Good afternoon, and welcome to the F5 4th Quarter Fiscal 2020 Financial Results Conference Call. At this time Also, today's conference is being recorded. If anyone has any objections, please disconnect at this time. I'll now turn the call over to Ms. Suzanne DeLong.
Ma'am, you may begin.
Hello, and welcome. I'm Suzanne DuLong at Five's Vice President of Investor Relations. Franco DeNeu, F5's President and CEO and Frank Peltzer, F5's Executive Vice President and CFO, will be making prepared remarks on today's call. Other members of the FIME executive team are also on hand to answer questions during the Q and A session. A copy of today's press release is available on our website at f5.com, where an archived version of today's call will be available through January 25, 2021.
Today's live discussion is supported by visuals, which are viewable on the webcast, and will be posted to our IR site at the conclusion of today's discussion. The replay of today's call will be available through midnight Pacific Time, October 27th, by dialing 800 5858367or4166214642. Use Meeting ID 605,529. For additional information or follow-up questions, please reach out to me directly s.dulongf5.com. Our discussion today will contain forward looking statements, which include words such as believe, anticipate, expect and target.
These forward looking statements involve uncertainties and risks that may cause our actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by these statements. Factors that may affect our results are summarized in the press release announcing our financial results and described in detail in our SEC filings. Please note that F5 has no duty to update any information presented in this call. With that, I will turn the call over to Francois.
Thank you, Suzanne, and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. While fiscal year 2020 was not the year that any of us expected, I speak for the entire executive team when I say how proud we are of the F5 team for delivering a very strong year under extraordinary circumstances. Our results show building momentum in our pivot to a software and subscription driven business. They also show the value of our incumbency, the strength of our customer relationships and the stickiness of our solutions.
In the last several years, we have aligned we have built close to a $450,000,000 software product run rate business that in FY 2020 grew 52%. With $365,000,000 in fiscal year 2020 revenue, the strength of our software business line in our systems business, which was down 10% for the year. Our services business grew 5% For the year, we delivered 5% non GAAP revenue Today, our customers face exploding application growth and the reality that users expect more than they ever have from applications. Our customer's business depends not just on whether their application loads, but how quickly it responds and whether it and its users are secure. New ways of working and the higher expectations for application performance customers focused on solutions that enable them to work smarter and scale faster.
We believe we are ideally positioned to serve this demand. Frank will review our fourth quarter fiscal year financial results and our outlook. I will then speak to our fiscal year 2021 growth drivers, including some customer highlights from the quarter. Frank?
Thank you, Francois, and good afternoon, everyone. I will speak first to our 4th quarter and then to our fiscal year results before discussing our outlook for FY 2021. We delivered a very strong Q4, On a GAAP basis, Q4 revenue was $615,000,000. 4th quarter non GAAP revenue of $617,000,000 was up approximately 4% year over year and above the high end of our $595,000,000 to $615,000,000 guidance range. Please note as I review our revenue mix, I will be referring to non GAAP revenue measures.
Q4 product revenue $280,000,000 was up 6% year over year and accounted for approximately 45% of total revenue. Software revenue was $113,000,000, growing 36% against a very tough comparison of 91% growth in the prior again against a very tough comp in the year ago period. As we look ahead, we are seeing very positive trends in our software business and expect much stronger software growth in Software continues to grow as a percent of product revenue, representing 40% of product revenue in Q4, up from 31% in the year ago quarter. Subscriptions represented 76% of software revenue in the quarter compared to 66% in the year ago quarter. Services revenue of $336,000,000 grew 3% year over year and represented 55% of revenue.
Revenue from recurring sources, which includes term subscriptions as a service and utility based services revenue totaled 66 percent of revenue in the quarter. This is up from 63% in the year ago period. The improvement comes largely as a result of Systems revenue of $168,000,000 was down 8% compared to last year. On a regional basis, in Q4, Americas delivered 4% revenue growth year over year, representing 58% of total revenue. EMEA delivered 9% growth, representing 4% of revenue.
