NETSCOUT SYSTEMS INC (NTCT) Business

Item 1. Business

Overview

NetScout is an industry leader with over four decades of experience in providing enterprise network observability, carrier service assurance, cybersecurity, and Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS), protection solutions. Our unique visibility platform and solutions are powered by our pioneering deep packet inspection, or DPI, technology at scale, which is used by many Fortune 500 companies to protect their digital business services against disruption. Service providers and enterprises, including local, state and federal government agencies, rely on our solutions to achieve the visibility and protection necessary to optimize network performance, ensure the delivery of high-quality, mission-critical applications and services, gain timely insight into the end-user experience, and protect their networks from attack. The majority of our solutions are designed to provide Smart Data, a high-fidelity, decision-grade data foundation derived from real-time network activity across legacy, hybrid, and cloud-native environments. This data enables a unified view of performance, availability, and security, supports faster root-cause analysis and operational decision-making, and is increasingly used to inform broader observability platforms and automated and AI-driven workflows. With our offerings, customers can quickly, efficiently and effectively identify and resolve issues that result in downtime, service interruptions, poor service quality, or compromised data, thereby reducing mean time to resolution of issues and driving compelling returns on their investments in their networks and broader technology initiatives. Significant technology trends and catalysts for our business include the evolution of customers' digital transformation initiatives, such as migration to cloud environments and to the edges of their networks; the rapidly evolving cybersecurity threat landscape; advancements in artificial intelligence (“AI”) and business analytics that can enhance observability and are increasing the need for high-quality, real-time data to support automated and AI-driven operations; and the continued evolution and potential opportunities related to 5G technology across both the service provider and enterprise customer verticals.

Our operating results are influenced by a number of factors, including, but not limited to the volume, mix, and quantity of products and services sold; pricing, costs and availability of materials used in our products; growth in employee-related costs, including commissions; and the expansion of our operations. Factors that affect our ability to maximize our operating results include, but are not limited to our ability to introduce new and enhance existing products; the marketplace acceptance of those new or enhanced products; continued expansion into international markets; expansion into new or adjacent markets; development of strategic partnerships; competition; successful acquisition and integration efforts; and our ability to control costs and make improvements in a highly competitive industry.

Markets

Our service assurance solutions are used by enterprises (including government agencies) and service providers to optimize network performance, quickly identify and resolve issues impacting application and service quality, and to gain insight into the end user experience. Our cybersecurity solutions are used by enterprises and service providers to identify and mitigate advanced, volumetric, multi-vector, and application-specific DDoS attacks, as well as assist enterprise security teams in rapidly identifying, isolating, investigating, and resolving other advanced network threats. These combined solutions provide a powerful platform to address observability, service assurance and cybersecurity challenges for our customers. Additionally, we are starting to allow our Smart Data to be leveraged for third party observability platform use and automated and AI workflows to complement other provider solutions.

Enterprise Market

Within the enterprise market, NetScout's nGeniusONE, ISNG, Omnis Insights, Omnis Cybersecurity solutions, and Arbor Edge Defense offerings enable IT organizations to support a growing range of performance management, observability, AI Ops, and cybersecurity use cases including:

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Network Observability - Our nGeniusONE analytics and our ISNG real-time information platform provide the necessary insight to optimize network performance, restore service and understand the quality of the users’ experience. By integrating certain acquired product lines and product features into our core offerings, our customers can benefit from a consistent view across their traditional wired network infrastructures, remote offices, and wireless networks

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(WiFi). Our Omnis Insights solution opens our DPI smart data to the broader observability markets, allowing our customers to stream Smart Data to partners and third-party platforms that enable observability, cybersecurity, and AI operations use cases.

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Application Performance Management: Data Center Transformation and Cloud Computing - We enable information technology (IT) organizations, from their development operations to their infrastructure teams, to manage the delivery of services across virtual and physical environments, providing a comprehensive, unified real-time view into network, application, server, and user communities' performance. We proactively detect emerging issues with the ability to help analyze both physical and virtual service delivery environments within the data center which enables organizations to optimize datacenter infrastructure investments, protect against service degradations, and simplify the operation of complex, multi-tier application environments in consolidated, state-of-the-art data centers. Our solutions are often used by enterprises to support private cloud computing environments that are aimed at enabling greater, more cost-effective accessibility to applications without compromising the reliability and security of those applications and the network. Our solutions portfolio also includes a range of virtual appliances that can help enterprise customers extend their monitoring of applications deeper into their traditional or "colo" data centers, confidently migrate applications into public cloud environments and gain a comprehensive, cohesive view into the resulting hybrid cloud environment.

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Unified Communications (UC) - We deliver deep application-level unified visibility into voice, data and video services side-by-side in order to understand the interrelationships of all UC services that traverse the network infrastructure and assess quality and performance of the delivery of these services. As a result, our real-time, actionable intelligence helps customers to deliver a high-quality UC experience as users make calls, video conference and engage in instant messaging. We also help desktop, network, telecom, and application teams manage UC through a common platform across complex, geographically dispersed, and multi-vendor environments.

