, which automates the entire process of finding, securing, and monitoring APIs for anomalous behavior.

•Next-generation, AI enabled bot mitigation through F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense provides our customers the ability to defend applications and APIs from automated attacks. The solution leverages AI to analyze massive amounts of traffic and machine learning to ensure sustainable bot prediction models with high efficacy.

•Protection from sophisticated account takeover attempts.

•F5 Distributed Cloud Multi-Cloud Networking ("MCN"). Our MCN solutions simplifies networking with an integrated service stack that securely connects both networks and application workloads, lowering operational costs and increasing agility. Under our MCN solutions we offer the following product solution:

•F5 Distributed Cloud Network Connect. A networking solution that offers easy, secure, and consolidated connectivity across public and hybrid clouds, data centers, and edge sites. It provides unified policies and single-pane-of-glass management, reducing complexity and increasing efficiency, including full multi-tenancy and segmentation, enabling self-service capabilities for DevOps, NetOps and SecOps. Network Connect automates the configuration of native public cloud networking resources and seamlessly connects multiple clouds using site-to-site connectivity over a private backbone or the F5 Global Network.

•F5 Distributed Cloud App Connect. An application delivery and deployment solution for application-level connectivity across various cloud providers and regions. App Connect offers orchestrated awareness for API endpoints on all connected clusters, allowing cross-cluster service discovery and advertisement for seamless app-to-app communication with fine-grained API control. Connections between sites are self-maintaining, redundant, and fully automated, which reduces the need for administrative tasks such as establishing VPNs and routing. App Connect provides end-to-end visibility for customers, who can choose their underlying transport, including the F5 Global Network.

•F5 Distributed Cloud DNS. A cloud-based Domain Name System ("DNS") solution that offers DNS delivery across multicloud environments and modern applications. F5 Distributed Cloud DNS can be distributed globally as either a primary or secondary DNS, providing authoritative DDoS protection, Domain Name System Security Extensions ("DNSSEC"), and the flexibility to automatically scale to meet our customers growing application demands.

•F5 Distributed Cloud CDN. A high-performance, multicloud and edge focused content delivery network ("CDN") solution that allows our customers to efficiently connect, secure, and optimize applications and workloads across multi- and hybrid-cloud environments through efficiently leveraging the integrated tools and technologies in the F5 Distributed Cloud Platform. F5 Distributed Cloud CDN can be purchased with other F5 Distributed Cloud offerings or as a stand-alone service.

•F5 Distributed Cloud App Stack. A SaaS-based solution that provides our customers the ability to deploy and orchestrate applications on a managed Kubernetes platform with centralized management of distributed applications through a single pane of glass. F5 Distributed Cloud App Stack simplifies the management of application deployments as one across on-premises, cloud, and edge locations.

F5 NGINX. Built from the F5 NGINX open-source software that powers hundreds of millions of websites and applications across the world, our F5 NGINX technology suite delivers a lightweight, agile ADC and API connectivity solution

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for modern, container-native, micro-services-based applications and APIs. F5 NGINX delivers a range of capabilities including web server, load balancer, proxy, API gateways and caches in packaged software subscription consumption models. F5 NGINX product offerings include the following:

•F5 NGINX Plus. F5 NGINX Plus, our all-in-one, high performance load balancer, web server, content cache, and API gateway for modern applications, is offered as packaged software in a subscription consumption model. F5 NGINX Plus software delivers cloud-native, Kubernetes-friendly solutions that drive mission-critical applications and APIs with scalability, visibility, security, and governance. F5 NGINX Plus can be easily integrated into enterprise application workflows and CI/CD pipelines, as well as automation frameworks and ecosystems. F5 NGINX Plus is lightweight and can be used as a per-application ADC, but also scalable and performant enough for an enterprise’s largest and most critical applications. F5 NGINX Plus is also offered as a fully managed native service on the Microsoft Azure Cloud allowing teams to lift-and-shift their applications to the cloud with no configuration change removing the operational burden of self-managed instances from teams.

•F5 NGINX One Console. The F5 NGINX One Console is a unified SaaS management platform designed to streamline the deployment, configuration, monitoring, and administration of NGINX instances across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Tailored for organizations leveraging NGINX for modern application delivery, the NGINX One Console provides centralized visibility and real-time analytics to optimize application performance, ensure security, and monitor traffic flows. Its intuitive interface simplifies the management of NGINX instances and supports automated workflows, integration with DevOps pipelines, and role-based access controls ("RBAC"). By empowering teams to manage containerized and microservices-based applications efficiently, the NGINX One Console enables enterprises to deliver reliable, scalable, and secure applications in increasingly distributed environments.