APAC was down 1% year over year and accounted for 18% of revenue. Looking at our bookings by vertical, we saw robust enterprise activity in the quarter, with enterprise representing 70% of product bookings. Service providers accounted for 15% and government customers represented 16% of product bookings, including 7% from U. S. Federal.
Let me now share our Non GAAP gross margin was 84.4 percent. GAAP operating expenses were 404,000,000 Non GAAP operating expenses were 3 16% and our non GAAP operating margin was 30.1%. Our GAAP effective tax rate for the quarter was 20.4%. Our non GAAP effective tax rate was 19%. GAAP net income for the quarter was 78,000,000 or $1.26 per share.
Non GAAP net income was $150,000,000 or $2.43 per share. I will now turn to Cash and investments totaled approximately $1,300,000,000 at quarter end. We repurchased approximately 358,000 shares of F5 common stock in the quarter at an average price of $140 per share for a total of approximately $50,000,000. DSO was 43 days, and capital expenditures for the quarter were $12,000,000. Deferred revenue increased 6% year over year, to one $300,000,000.
We ended the quarter with approximately 6110 employees, up approximately 90 employees from Q3. Let me now turn to our full year 2020 results. For the year, GAAP revenue totaled 2.35000000000 Non GAAP revenue grew 5 Non GAAP product revenue of approximately $1,000,000,000 grew 5 percent from the prior year and accounted for 44% of total revenue. Within product revenue, software grew 52%, while systems revenue declined 10%. Subscriptions represented 71% of software revenue in fiscal year 2020 compared to 55% in fiscal year 2019.
Revenue from recurring sources totaled 65 percent of revenue for the year, up from 60% in fiscal year 2019. Services revenue of $1,320,000,000 grew approximately 5% during the year and represented 56% of total revenue. Our non GAAP effective tax rate for the year was 20.2%. GAAP net income for FY2020 was $307,000,000 or $5.01 per share. Non GAAP net income was $575,000,000, or $9.37 per of 2021.
Unless otherwise stated, please note that my guidance comments reference non GAAP metrics In our Q1 and fiscal year outlooks, we have attempted to factor in the expected impact of continued global uncertainty related COVID-nineteen and the broader economic trends as we understand them to date. Let me start with sharing our expectations for the first quarter of 2021. Near term, we expect customers will continue to prioritize investments that enable them to serve the immediate needs of their customers and employees. We expect to benefit from being a trusted and operationalized partner of the largest enterprises around the world as they continue to With this in mind, we are targeting Q1 FY21 non GAAP revenue in the range of $595,000,000 to $615,000,000 We expect Q1 'twenty one gross margins of 84.5 percent to 85% and we estimate operating expenses of $324,000,000 to $336,000,000. We anticipate our effective tax rate for Q1 will 21% to 22% range.
Our Q1 earnings target is $2.26 to $2.38 per share. We expect Q1 share based compensation expense of approximately $56,000,000 to 58,000,000 As for our capital deployment, we retain the option to repurchase shares opportunistically in any open trading window Now let me share some of We have made tremendous progress on our software transition and expect momentum to continue as the contribution from subscription software and SaaS grows. Accounting for this progress in fiscal year 2021, we expect to grow software revenue for the full year by more than 35% Based on our strong Q1 software pipeline and increasing momentum from our software subscription offerings, we expect a software growth rate of at least slightly compared to FY 2020, likely declining high single digits for the year. We anticipate gross margins of approximately 85% for the year. We expect to achieve at least We also expect operating margins to move following our typical seasonal pattern.
We anticipate our full fiscal year effective tax rate to be in the range 21% to 22% with some fluctuations quarter to quarter. We expect fiscal year 2021, stock based compensation in the range of $30,000,000 to $240,000,000 and capital expenditures in the range of $40,000,000 to $60,000,000. We expect to Please remember to pre register on our Investor Relations site. With that, I will turn the call back over to Francois. Francois?