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Software-as-a-Service and Infrastructure Performance Management - We also provide enterprise customers with active agent-based offerings that can help them determine availability and performance levels for software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, and gauge the health of servers, routers and switches as well as wireless and virtual infrastructures. As a result, customers can continuously monitor the performance of key business services and the infrastructure used to deliver them, regardless of how applications are deployed or where the user is located. Deployed independently or as part of our broader service assurance solution, these products also play an important role in helping enterprises deliver a superior user experience, achieve outstanding service quality and drive better returns on their application and infrastructure investments.

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Application and Desktop Virtualization - We provide clear and actionable insights that help customers fully realize the operational benefits associated with Application and Desktop Virtualization and reduce the time it takes to identify and resolve service problems. We offer visibility across all virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) tiers including remote access, client, virtualization, web, front-end application, and related database systems, and help customers gain actionable metrics and insight from monitoring and analyzing the consumption and performance of VDI services.

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Cybersecurity: DDoS Protection and Omnis Cyber Intelligence - Computer networks continue to be targeted for cyberattacks that are aimed at disrupting, damaging, or otherwise destroying an enterprise’s ability to conduct its business or gaining unauthorized access to corporate applications and restricting or stealing valuable information. We provide a range of network security solutions under the NetScout Arbor brand that enable enterprises to protect their networks from high-volume and application-specific DDoS attacks, which are aimed at either overwhelming the network with traffic or over-exercising specific functions or features of a website with the intention to disable those functions or features. We have also developed enhanced cybersecurity solutions for enterprises with our Omnis Cybersecurity Intelligence suite of products that provide greater deep-dive forensic capabilities as well as analytics that can provide visibility into anomalous behavior on the network that may be indicative of an advanced threat. These security analytics enable existing enterprise customers to leverage their historical investments in NetScout's service assurance solutions by using the Adaptive Service Intelligence (ASI) data already being generated to support service assurance for cybersecurity use cases.

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Government Markets

Considered as part of our enterprise customer vertical, we have built a strong position with federal, state and local government agencies, both in the United States and abroad. Similar to our enterprise customers, government agencies are focused on streamlining and transforming IT into more efficient and more easily managed environments. To accomplish this, agencies are turning to IT solutions that will help simplify managing and assuring their IT environments as well as reducing costs. However, governmental markets differ from enterprise markets primarily due to their purchasing cycles being influenced by potential changes in government administrators, budgetary priorities and allocated funding for key projects.

Telecommunication Service Provider Markets

Today's service providers are focused on delivering a compelling set of services and ensuring a high-quality user experience, while also striving to minimize operational complexity, control costs and improve automation. This, coupled with the challenge of internet protocol (IP) transformation activities and complex technologies such as 5G, Long-Term Evolution (LTE), Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), Internet Protocol Television (IP-TV), WiFi, Fixed Wireless Access (FWA), network slicing and cloud services drives the need for a more automated and unified approach to managing service delivery and the subscriber experience and protecting the mobile network. Our service provider solutions support an expanding range of use cases including:

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Service Assurance for Mobile, Fixed Line and Cable Operators - The fundamental transformation of the mobile network to all-IP enables mobile operators to build highly scalable service delivery environments to offer new services to meet the growing subscriber demand for data, voice and video-centric services and to consolidate and simplify network operations. Mobile operators use our offerings to gain real-time, detailed IP packet-level insight and core-to-access visibility, which enables them to ensure services offered over the network meet certain pre-defined quality levels for an optimal subscriber experience. Our service assurance solutions help service providers effectively manage capacity, assess overall network quality, take proactive steps to modify the network before issues impact subscribers, and quickly identify and troubleshoot network problems. In addition to improving the overall return on their network infrastructure investments, mobile operators using our solutions also benefit from improved network quality and unique customer insights - both of which contribute to subscriber acquisition, retention, and monetization. The growing demand for high-bandwidth triple-play services, broadband connectivity, content anywhere, IP-TV, on-demand video traffic, newer 5G technology, extended WiFi initiatives, and carrier Ethernet services presents fixed line and cable multi-system operators with significant revenue opportunities. IP has become the de facto convergence mechanism for access, distribution and core networks, enabling new service offerings and simplifying network operations while reducing total cost of operations. For example, cable operators use our solutions to monitor and manage their local area WiFi connectivity services, ensure the high-quality delivery of video to consumers outside of their homes as well as provide broadband and telephony services targeting small- and medium-sized businesses.

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Business Intelligence for Service Providers - Service providers strive to understand how the performance of their networks impacts customer experience, subscriber behavior and related usage trends. By combining network traffic data with other information, including support requests, subscriber calling plans, demographic data and other details, service providers can make more timely decisions about their offerings and sales and marketing initiatives to acquire, retain and further monetize their subscribers. Our analytics deliver timely insights into a service provider's subscribers, services, networks, and applications, as well as easy export capabilities so that this information can be integrated into their data lakes and third-party analytic platforms.