•F5 NGINX Ingress Controller. The F5 NGINX Ingress Controller provides traffic management for Kubernetes clusters. This solution is deployed at the central point of entry into a Kubernetes cluster and reduces complexity, increases uptime, and provides better insights into application health and performance at scale. This offering is sold in a subscription consumption model that scales with the customer’s Kubernetes cluster size.

•F5 WAF for NGINX. F5 WAF for NGINX is a comprehensive WAF security and denial-of-service ("DoS") defense solution designed to protect applications and API’s from advanced Layer 7 attacks. It is a lightweight solution that seamlessly integrates into DevOps environments and is platform-agnostic running across distributed architectures and hybrid environments to deliver consistent protection. It can be used in a variety of the use cases where F5 NGINX Plus is deployed and integrate easily into CI/CD pipelines for automation. F5 WAF for NGINX can be added to subscriptions and is bundled into "advanced" offerings for F5 NGINX Ingress Controller.

F5 BIG-IP. Our F5 BIG-IP family of product offerings provide feature-rich, highly programmable and configurable application delivery and security solutions for legacy applications in enterprises and service providers. Also known as traditional applications, legacy applications are based on monolithic, three-tier, or client-server architectures. Such legacy applications are the most ubiquitous application architecture today, and many organizations continue to rely exclusively on legacy applications to power the most mission-critical business applications, customer-facing digital interfaces and internally used applications. For most organizations, the priority around legacy applications is maximizing operational efficiency and minimizing the total cost of ownership. F5 BIG-IP's "best-of-suite" approach helps standardize and consolidate application delivery and security functions into a single solution, automating functions and reducing operational cost. The F5 BIG-IP family of products includes packaged software, which are available in subscription and perpetual consumption models, and F5 BIG-IP system offerings.

•F5 BIG-IP Packaged Software. F5 BIG-IP packaged software includes a growing portfolio of products that provide the performance and security to deliver applications to end users. F5 BIG-IP Packaged Software offerings include the following:

•F5 BIG-IP Security. F5 BIG-IP application security products include F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager that secures and protects user access to applications, F5 BIG-IP Advanced Web Application Firewall that protects applications with behavioral analytics, bot defense and application layer encryption, and F5 BIG-IP SSL Orchestrator that maximizes infrastructure security with encryption/decryption and traffic steering. We also offer F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager which drives accurate detection with machine learning, stress monitoring, dynamic signatures, and attack mitigation, F5 BIG-IP Carrier Grade NAT which provides carrier-grade scalability with a high number of IP address translations, fast network address translation setup rates and high-speed logging, and F5 BIG-IP DDoS Hybrid Defender which delivers advanced cloud and on-premises DDoS defenses to ensure real-time protection against volumetric DDoS threats and dynamic network and applications attacks.

•F5 BIG-IP Application Delivery. F5 BIG-IP Application Delivery products include F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager which manages network traffic ensuring applications are always fast, available, and secure; F5 BIG-IP DNS which provides hyperscale and security during high query volumes and DNS DDoS attacks; F5 BIG-IP Policy Enforcement Manager which improves network performance through effective policy management; and F5

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BIG-IP Next for Kubernetes which supports ingress and egress traffic management for integration to multiple networks.

•F5 BIG-IP Automation Tool Chain. F5 BIG-IP Automation Tool Chain is a set of automation tools that make it faster and easier to deploy and configure F5 application services. Via the F5 Automation Tool Chain, F5 BIG-IP capabilities easily integrate into orchestration frameworks such as Ansible, HashiCorp Terraform, OpenShift, and Cloud Foundry as part of a CI/CD pipeline.

•F5 BIG-IQ Centralized Management. F5 BIG-IQ simplifies, enhances management of, and reduces customer operational costs associated with F5 BIG-IP deployments through central management, analytics, and automation for F5 BIG-IP instances.

•F5 BIG-IP Systems. F5 BIG-IP systems are designed to enhance the performance of our software by leveraging a combination of custom field-programmable gate array ("FPGA") logic and off-the-shelf silicon, providing customers a balance of cost and flexibility. All of our systems run all available F5 BIG-IP software modules. Our next-generation hardware, rSeries systems and VELOS chassis and blades are designed to enable enhanced automation and multi-tenancy, a capability that enables running multiple versions of F5 BIG-IP software on the same system thereby making it easy to migrate from one version to another with minimal or no downtime.