Thank you, Frank. It has been more than 2 years since we unveiled our strategy to transform F5. In the process of extending our reach, and expanding our role, we have built the broadest available application security and delivery portfolio and significantly expanded our addressable market. As a result, the foundation Going forward, our software growth will be more diversified, thanks to a broader and growing subscription and fast base of revenue. We have a renewal flywheel that is starting to turn with momentum and true forward revenue opportunities on a sizable portion of our long term subscription is growing across all geographies subscription based, up from 55% in 2019.
We expect continued software momentum in fiscal year 2021, and I will speak to our growth drivers in turn. First, core Big IT software. Much of the software growth we have delivered thus far comes on the back of Big IT. I have spoken previously about the extensive work we have done to reduce friction in purchasing, deploying and managing the IP software We have focused on flexibility in our commercial models and on enhanced automation and central management. During Q4, customers chose big IP to refresh core business applications as well as for capacity additions, In one instance, a multinational delivery services company chose big IP to handle both in freeze traffic to its consumer facing dot com site and to scale backend processing.
Looking ahead, We expect applications in hybrid and multi cloud environment. Our second growth driver is NGINX. NGINX brings multiple growth vectors to FY 'twenty one and beyond. In addition to continuing to expand NGINX Plus instances, We see increasing customer interest in NGINX controller, our modern app orchestration and analytics platform. Controller is complementary to Big IP and bridges the divide between dev teams building modern apps and the infrastructure teams that need to secure scale and monitor them.
And AppProtect, our WAF solution for modern applications. NGINX with AppProtect enables security professionals and develop us to introduce application security early in the development lifecycle, making security part of the modern app stack. In Q4, we secured an NGINX AppProtect win with a major video conferencing and collaboration platform. NGINX already is a key technology for this customer, enabling them to scale their platform to meet explosive COVID-nineteen demand. With that explosive growth, however, also came increased security concerns.
NGINX's ability to scale rapidly with no impact on service delivery was a key differentiator. As was our ability to meet a wide set of requirements in a cloud agnostic way, including low balancing, caching and security with App Protect. Not only did this win expand our existing footprint with the customer, It also positions us to capture additional use cases, including protecting login pages and preventing provincial stuffing with SHAPE solutions. Use cases like this one, enabling best in class security on modern application architectures, are gaining momentum, and we believe accelerate the appeal of NGINX to large enterprises. That provides a good transition to our 3rd growth driver, application security.
Application security is a large and growing focus for customers and understandably so. In the current environment, organizations are more reliant than ever on applications to enable employee collaboration and customer engagement. At the same time the attack surface and sophistication of attacks has increased dramatically. During FY 'twenty, web application firewalls remote access, SSL orchestration and fraud protection led customer security demands. As an example, during Q4, we secured a cloud win with a retailer with a significant dotcom presence.
Big IP virtual additions outperformed both a cloud native load balancing and web application firewall solution. As a result, the customer doubled its F5 consumption in just the first year of its multiyear term subscription. We expect the application security demands we have seen this year persist and grow in FY 2021. As a result, we expect security across multi cloud environments is fulfilling a significant and growing customer need. Within the context of application security, We also see shape as a significant software growth driver.
Customers are looking to shape AI and machine learning enable defense capabilities to protect against a growing number strong contributor and a great addition to the F5 portfolio. In the roughly 9 months the shape team has been part of F5, we have grown even more confident in the opportunity it brings to F5 and our customers. Shapes intelligent fraud and bot protection value proposition is resonating with customers across multiple verticals. For instance, In Q4, we secured a shape win with 1 of the world's largest social networking platforms to protect the platform and its users from artificially generated influence caused by inauthentic behavior. Shapes ability to deliver a high degree of efficacy with high confidence and actionable intelligence was a key differentiator in this win.