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DDoS Protection - Internet Service Providers (ISPs), including leading telecommunications providers, cable multi-service operators and cloud providers, have seen significant increases in the sophistication, scale and frequency of high-volume, multi-vector and application-specific DDoS attacks on their networks. DDoS attacks are aimed at disrupting the online services of an ISP's business customer by overwhelming the network with traffic or by over-exercising specific functions or features of a website with the intention to disable those functions or features. NetScout Arbor smart DDoS solutions are used by a wide range of ISPs around the world to help protect their networks against DDoS attacks, and to resell certain DDoS offerings to their enterprise customers.

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Products Overview

Since our founding in 1984, we have been an industry innovator in using IP-based network traffic to help organizations manage and optimize the delivery of services and applications over their networks, improve end-user experience, and protect networks from cybersecurity threats. Using our patented ASI technology, our platform is designed to captures every network-based interaction, transaction, and experience happening across the business in real time, at wire speed, and with high fidelity to produce “Smart Data.” Rather than sampled metrics or synthetic data, Smart Data is structured, enriched, AI-ready metadata that captures how services and applications are performing. This Smart Data forms the foundation of our platform, supporting observability, service assurance, AI Ops, and cybersecurity use cases across our product portfolio. Our offerings can help customers quickly identify and troubleshoot network and application performance issues, defend their networks from DDoS and other cybersecurity attacks, and rapidly find and isolate advanced network threats. Our solutions are deployed by customers in one of four form factors: as integrated hardware and software appliance, as software only that is then integrated into commercial off-the-shelf hardware, in a virtualized environment as software only, or as a SaaS solution. Our solutions help our customers keep pace with increasing customer demands and technological complexity. To further elevate our value proposition and address the near- and long-term needs of customers and prospects, we have delivered major product upgrades across our product lines by integrating key functionality from acquired product lines, increasing the deployment flexibility of our solutions, and adding new features and capabilities that enable us to address a broader range of use cases. Our primary products can be categorized as follows:

Service Assurance Solutions for Network Observability, Artificial & Business Intelligence Analytics

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nGeniusONE Management Software and Analytic Modules - Our nGenius applications are used to support our service provider, enterprise, and government customers enabling them to predict, preempt, and resolve network and service delivery problems while facilitating the optimization and capacity planning of their network infrastructures. Additionally, we market a range of specialized products and analytic modules that can enable our customers to analyze and troubleshoot traffic in radio access network and WiFi networks, as well as gain timely insight into high-value services, applications and systems, and better understand the subscriber's experience on the network.

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Visibility Products (Sensor, Packet Flow Systems and Taps) - Our platform provides real-time generation and analysis of information-rich, high-volume network-derived data for use across our applications and our partner networks. The Infinistream is an advanced passive network probe that can be deployed as a traditional appliance with integrated hardware and software, as software-only for use in commercial-off-the-shelf hardware or in virtualized or software only form factors. The virtualized form factor version, which is marketed as vSTREAM, can be deployed to support NFV environments as well as to cost-effectively monitor application performance in traditional data center, private cloud, and public cloud environments. We also provide comprehensive packet flow systems (also called network packet brokers or network visibility fabric switches), that deliver targeted network traffic access to a range of monitoring and cybersecurity tools and systems, including the nGeniusONE application. Additionally, we market a suite of test access points (TAPs) that enable full, non-disruptive access to network traffic with multiple link type and speed options.

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Omnis Insights – Our Omnis Insights solution is designed to generate a high-fidelity, curated dataset that strengthens observability and cybersecurity operations. Supporting AI/ML processes with both real-time and historical insight, the dataset improves service performance while avoiding unnecessary processing and storage costs. Built on NetScout’s DPI technology, Omnis Insights delivers granular session-and conversation-level telemetry to accelerate troubleshooting and streamline complex workflows. AI-ready insights, derived from enriched metadata, are structured into domain-specific export feeds with feature extraction tailored to specific use cases. These insights can be easily ingested into data lakes or streamed to our partners like Splunk and ServiceNow.

Cybersecurity Solutions

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We provide cybersecurity solutions that enable service providers and enterprises around the world to protect their networks against DDoS attacks under the Arbor solution portfolio. Certain of our service provider customers around the world also resell Arbor's solutions as a managed DDoS protection service to their enterprise customers. Our

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portfolio of DDoS protection solutions offers complete deployment flexibility spanning on-premise offerings and cloud-based capabilities to meet a broad array of customer needs, as well as specialized analytics and comprehensive threat intelligence information. Our DDoS protection offerings for service providers include Arbor Sightline for DDoS visibility and threat detection, Arbor Threat Mitigation System for removing DDoS attack traffic from the network without disruption to key network services and Arbor Insight for advanced analytical and forensic information. Our DDoS protection offerings for enterprises include Arbor Edge Defense, a perimeter-based appliance for identifying and blocking incoming DDoS attacks and outbound malicious communications, and Arbor Cloud, a global, cloud-based traffic scrubbing service that quickly removes DDoS attack traffic. Our Omnis Cyber Intelligence offering utilizes packet forensic capabilities to minimize the time between threat detection and response. We plan to further enhance and expand these capabilities in ways that will enable greater adoption of our solutions by service provider and enterprise customers.