Competition

As F5 expands its reach and role into a broader set of hybrid multicloud application delivery and security solutions, our competitive set evolves and includes vendors with capabilities associated with application delivery, application security, and multicloud networking.

The principal competitive factors in the markets in which we compete include deployment model, consumption model, ecosystem integrations, features and performance, customer support, brand recognition, scope of distribution and sales channels, and pricing. We believe we generally compete favorably on the basis of these factors because of our robust solutions and services, our ability to deliver and secure any application, and any API, anywhere, and our platform approach.

To provide a unified experience across all our offerings, we have introduced the F5 ADSP. With the F5 ADSP, customers can leverage the full strength of our broad portfolio with capabilities to enhance security, scalability, and operational efficiency while enabling key capabilities such as policy management, analytics, and automation.

While customers broadly are expressing increasing preference for a platform approach that simplifies complexity and eliminates operational burden, we also compete on a point-solution basis. Within application delivery, our customers have the best of both worlds: reliability that F5’s always been known for – across any environment from on-premises to multicloud; and agility and flexibility enabled by lightweight modern technologies, without compromising security or manageability. Our F5 BIG-IP offerings compete against Citrix and Broadcom. Our lightweight, agile, developer-friendly F5 NGINX offerings, which provide capabilities like optimizing Kubernetes traffic management and load balancing cloud-native and hybrid cloud applications compete against Amazon Web Services ("AWS"), Google Cloud Platform, Envoy, and HAProxy.

In application security, we compete with vendors that offer web application firewall, bot detection and mitigation, API protection, carrier-grade firewall, carrier-grade network address translation ("NAT"), SSL orchestration, access policy management, and DDoS mitigation including Akamai, Cisco, Cloudflare, Fortinet, Juniper Networks, Palo Alto, Radware, and Thales (Imperva).

F5 Distributed Cloud Services use cases include application and API security delivered as SaaS, as well as multicloud networking. F5 competes with traditional edge players including Akamai, Cloudflare and Fastly, as well as networking vendors including Broadcom and Cisco, and pure-play vendors like Aviatrix, and public cloud providers.

Manufacturing

We outsource the manufacturing of our products to various manufacturing partners, including our primary third-party manufacturer service provider, Flex Ltd. ("Flex"), to manufacture our hardware systems according to our specifications. Assembly, quality control and systems testing are carried out at Flex's facilities in Guadalajara, Mexico and Zhuhai, China. Additionally, Flex manages material procurement and fulfillment activities on our behalf, ensuring we maintain high standards of efficiency and scalability across our operations. Systems built in Guadalajara are shipped to the Flex fulfillment center in Memphis, Tennessee for distribution primarily to distributors, value-added resellers, or end-users in the Americas and EMEA. Systems built and fulfilled in Zhuhai are distributed to partners and customers in APAC. Title to the products transfers from Flex to us and then to our customers upon shipment from a designated fulfillment location.

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Our sales and operations planning cadence provides Flex and other partners with a rolling demand forecast. This approach enables our manufacturing partners to plan for the appropriate stock levels of raw materials and manufacturing line capacity, resulting in the right finished goods inventories to meet our end-user demand. The components for our hardware products consist of commodity parts and custom components. The component parts within our products are either sourced by our manufacturing partners or by us from various component suppliers. F5 has established a robust and resilient global hardware supply chain. We continuously monitor areas of potential impact within our supply chain, such as geopolitical, supplier, and other risk factors, as well as proactively take steps to minimize disruptions, including securing alternate supply when applicable.

Acquisitions

We evaluate opportunities to acquire complementary businesses, technologies, services, and intellectual property to complement our organic innovation and research and development efforts, advance the development of our platforms, and enable further investment in our key priority areas. Our evaluation of acquisition opportunities seeks to confirm that any potential transaction would accelerate our strategy, represent an attractive customer opportunity, address a customer need, align with our customer base and go-to-market strategy, and present a clear timeline and path for value accretion. Our acquisitions enable us to gain access to talent, technology, products and features, and can range in size and complexity, from those that enhance or complement existing products and accelerate development of features to those that result in new offerings.