Shape also is available via our several line managed services platform, which allows customers to benefit from shape's capabilities with no integration work. We have secured several wins in a very short timeframe, thanks to this integration and the ease of implementation it brings. In fact, one recent integrated win takes shape, which is already installed on the majority of the top 10 U. S. Banks, and extends it to thousands of small and mid sized banks who are using civil line for their managed security needs.
This is an example of one of the core premises of our combination with shape. We are taking shapes industry leading anti fraud solutions and making them available to a much larger customer base at a time when customers are facing tremendous increases in both the volume and sophistication of attacks. Our 4th growth driver is continued growth in cloud deployments. Our FY 2020 cloud business totaled more than $100,000,000. Security use cases are playing an increased role as customers rely on F5 to ensure robust and consistent application security.
Our cloud presence has been driven both by our organic investments in FI Cloud Services and through our partnership with the cloud providers. Our strategic collaboration agreement with AWS is just one example of a highly complementary cloud provider partnership. In addition to a co selling motion, which is generating new leads for F5, AWS and F5 have co innovated on programs and cloud native integrated solutions. Just last week, we introduced a joint solution combining Amazon Cloudfront and F5's essential app protect. CloudFront is a fast content delivery network or CDN service from AWS.
F5's essential AppProtect is our easy to deploy SaaS security solution for protecting web applications. Integrating essential app protect and Amazon cloud front securely delivers data, videos, applications and APIs to customers globally with low latency and high transfer speeds, all within a developer friendly environment. We are leveraging the power of AWS to provide customers strengthened security and increased performance. And we are doing this in a single SaaS solution, which delivers higher long term return on customers' application investment and a better experience for their users. This integration illustrates the path of our collaboration with AWS, and we continue to explore how our 2 companies can come together to help customers deliver more value through their cloud applications.
I would be remiss if I did not also speak to the opportunity we see with service providers. In general, service provider RFP activity is up from last year and quote requests and informal activities are much higher. In addition, following our Rakuten win, we are beginning to see more movement and solid customer plans on their 5G strategies. At this point, we are engaged We have traditionally played a role as the preferred choice for GI Land Solutions in 4g Networks and we are well positioned to continue to own that segment and grow into new 5G functions. In fact, we have already secured multiple design wins in 5G architectures and we expect deployments to begin ramping in the second half of twenty twenty one.
A few words from our systems business before we wrap up As Frank noted, we expect our systems decline to slow in fiscal year 2021, compared to fiscal year 2020, likely declining in the high single digits. While there is a tendency to think that accelerated digital transformation means 100 percent software deployments, it does not always. Our business whether software or systems is tied to applications, whether they are in the data center, the public cloud or anything in between. We are supporting mission critical applications globally. Many of these applications are experiencing rapid growth because of remote working and risingecommerce demands.
With this growth comes escalating application security concerns, including application fraud. FID is there to help with whatever consumption model our customers prefer. As we look ahead, we see a significant opportunity We are reducing our customer's operational complexity, improving their application performance, securing all apps no matter where they live, and unlocking valuable business insights. F5 has always been about solving our customers most important application challenges. Over the last two years, we have built the broadest available application security and delivery portfolio from both traditional and modern application Our understanding and appreciation of our customer's rapidly evolving needs has also deepened over the last 2 years.
Today, customers face exploding application growth and the reality that the baseline of user expectations from applications has been redefined. Think of your own experience and how markedly it has changed. The richness of your favorite app experience, it is reliable, fast, personalized and trusted? How long do you wait if the application is slow? What do you do when an upgrade degrades your experience or worse yet, the app fails altogether.
Switching brands has never been easier. A large insurer, an industry where competitive advantage has not historically been rooted in applications told us that if their homepage does not load in under 3 seconds, they lose the customer a fast paced Digital World is just as fast to move elsewhere. Digital transformation has reached set expectations for the experience and application must deliver to be compelling to be competitive. Our customers need F5 to enable these rich experiences, and we have a unique position from which to help them to do so. We see a world where our customer's application portfolio adapts as needed.