Integration with Third-Party Solutions

To have greater operational impact on assuring performance of applications and service delivery, we have integrated our technology with third-party management consoles and business service management systems. This integration allows organizations to receive alarms on impending performance problems and to link into the nGenius Service Assurance solution in order to perform detailed problem analysis and troubleshooting. The third-party solution providers that we have integrated our solutions with include Cisco Systems, Cisco Sourcefire, Citrix Systems, Dell Technologies, Hewlett-Packard Company, IBM Tivoli, ServiceNow, Splunk, and VMWare. In addition, we have embedded NetScout Arbor DDoS mitigation capabilities on a blade within Cisco's market-leading ASR9000 router and will continue to evaluate partnership opportunities to support integration of its smart DDoS capabilities into various third-party platforms.

Growth Strategy

The following are key elements in our growth strategy for fiscal year 2027:

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Drive Platform Innovation - In order to support our customers' near-term and longer-term requirements, we plan to continue innovating by enhancing and expanding our product portfolio as well as developing an integrated platform to serve our customers combined service assurance and cybersecurity requirements. In particular, we continue to invest in research and development, and leverage the strong technical and domain expertise across our organization. Our engineering teams are focused on advancing technical innovation across our broad product portfolio. By capitalizing on our extensive experience with global enterprises, service providers, and government organizations with IP-based networks, we believe we remain well positioned to cross-leverage our technology development across all major platforms and relevant technologies to address the evolving demands of current and prospective customers.

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Deliver Pervasive Visibility - By making our visibility products available in multiple form factors, including as an integrated appliance, software that can be deployed with commercial off-the-shelf servers and as virtual appliances, we believe that it is easier and more affordable for customers to deploy our technology more broadly across their hybrid network and IT infrastructures. By offering more cost-effective instrumentation options, we believe we are well positioned to help existing and new customers gain greater visibility into more places across their end-to-end network environments and address an even broader range of service assurance and cybersecurity use cases.

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Extension into Adjacent Markets - By enhancing and expanding our product portfolio and driving product integration via internal development and acquisitions, we have expanded our reach into complementary adjacent markets such as application performance management, infrastructure performance management, data analytics, observability, AI Ops, and cybersecurity. We believe that this element of our strategy is integral to gaining access to larger budgets, increasing spending from existing customers, attracting new customers, and increasing our total addressable market. In particular, our Omnis Insights solution has opened our DPI data to the broader observability, cybersecurity, and AI Operations markets for the first time. Our customers can now stream DPI data to partners and third-party data lakes that enable AI use cases. We believe the scale and flexibility of our Omnis platform will be critical in unlocking the full potential of AI.

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Fortify and Expand Existing Customer Relationships - We have an expansive, global customer base of service providers and enterprises that have purchased our products in support of major technology and network initiatives that they have implemented over the past decade. As a result, we believe we are well positioned to expand the scope of many of these relationships as well as acquire new customer relationships as we identify new opportunities to support new network, observability, AI Ops, cybersecurity, and broader technology projects.

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Expand our Customer Base - We believe the investments we have made over the past several years to expand our product portfolio and support greater deployment flexibility also position us to win new customers in established geographic markets where we can leverage our global direct sales organization and an extensive network of value-added resellers and systems integrators.

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Increase Market Relevance and Awareness - We plan to continue to implement marketing campaigns aimed at generating high-quality sales opportunities with both current and prospective enterprise and service provider customers, promoting thought leadership and building the NetScout brand.

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Extend our Technology Partner Alliance Ecosystem - We plan to continue to develop and fortify alliances with complementary solutions providers that can help us support a larger, more global and more diverse customer base. We also plan to continue to enhance our technology value, product capabilities and customer relevance through the continued integration of our products into technology partner products.

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Pursue Strategic Acquisitions - We have completed many acquisitions since our inception that have helped broaden our capabilities, enhance our products and technologies, enable us to expand into adjacent markets and better position us to meet the needs of a larger base of customers and prospects.

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Improve Cost Structure and Drive Efficiencies - We plan to balance our investments in key technology, product development, sales and marketing, and other initiatives that will enable us to continue to drive long-term profitable growth with an ongoing focus on managing costs and driving efficiencies.

Support Services

Customer satisfaction is a key driver of our success. Our programs offer customers various levels of high-quality support services to assist in the deployment and use of our solutions. We have support personnel strategically deployed across the globe to deliver 24/7 support to our customers. Our support also includes updates to our software and firmware at no additional charge, if and when such updates are developed and made generally available to our commercial customer base. If ordered, support commences upon fulfilment or expiration of the standard warranty for software. For software, which also includes firmware, the standard warranty commences upon fulfilment and expires 60 to 90 days thereafter. With regard to hardware, the standard warranty commences upon fulfilment and expires 60 days to 12 months thereafter. Our warranties are consistent with commonly accepted industry standards. We expect to continue to provide support services for the acquired platforms under existing agreements and will explore opportunities to further simplify and standardize our support obligations over the coming years. For customers requiring additional levels of service, we offer managed services in various forms, where we operate our technology platform to meet the customers’ requirements for observability and threat mitigation.