In September 2025, we completed the acquisition of CalypsoAI Corp. ("CalypsoAI") which is expected to integrate into our F5 ADSP to create a complete solution for securing AI inference. Additionally, we also completed several other immaterial acquisitions in 2025 and in prior years to enhance various aspects of our platform.

Backlog

Backlog is primarily systems-based and represents orders confirmed with a purchase order for products to be fulfilled and invoiced to customers with approved credit status. Orders are subject to cancellation, rescheduling by customers, or product specification changes by customers. Although we believe that the backlog orders are firm, purchase orders may be canceled by the customer prior to fulfillment without significant penalty. For this reason, we believe that our product backlog at any given date is not a reliable indicator of future revenues.

Human Capital Management

F5’s commitment to its employees is to be a human-first and high-performing team equipped with the tools and expertise to deliver extraordinary impact on what matters most to F5, our customers, and our partners. This commitment is delivered through our culture and engagement, our investment in employees’ growth and development, our focus on diversity and inclusion, and our compensation, benefits, and wellbeing offerings.

As of September 30, 2025, we had 6,578 employees – over 99% of whom were full-time employees. Our employees are based in 47 countries with 47% of employees based in the United States. None of our employees in the United States are represented by a labor union. We have experienced no work stoppages and believe that our employee relations are in good standing, as evidenced by our annual employee engagement survey results, described in the section below entitled "Culture and Engagement."

Culture and Engagement

We have been able to sustain our strong company culture because BeF5 and LeadF5 behaviors are key to executing our strategy.

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We measure the success of and identify areas of improvement for our company culture through global surveys of employee experience and sentiment at least once each year. As of March 2025, employees reported high satisfaction with F5’s culture on several key questions:

•85% of employees favorably rate "I am proud to work for F5."

•90% of employees favorably rate "I trust my manager."

•91% of employees favorably rate "F5 shows a commitment to ethical business decisions and conduct."

One survey measure that F5 tracks closely as a gauge of our culture increased from fiscal year 2024. As of March 2025, 80% of employees favorably rate "I feel a sense of belonging at F5." This increase in Belonging, compared to 73% a year prior, is critical to F5's efforts to foster the culture that is so important to our employees' and our company's performance.

Growth and Development

We provide employees with opportunities to improve their technical and professional knowledge, nurture our innovation ecosystem, strengthen management and leadership, as well as maintain our high standards of business integrity through ongoing compliance training. These development opportunities are available through both live employee events and third-party on-demand tools and are led by a mix of individual and AI coaches. In fiscal year 2025, F5 invested in tailored coaching and skills-building for its people managers to help continuously raise the bar on performance at F5.

Diversity and Inclusion

F5 is steadfast in its commitment to create a diverse and inclusive workplace. We believe our differences—when embraced with humility and respect—drive smarter decisions, increased innovation, stronger performance, and a culture where everyone can be themselves and reach their full potential.

The most critical drivers of our diversity and inclusion efforts year after year are represented in our seven Employee Inclusion Groups ("EIGs") – F5 Ability, F5 Asian and Pacific Islanders, F5 Appreciates Blackness, F5 Connects Women, F5 Latinx e Hispanos Unidos, F5 Military Veterans, and F5 Pride. Since our first EIG was established in 2013, these global communities represent a space for all F5ers to collaborate, share experiences, and learn.

Compensation, Benefits and Wellbeing

F5 aims to attract, reward, and retain extraordinary talent from diverse backgrounds by offering a total compensation package that is equitable, flexible, and market competitive.

This includes the pay, incentive plans, restricted stock unit grants ("RSUs"), Employee Stock Purchase Plan, retirement plans, healthcare, paid time off and family leave F5 provides to employees, as well as the programs that support the diverse needs of our employees’ overall health and wellbeing. In fiscal year 2025, F5 also renewed our popular Wellness Weekends to provide one weekend a quarter when all employees have a set Friday through Monday off to reset and refresh.

Environmental, Social and Governance

F5's Environmental, Social and Governance ("ESG") programs are guided by our fundamental principle to "do the right thing" for each other, our customers, our shareholders, and our communities.

Environmental. F5's 2030 climate target, verified by the Science Based Target Initiative, is to reduce both absolute Scope 1 and 2 emissions by 50% and absolute Scope 3 emissions by 43% from a 2021 baseline. We plan to meet this climate target by

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optimizing our energy use, sourcing more renewable energy, and enhancing the sustainability of our products and supply chain processes.