Where it automates redundant processes for greater efficiencies and it protects itself, securing all points of vulnerability. Where it expands and contracts based on performance needs and where by mining and harnessing application data It gets smarter, more insightful, becoming self tiering and evolving more quickly. As 5 is uniquely positioned to deliver this vision because of the portfolio and capabilities we have assembled. We are looking forward to speaking more about our vision for adaptive applications and how we are making it a reality at our upcoming Analyst And Investor Meeting. In closing, we have made significant progress pivoting F5 and changing the way customers see us.
We have built the broadest available set of application security and delivery services, and expanded our total addressable market in the process. And building a robust and growing base of recurring revenues. Let me wrap up our prepared remarks by thanking as well as our customers and partners. And our innovation are well aligned with both near and longer term customer demand. With that,
Your first question comes from the line of Meta Marshall from Morgan Stanley. Your line is open.
Hi, team. This is Eric on for Meta. Thanks for taking our question. Maybe just going back to the comments made on service rider side and just on that vertical specifically. Have you seen any change to order behavior that maybe matches with some of the other equipment providers have noted?
And I know you noted some design wins for 5G, but wondering if that near term has had any impact just being mindful of the percentage of revenue from that segment. A little bit lower than it has been traditionally?
Hi, Eric. The short answer is no we haven't seen a fundamental change, Eric. The percentage of our revenue of our bookings comes from service providers is basically in the same range it has been for the last few quarters. We are seeing momentum in 5G activity, but in terms of when that will turn into kind of meaningful contribution to our order book, we think that's more of a second half of twenty twenty one. But we are seeing continued traction in security use cases with service providers.
And specifically, our position as a consolidator of multiple functions, which is kind of a unique position that I don't think you necessarily would see with, other equipment providers in the telco We have a unique position in consolidating a number of functions like CG Nat and DDoS and DNS, TCP Optimization. And increasingly our service providers virtualized their infrastructure, our ability to consolidate all these functions in a software bundle is very appealing to them. And so that's, that's a use case that it's growing. But overall, the business the trends in
the business have been the same over the last few quarters, so no specific change.
Got it. That's very helpful. And then if I could sneak in one more, just on kind of the stronger expectations on the hardware side moving forward, what would you guys point to as the strongest reason. Maybe some customers are still choosing hardware. Are there any incremental drivers?
I think, Eric, the, we've always said that we have a number of geographies that have that continue to grow in their consumption in hardware form factors and also a number of verticals, where hardware form factors play an important role, including service providers, government, even financial services, But I think the difference, today is our security has become a more important mix of our hardware business, than it was a couple of years ago. And our hardware security business is not declining. And so when you factor that in, that leads to a decline in hardware systems that's abating And that's largely because of the mix of, of security that's in our hardware business today.
Your next question comes from the line of James Fish from Piper Sanders. Your line is open.
Hey, guys. Congrats on a great quarter. A couple of questions here. You're talking about strength in application security. Guess, how do you feel about the portfolio as a whole, whether there are areas that you'd want to get at organically or inorganically And any sense to how many customers are now using shaped security?
Generally, we feel very good about our application security portfolio. We think we are one of the one of the very, very few players, who provide, who can protect an application, but also protect how an application is used. With a combination of F5 security capabilities and now shapes portfolio. So we feel very good, about our competitiveness and differentiation in this space. And in fact, our security business had been growing healthily but that has accelerated as well with, with COVID because the amount of, online fraud and attacks on digital channels not just for retailers, but all kinds of companies, has continued to increase and in fact, has increased dramatically in the last few months.
And that's providing, significant tailwinds for us. So that's the, that's where we're at on the app security in general. And Jim, we will probably say more about that at the Analyst And Investor Meeting.