Manufacturing

Our manufacturing operations consist primarily of final product assembly, configuration, and testing. We purchase components and subassemblies from suppliers and construct our hardware products in accordance with NetScout standard specifications. We inspect, test and use process controls to ensure the quality and reliability of our products. We maintain an ISO 9001 quality systems registration, a certification showing that our corporate procedures and manufacturing facilities comply with standards for quality assurance and process control. We also maintain an ISO 9001:2000 quality systems registration, a certification showing that our corporate procedures comply with standards for continuous improvement and customer satisfaction.

We generally use standard parts and components for our products, which can be sourced from various suppliers. We have generally been able to obtain adequate supplies of components in a timely manner from current suppliers. While certain components, such as computer network interface cards, are currently purchased from a single supplier, we have identified

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alternate suppliers that we believe can be qualified to fulfill our needs should an issue arise with the existing supplier. We also maintain escrow arrangements for certain technologies. We continue to monitor the impact of global geopolitical tension and conflicts, memory shortages related to significant AI-related datacenter buildouts, and macroeconomic conditions, as well as other factors, on our supply chain. Although we have been able to manage supply challenges in the past, there is no guarantee that we will be able to continue to manage these challenges without significant impacts to our business if our supply chain becomes increasingly strained. Our reliance on single source suppliers and impacts on our supply chain are further described in Item 1A "Risk Factors."

We manufacture our products based upon near-term demand estimates resulting from sales forecasts and historical fulfillment information. However, since these forecasts have a high degree of variability because of factors that include time of year, overall economic conditions and sales employee incentives, we believe it is prudent to maintain inventory levels in advance of receipt of firm orders to ensure that we have sufficient stock to satisfy incoming orders. The potential impacts of the global and macroeconomic conditions and potential supply chain disruptions on our business are further described in Item 1A "Risk Factors."

Sales and Marketing

Sales

We sell our products, support and services through a direct sales force and an indirect reseller and distribution channel.

Our direct sales force generally uses a "high-touch" sales model that consists of face-to-face or virtual meetings with customers to understand and identify their unique business challenges and requirements. Our sales teams translate our customers' requirements into tailored business solutions. Due to the complexity of the systems and the capital expenditures involved, our sales cycles typically take between three and twelve months. We build strategic relationships with our customers by continually enhancing our solution to help them address their evolving needs. In addition to providing a comprehensive solution to meet these needs, we continually provide software enhancements to our customers as part of their maintenance contracts with us. These enhancements are designed to provide additional and ongoing value to our existing customers to promote loyalty and the expansion of their deployment of our products. Existing customer growth is also driven by the expansion and changes in their networks or services in the case of the service assurance products or the need for more capacity or capabilities in the case of the Arbor DDoS solutions.

Historically and currently, generally, we use indirect distribution channels principally as intermediaries on contractual terms for customers with whom we do not have a contract or if the customer would like to use the channel for services. Generally, our sales force uses the same “high-touch” approach in most markets. In some international markets where we do not have strong sales presence, the channel partners participate in the selling process. However, in most markets, the sale is led by the NetScout sales teams.

During the fiscal years ended March 31, 2026 , 2025, and 2024, no direct customers or channel partners accounted for more than 10% of our total revenue.

Marketing

Our marketing organization drives our market research, strategy, product positioning and messaging, and produces and manages a variety of programs such as customer forums, trade shows, industry events, advertising, public and analyst relations, social media, direct mail, seminars and webinars, sales promotions and other online marketing programs. These programs are focused on promoting the sale and acceptance of our solutions to further build the NetScout brand for our service assurance and cybersecurity products within the marketplace.

Key elements of our marketing strategy focus on thought leadership, market positioning, market education, go to market strategies, reputation management, demand generation, and the acceleration of our strategic selling relationships with local and global resellers, systems integrators, and our technology alliance partners. During fiscal year 2026, we continued to invest in the promotion of the NetScout brand related to service assurance and cybersecurity products in their respective markets. We expect to continue these initiatives during fiscal year 2027.

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Research and Development

Our continued success depends significantly on our ability to anticipate and create solutions that will meet emerging customer requirements. We work closely with our largest enterprise and service provider customers to better understand and address their near-term and longer-term requirements. By better understanding the key, time-sensitive needs of our global customer base, we believe our development programs will continue to result in enhanced products that are able to meet the increasing challenges of an increasingly complex and dynamic global network environment.

We have invested significant financial resources and personnel into the development of our products and technology. Our continued investment in research and development is crucial to our business and our continued success in the market. We have assembled a team of highly skilled engineers with expertise in various technologies associated with our business and the technologies being deployed by our customers. We plan to continue to enhance and expand our product offerings and capabilities in the near future while integrating key capabilities from acquired product lines as appropriate. As a result, we plan to continue to invest and dedicate significant resources to our research and development activities for both our enterprise and service provider customers.