As evidence of our progress towards our climate target, F5’s most recent annual ESG report in March 2025 disclosed a reduction in our total emissions from fiscal year 2023 to fiscal year 2024. This was driven by a 16% year-over-year reduction in Scope 1 and 2 emissions and a 10% year-over-year reduction in Scope 3 emissions. To ensure the integrity of our emissions reporting, F5 also secured third-party verification for our Scope 1 and 2 emissions data from fiscal year 2024. The auditor’s verification letter is available on page 19 of F5’s 2024 ESG report at f5.com under the ‘‘Company — Investor Relations — ESG’’ section.

Social. In addition to the employee programs and benefits outlined in the Human Capital Management section above, we continue to prioritize F5 Global Good, the community development initiative that amplifies our employee engagement and diversity and inclusion programs. We are proud that employees direct the entirety of Global Good’s donations, through both the Company matching program and grant selection committees. In fiscal year 2025, 72% of all employees worldwide participated in Global Good programs, volunteering over 13,400 hours and directing the entirety of F5’s donations, through both the Company matching program and grant selection committees. F5 and our employees donated over $3.9 million to more than 3,900 non-profits worldwide in fiscal year 2025.

Governance. In fiscal year 2025, F5 completed its second Double Materiality Assessment, to help identify and assess the most significant ESG issues impacting both our financial performance and our broader societal and environmental impact. Aligned with the definitions and required value chain scope set by the EU's Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive ("CSRD"), this bi-annual assessment reflected shifts in our stakeholders’ views, as well as changes in the geopolitical and macro-economic environment over the last two years. The Double Materiality Assessment is available on page 7 of F5’s 2024 ESG report at f5.com under the "Company — Investor Relations — ESG" section.

Executive Officers of the Registrant

The following table sets forth certain information with respect to our executive officers as of November 25, 2025:

François Locoh-Donou has served as our President, Chief Executive Officer and member of our Board of Directors since April 2017. Prior to joining F5, Mr. Locoh-Donou served as Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of Ciena Corporation. During his more than 15 years at Ciena, Mr. Locoh-Donou served in several leadership positions. From August 2011 to October 2015, he served as Ciena’s Senior Vice President, Global Products Group. Previously, he served as Ciena’s Vice President and General Manager, Europe, Middle East and Africa from June 2005 to August 2011. He holds an M.B.A. from Stanford University, a 'Mastere' in Optical Telecommunications from the National Institute of Telecommunications of Paris, and a 'Diplome d'Ingenieur' in Physics Engineering from the National Institute of Physics in Marseille, France. Mr. Locoh-Donou serves on the board of Capital One Financial Corporation. He is also the co-founder of Cajou Espoir, a cashew-processing facility that employs several hundred people in rural Togo, 80 percent of whom are women. Cajou Espoir exports more than 400 tons of cashew kernels annually to the U.S. and Europe.

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Edward Werner has served as our Chief Financial Officer since November 2024. Mr. Werner joined F5 in 2001, and progressively took on roles of increasing responsibility. He served as F5’s Senior Vice President, Finance from 2012 until November 2024. He oversees F5's worldwide financial planning, analysis, accounting, reporting, and internal auditing procedures, as well as investor relations. Mr. Werner holds a B.A. in Business Administration with an Accounting Concentration from the Foster School of Business at the University of Washington.

Tom Fountain has served as our Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer since September 2024. From June 2020 through August 2024, he served as Executive Vice President of Global Services and Chief Strategy Officer. Mr. Fountain joined F5 in January 2018 as Executive Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer. Mr. Fountain is responsible for overseeing F5’s global services organization, including global support, consulting, and services teams. He is also responsible for leading F5's digital transformation to accelerate critical solution delivery to customers and for driving execution, productivity and efficiency company wide. From November 2012 to January 2018, Mr. Fountain served as Senior Vice President for Strategy and Corporate Development at McAfee LLC, Vice President of Strategy and Operations at Intel Corporation, and Senior Vice President for Strategy and Corporate Development at McAfee Incorporated. Previously, Mr. Fountain served as Vice President and General Manager of the Content and Media Business Unit at Juniper Networks from December 2011 to November 2012 and Vice President of Corporate Strategy at Juniper Networks from February 2009 to December 2011. Earlier in his career, Mr. Fountain was a venture capitalist at Mayfield Fund from June 2003 to February 2009 and co-founder and engineering leader at Ingrian Networks from December 1999 to June 2004. He holds an M.B.A., an M.S. in Computer Science, an M.S. in Electrical Engineering, and a B.S. in Computer Systems Engineering, each from Stanford University.