Got it. Fair enough. And end of last quarter, you guys noted some weakness in sort of the APAC sales due to COVID-nineteen and not being able to get in front of customers. How did this change as you worked through the quarter?
I think in Asia Pacific, Jim, we're still, we still have some geographies that are challenged with, COVID-nineteen as you've seen. There's been some second waves and some lockdowns. So there's some specific geographies where we have been challenged. The comment about some software projects that were put on hold, we, I think that was throughout our Q4. That was still the case.
But we're starting to see that abate, and we feel very good about the pipeline we now have for the first half of twenty twenty one. And, in fact, we are, as you saw from the prepared remarks, We think our software business in Q1 of 2021 will grow faster than 50% year on year. And for the full year, we think it'll be greater than 35% year on year growth. So we feel, that our software business really has, we think we have turned an inflection point here. Our software business is on a broader base of subscriptions And it's giving us an opportunity for a number of true forward opportunities on renewal.
We've got a much broader base of subscription than we did a year ago. And as you see, the software business now more than 40% of our product revenue. So we would, we generally feel that well, inflection point here where our software is going to continue to have very strong growth going into 2021. Thank you, Jim.
Your next question comes from
the line of Rod Hall from Goldman Sachs. Your line is open.
Yes, hi guys. Thanks for the question. I wanted to start off. You talked about enterprise order momentum being good and I wondered if maybe you could dig a little bit more into that in terms of size of enterprise. Are you seeing that more in large enterprises or medium size?
Can you give us some color there and just kind of how the order momentum looks from a verticals point of view too? And then on the growth, my second question is I can calculate based on the parameters you gave, growth that's a little slower than 20, but I can also get up above 5% growth depending on minor tweaks to that. And I'm just curious, whether you think it's more likely growth does accelerate in 'twenty one? And then what's what's your macro assumption there? Are you assuming macro improves?
Are you assuming the current environment persists? I mean, just curious kind of what you guys think the demand environment will do on 21 in the context of that growth indication?
Hey, Rod, there were a number of questions there. So I'll make sure I try
and No,
no worries.
I'll repeat them if you need.
Yes, I'll start from the end. You may need to repeat. Just on the macro to start there, Rod, Our assumptions as that the environment does not get better than it is today, but we also assume it doesn't get materially worse. So we have been in this, environment in the pandemic for the last three quarters. And I think we've reported now three full quarters under this environment.
And it's allowed us to take stock of what our customers are doing, where their priorities are. And we've taken all of that into account into our 2021 planning. So basically, we kind of assume status quo Now as to the beginning of your question on enterprise spend, look, the vertical there are 2 things that are important. As you saw, our enterprise numbers were actually pretty strong. And I think there are 2 things that are important there.
Number 1, the verticals that we are most exposed to as a company, are in enterprise are really financial services technology and government. And in these verticals, the need for more applications, more applications security and more multi cloud deployments of applications, has continued to be strong. The verticals where we have seen a lot of weakness, which are more, the retail transportation, the verticals that are directly affected by, by COVID, they represent less than 10% of our business. So yes, they are soft, but the impact on our business has been limited And generally, we have very limited exposure to the small and medium businesses. So that's in terms of the mix of the business, that's the reason.
And I think the other reason where you see strong enterprise demand for us is our, I think there still is a perception out there that Si is really a networking data center company. And so folks tend to look at our results compare us to campus switching or routing type equipment. But the reality is our spend is more tied to the need for customers to protect their applications with security and the need for customers to deploy more and more applications globally in multi cloud environments. And so we our business is closely tied to the growth complexity and security of applications than it is to, kind of network dynamics. Have I,
yes, the only other one was the quantification of the growth. If I add up kind of what you guys said, I can get to kind of a minimum growth rate of maybe 4%. But probably even a little higher than that depending on what you think services grows. But I'm curious whether you see growth, you lean toward growth accelerating if the environment remains the same off of or do you think growth just kind of remains the same or maybe it's a little worse? I'm just curious which direction do you think growth is going in 'twenty one if all other things held equal?