We predominantly develop our products internally, with some limited third-party contracting. We have also acquired developed technology through business acquisitions. To promote industry standards and manifest technology leadership, we participate in and support the activities and recommendations of industry standards bodies, and we also engage in close and regular dialogue with our key customers and alliance partners. These activities provide early insight into the direction of network and application performance requirements and the changing cybersecurity landscape that impacts current and emerging technologies.

Seasonality

We have experienced, and expect to continue to experience, quarterly variations in our order bookings as a result of a number of factors, including the calendar year-end and budget and procurement cycle of many of our customers, as well as the fiscal year end procurement cycle of our government customers, particularly U.S. government customers with a fiscal year end of September 30. Due to these factors, we historically have experienced stronger bookings during our fiscal third and fourth quarters than in our fiscal first and second quarters. The timing of our order bookings can also be impacted by the length of certain product and service sales offerings cycles, complexity of certain customer environments, and new product introductions and their market acceptance.

Customers

We sell our products to enterprises, service providers and local, state, and federal governmental agencies with large-and medium-sized high-speed IP computer networks. Our enterprise customers cover a wide variety of industries, such as financial services, technology, manufacturing, healthcare, utilities, education, transportation and retail as well as government and associated agencies. Our telecommunications service provider customer group includes mobile operators, wireline operators, cable operators, internet service providers, and cloud providers.

Backlog

We produce our products on the basis of our forecast of near-term demand and maintain inventory in advance of receipt of firm orders from customers. We configure our products to customer specifications and generally deliver products shortly after receipt of the purchase order. Service engagements are also included in certain orders. Customers generally may reschedule or cancel unfulfilled orders with little or no penalty. Our total backlog at any particular time is not necessarily indicative of future sales levels. Within total backlog, fulfillable backlog includes what we consider to represent orders that are generally available to be delivered to customers as of the end of the reporting period. Delivery of our fulfillable backlog typically occurs early in the subsequent quarter. However, delivery may be delayed or accelerated due to various other reasons, including but not limited to, changes in timing of customer projects and product delivery schedules, which may not be within our control. Our total combined product backlog at March 31, 2026 was $50.8 million compared to $33.1 million at March 31, 2025. Combined product backlog included fulfillable backlog of $45.8 million and $25.1 million at March 31, 2026 and 2025, respectively. The increase in backlog was driven by the timing of orders from two large enterprise related customers.

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Competition

We compete with many companies in the markets we serve. The service assurance market, including the infrastructure, network, and application performance management markets, is highly competitive, rapidly evolving, and fragmented with overlapping technologies and a wide range of competitors, both large and small, who may deliver certain elements of our solution. Consequently, there are a number of companies who have greater name recognition and substantially greater financial, management, marketing, service, support, technical, distribution and other resources than we do. Additionally, certain competitors, either due to their size and resources or due to their technological strengths, may be able to respond more effectively than we can to new or changing opportunities, technologies, standards and customer requirements.

Principal competitive factors in our service assurance market include scalability; ability to address a large number of applications, locations and users; product performance; the ability to easily deploy into existing network environments; the ability to offer virtualized solutions; and the ability to administer and manage the solution.

While we face multiple competitors within the service assurance industry, we believe that we compete favorably on the basis of the following factors:

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we provide a comprehensive service delivery management solution that is capable of addressing the needs of both enterprise and service provider customers and can be scaled to meet the challenges of today's dynamic service delivery environments;

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we believe that our solutions provide superior data and compete favorably on a broad range of metrics including the ability to recognize and track a large number of applications;

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we believe our solutions possess the scalability to support high and increasing levels of data and network traffic;

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our solutions look at both user and control plane traffic across an entire network; and

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our ASI technology is optimized to provide real-time information about service performance and real-time alerts to emerging service problems whereas traditional solutions are inherently latent, supporting only forensic-trouble shooting after an issue has occurred.

In the enterprise market, our competitors include companies who provide network observability, application performance management, infrastructure performance management and other related solutions such as CA Technologies (a Broadcom Inc. business), Cisco Systems, Dynatrace, Datadog, ExtraHop, IBM, Infovista, Viavi, Gigamon, New Relic, Riverbed Technology, and SolarWinds. In addition, we both compete with and partner with large enterprise management vendors, such as HP and IBM, who offer performance management solutions. We also compete with smaller, privately held competitors who often focus on specific vertical markets.

In the service provider market, we compete with traditional probe vendors, network equipment manufacturers, big data and analytics vendors, and virtualization vendors. These vendors include Anritsu, Cisco, Ericsson, EXFO, Huawei, IBM, Infovista, Niksun, Elisa Polystar, Radcom, Splunk (a Cisco Systems business), Nokia and Viavi. We face additional competitive threats from startups and new entrants that seek to offer innovative solutions in an industry characterized by rapid technological change.