Chad Whalen has served as our Executive Vice President and Chief Revenue Officer since September 2024. He is responsible for F5’s global sales go-to-market strategy and brings over 20 years of experience leading global teams across Europe, Asia, and North and South America in network infrastructure, security, and SaaS. From July 2018 to August 2024, he was Executive Vice President of Worldwide Sales. Mr. Whalen joined F5 in 2017 to lead the Cloud Sales team. Prior to joining F5, he ran strategic alliances at Fortinet, worldwide sales and services at Jasper, Americas sales and field operations at Ciena and global sales and marketing at World Wide Packets. He holds a B.A. in Business Administration and Management from Eastern Washington University.

Lyra Schramm has served as our Executive Vice President and Chief People Officer since April 2024. She is responsible for driving people initiatives that support F5’s purpose to help bring a better digital world to life and position the company for continued growth. Prior to joining F5, Ms. Schramm spent nine years at Google in various leadership roles including Vice President, Strategy & Innovation where she spearheaded Google’s first enterprise-wide people strategy supporting the transformation to an AI-first company. In addition, she led human resources for the Global Advisory Functions, was the Chief of Staff to the Chief Human Resource Officer, and led the people strategy for a new business line, Google Technical Services. Previously, Ms. Schramm played a pivotal HR leadership role at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation where she was instrumental in the Foundation’s global expansion. Her early career with Amazon set the stage for AWS’s growth, where she developed key recruitment strategies that significantly increased headcount and revenue. Ms. Schramm holds a BA in Marketing from Washington State University.

Kunal Anand has served as our Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer since October 2025. From October 2024 to October 2025, he served as our Chief Innovation Officer. He joined F5 in April 2024 as Chief Technology Officer. He is responsible for driving the Company’s technology and AI vision and innovation, with a focus on incorporating rapid AI adoption across F5’s product solutions. Prior to F5, Mr. Anand held the dual role of Chief Technology Officer and Chief Information Security Officer at Imperva. He joined Imperva in 2018 with the acquisition of Prevoty, an application security startup he co-founded in 2013. Before joining Prevoty, he was the Director of Technology at BBC Worldwide. Mr. Anand has a deep history of innovation and technical expertise, and has held roles leading security, data, technology, and engineering teams at Gravity, MySpace, and the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab. He holds a B.S. degree from Babson College.

John Maddison has served as our Chief Marketing Officer since October 2025. He joined F5 in December 2024 as Chief Product Marketing and Technology Alliances Officer. Mr. Maddison is responsible for overseeing F5’s global marketing, business development, and corporate communications teams. He is also responsible for increasing F5’s market impact and delivering on the Company’s brand promise through its products and partnerships. Prior to joining F5, Mr. Maddison spent twelve years at Fortinet, most recently as Chief Marketing Officer and EVP of Product Strategy. He previously held leadership positions at Trend Micro, Vina Communications, and Octel Communications. Mr. Maddison holds a B.S. in Engineering from Plymouth University in Devon, England.

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Angelique Okeke has served as our Executive Vice President and General Counsel since March 2025. She is responsible for leading F5's legal, regulatory, compliance, and corporate governance functions. Ms. Okeke brings more than 20 years of legal and operational leadership experience to F5. Prior to joining F5, she spent eight years at Nike, Inc., most recently as Global Vice President where she led strategic legal counsel on enterprise-wide initiatives that transformed Nike’s retail business model and accelerated its digital commerce strategy. Ms. Okeke has held legal leadership roles at AWS and Lotame. Okeke holds a B.A. in Political Science and Communications from Boston College, a Master of Arts in Public Communication from American University, and a Juris Doctor from Howard University School of Law.

Michael Montoya has served as our Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Operations Officer since October 2025. He previously served on our Board of Directors from 2021 to 2025. Prior to joining F5, Mr. Montoya served as Chief Operating Officer at BlueVoyant, overseeing Product, Engineering, and Operations. He previously held Chief Information Security Officer roles at Equinix and Digital Realty, leading enterprise, product, and physical security, as well as compliance. Mr. Montoya holds a B.A. in Economics from The University of New Mexico.