In the cybersecurity market, we face a range of competitors, including those that may have greater name recognition and substantially greater financial, management, marketing, service, support, technical, distribution and other resources than we do. We believe that the scalability of our solutions, flexible deployment, and price-performance of our cybersecurity solutions positions us well to compete against both larger network equipment and security companies and smaller niche security solutions vendors. We compete under the NetScout Arbor brand with a broad range of vendors including Radware, Akamai, F5 Networks, A10 Networks, Fortinet, Fastly, Cloudflare and Corero Network Security.

Our ability to sustain a competitive advantage depends on our ability to deliver continued technology innovation and adapt to meet the evolving needs of our customers. Competitive factors in our industry are further described in Item 1A "Risk Factors."

Intellectual Property Rights

We rely on patent, copyright, trademark, and trade secret laws and contract rights to establish and maintain our rights in our technology and products.

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While our intellectual property rights are an important element in our success, our business does not depend on any one particular patent, trademark, copyright, trade secret, license, or other intellectual property right.

We use contracts, statutory laws, domestic and foreign intellectual property registration processes, and international intellectual property treaties to protect our intellectual property portfolio and rights from infringement. From a contractual perspective, we use license agreements and non-disclosure agreements to control the use of our intellectual property and protect our trade secrets from unauthorized use and disclosure. In addition to license agreements, we rely on U.S. and international copyright law to protect against unauthorized copying of software programs in the U.S. and abroad. We have obtained U.S. and international trademark registrations to preserve and protect certain trademarks. We have also filed and obtained U.S. patents and international counterparts to protect certain unique NetScout inventions from being unlawfully exploited by other parties. However, there is no assurance that pending or future patent applications will be granted, that we will be able to obtain patents covering all our products, or that we will be able to license, if needed, patents from other companies on favorable terms or at all. Our proprietary rights are subject to other risks and uncertainties described under Item 1A "Risk Factors."

Human Capital Management

We strive to remain a team of entrepreneurs, with the agility of a start-up and the sophistication of a global technology company. We believe that our culture is critical to our success and growth. Our Lean But Not Mean culture complements and augments our technology, exceptional talent, and forward-thinking innovation. "Lean" decision-making enables early resolution of tough choices and puts employees and the long-term success of the company first. We believe our commitment to our culture and values, an inclusive workforce, talent development, and health and safety, and providing competitive total rewards motivates our employees around the world. Our Compensation Committee oversees our key human capital management strategies and programs and shares oversight of health and safety matters with the Nominating and Corporate Governance Committee of the Board of Directors.

Employees

At March 31, 2026, we had 2,073 employees worldwide – approximately 99% of whom were full time employees. Our employees are in 35 countries with 62% of our employees located in the United States.

Culture & Values

We believe that our company culture is critical to our success and growth. Our culture complements and augments our technology, exceptional talent, and forward-thinking innovation. As a result of our philosophy, we have pledged to be respectful of, committed to, and appreciative of our employees while also enacting decision-making processes and business strategies that result in efficient business outcomes.

We dedicate heightened attention to our mission as Guardians of the Connected World and this mission serves as a key component in our employee engagement program. We continuously communicate our mission, values, and goals to all of our global employees through town hall meetings that provide direct interaction with the CEO, and in-depth focus groups that support messaging from top executives. These meetings allow leaders to stay connected with all employees and ensure everyone is equipped with the knowledge and tools to align their efforts with our vision, mission and goals. The Nominating and Corporate Governance Committee oversees these efforts as part of its comprehensive review of corporate governance, sustainability, and engagement and the Compensation Committee oversees NetScout's talent and human capital management as related to culture and values as well.

Commitment to Workplace Culture

NetScout's commitment to workplace culture is important to our organizational excellence and complements our core values of performing with integrity, compassion, collaboration, and innovation. We embrace our employees' differences and other characteristics that make our employees unique. Our ESG team, covering our Impact Programs (as described below), includes members from multiple functional areas whose activities are overseen by our executive Steering Committee, to foster transparent, merit-based, and consistent processes in employee engagement, onboarding, learning and development, policymaking, and career planning. Further, our Women in NetScout Network (WiNN) works to foster community and share insight into women’s

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experiences to inspire members to succeed in the workplace.

Talent Development

We invest in the ongoing development of our employees across the globe. As part of that program, we offer opportunities to identify leaders and develop and support all employees, including:

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Management and leadership development – to create leaders who provide direction, apply disciplined management practices, collaborate across functions, and understand the impact they have on others.

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Diversity management training – to support an inclusive workplace and foster consistent management practices across the globe.

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Management talent assessment – to bring greater transparency and understanding of required skills and abilities as we identify leaders at all levels.

Health and Safety Regulatory Compliance

Our Health and Safety (H&S) Council is responsible for H&S policy, managing and coordinating H&S regulatory compliance, and tracking goals and results. The H&S Council reports to senior executives and its results are reported to the Nominating and Corporate Governance Committee of the Board of Directors.

Total Rewards

We offer a competitive compensation and benefits package to attract, retain and motivate our employees. Our compensation package includes market-competitive pay, cash and equity incentive compensation, an Employee Stock Purchase Plan, retirement benefits, health benefits, paid time off and leave benefits.

Sustainability and Engagement

We are committed to making a positive impact on the lives of our employees, customers, investors, and communities in which we operate, and believe that effectively managing sustainability and engagement through strong governance is an important part of creating long-term value. As set out in its Charter, our Nominating and Corporate Governance Committee oversees our governance, sustainability, and engagement programs, including those related to environmental, social and governance (ESG) matters. Underpinned by a strong governance foundation, these programs focus on driving meaningful impact toward NetScout’s sustainability in its operations and in the products we bring to market, as well as advancing the wellbeing of our workforce and the communities in which we live and work (“Impact Programs”). The Nominating and Corporate Governance Committee meets regularly and reviews our Impact Programs and advises on our strategy and progress, and apprises the full Board of Directors. Our Board of Directors considers our overall strategy and its alignment with our mission. The Audit Committee also regularly reviews governance-related topics such as enterprise risk management, our anticorruption program, ethics and compliance issues, supply chain issues including human rights protections, and data privacy and security. The Compensation Committee regularly reviews workforce-related topics such as talent development, human capital management, compensation, and leadership training.

A steering committee, under the strategic direction of the Chief Executive Officer and chaired by our General Counsel, provides guidance and management oversight for our Impact Programs. The Office of ESG, covering our efforts on sustainability and engagement, chaired by our General Counsel, is responsible for the development and implementation of our Impact Programs. With representation across key business functions, the mandate of the Office is to consider our existing sustainability and engagement efforts, understand stakeholder perspectives (including customers, investors, and employees among others), promote a positive and engaged workplace culture through our Lean But Not Mean philosophy, identify areas for improvement that align with our business, and monitors and reports on the progress of our program to hold ourselves accountable to our stakeholders and the broader community.

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Government Regulation

As a company with global operations, we are subject to a variety of evolving legal and regulatory requirements in the jurisdictions in which we operate and in which we offer our service assurance and cybersecurity solutions, including requirements related to data privacy, data security and cybersecurity, AI, trade restrictions (including export controls and tariffs), economic sanctions, antibribery and anti-corruption, and other compliance requirements. In the ordinary course of business, we may collect, receive, use, store, generate, transfer, dispose of, transmit, share, and process (collectively, "process") sensitive, proprietary, and confidential information, including personal information, business data, trade secrets, intellectual property, and confidential third-party data (collectively, "sensitive data"). Accordingly, we may be subject to numerous data privacy and security obligations, including federal, state, and local laws, regulations, industry standards, guidance, and other obligations related to data privacy, cybersecurity and information security.

Additionally, to the extent we collect personal information from individuals outside of the United States, we are, or may become, subject to foreign data privacy and security laws, such as the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation ("EU GDPR") as well as other evolving requirements regarding cross-border data transfers and related compliance obligations. In addition, because we are embedding AI features in our products, emerging and evolving laws, regulations, and standards relating to the development, training, testing, deployment, and use of AI may impose additional compliance obligations (including requirements relating to transparency, documentation, monitoring, and risk management) and may restrict how we develop, market, or offer certain features. Foreign data privacy and security laws impose significant and complex compliance obligations on entities that are subject to those laws.

We are also subject to global laws and regulations that govern or restrict our business and activities in certain countries and with certain persons, including the U.S. Commerce Department's Export Administration Regulations and economic and trade sanctions regulations maintained by the Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC), as well as anti-bribery and anti-corruption laws and regulations, including the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) and the U.K. Bribery Act.

These laws are examples of the stringent and evolving regulatory frameworks related to our business activities that may increase our compliance obligations and exposure for any noncompliance. For more information on the potential impacts of government regulations affecting our business, see "Risk Factors" included under Part I, Item 1A.

Corporate Information

Our corporate headquarters are located at 310 Littleton Road, Westford, Massachusetts, and our telephone number is (978) 614-4000. We were incorporated in Delaware in 1984.

Our internet address is http://www.NetScout.com.Our Annual Report on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, Current Reports on Form 8-K and amendments to reports filed pursuant to Sections 13(a) and 15(d) of the Exchange Act, are made available free of charge on or through our website at ir.netscout.com as soon as reasonably practicable after such reports are filed with, or furnished to, the SEC. None of the information posted on our website is incorporated by reference into this Report.

We webcast our earnings calls and certain events we participate in or host with members of the investment community. They are made available on our investor relations website at ir.netscout.com/investors/events-and-presentations/events-calendar/default.aspx. Additionally, we provide notifications of news or announcements regarding our financial performance, including SEC filings, investor events, press and earnings releases, as part of our investor relations website. We also use our investor relations website to disclose important information about the Company and comply with our disclosure obligations under Regulation Fair Disclosure. The contents of these sections of our investor relations website are not intended to be incorporated by reference into this report or in any other report or document we file with the SEC.