I think, so we're not giving a full year, top line guidance here. We will give a view of our Horizon 2 guidance in 3 weeks at AIM. So I think you'll get a little more color there. I would just say that generally based upon what we've seen in Q4 and our Q1 guidance, I think we feel good about
Your next question comes from
the line of Sami Chandra from Credit Suisse. Your line is open.
Hi, thank you very much. The first question I have is related to the software strength in the quarter. And I know, Francois, you you made a couple of very granular examples in the drivers of cloud that we saw in the quarter that really drove solid results and are going to continue to be solid results. But we think about the composition of product revenue and software revenues, was there any high concentrations on specific customers or was there any lumpy activity in the quarter? And then to take that a step further, does the fiscal 1Q 2021 also factor in lumpiness or concentration that are driving these solid results?
You know, Sami, the answer is no. And actually, that is precisely why I say that we have reached an inflection point in our software. So to look at our software results a year ago, we have pretty strong growth. If you remember, in Q4, we had 91% growth. But that was in part, driven by a couple of large transformational kind of deals.
And the results we have this quarter, are really not So it's a broad base of adoption of our software and our software subscription. You probably saw that in our results, now more than 3 quarters of our software revenues. So 76% of our software revenues this quarter, came from, subscriptions. And so we've got a broad based on adoption of our software subscription consumption model across all of our verticals, not a specific customer, not a specific vertical. And that's part of why we have confidence in growth in our software is because we're seeing now a larger number of customers have reached that point where they're taking our software and it's giving us a broader base of, renewal opportunities going into 2021 starting to see the flywheel that you would see in a subscription business where for a number of our multiyear subscription, we have a true forward opportunity at the end of a 1 year subscription across a number of customers, and that's going to start contributing to the growth in our software.
So that's that's what I would say about lumpiness. I would say though that, we are also seeing a good pipeline of, I would say, these larger projects, going into the first half of twenty twenty one. Some of the projects that had been delayed, we think we'll see some of them in the first half of the year.
Got it. And then one question for Frank. I was hoping you could just help us think about the services growth rate in fiscal 1Q 2021. Is there a way we should thinking about it, something similar to the last two quarters kind of guidance framework? Any kind of real clarification on that would be great.
Yes, I'm not going to give a specific growth rate number. We'll have more to say, as Francois said at 8 inches. We think the trend towards lower, single digit growth though is likely in FY 'twenty one. And so this is just consistent with the hardware, software attach rates, but we've been seeing consistent pricing. We've been seeing an increase in attach rates for all cohorts of the Edge contracts.
And so we're really happy with the overall services business.
Great. Thank you. Solid results. Thank you for fitting in my questions.
Your next question comes from the line of Alex Henderson from Needham. Your line is open.
Thank you very much. So we've heard a number of bars and other people in the industry talk about the emergency spending type orientation to IT spending, particularly around security, particularly around work from home, endpoint security and the like. What they've also said though is that some of the transition transitional programs, things that were strategically important, those programs have been delayed and pushed out somewhat as a result of the temporary focus on, and we've got to make sure that everything's secure from work from home. Are you starting to see any real clarity around some of those larger projects coming back in, particularly around digital transformations to cloud orchestrated application deployments, and Kubernetes adoption. Or alternatively, is that still something that's a little further out in the headlights?
Alex, I think So the large kind of digital transformation projects, 1st of all, I would echo what you've said. We have seen a delay in some of these transformational project. But we are also seeing people have attended to the immediate priorities and they are now coming back to these, projects and starting to reignite them. So I think that's why I think in the first half of twenty twenty one, we should start to see some of these projects actually, come to be realized. And that's what I've said there applies to generally kind of digital transformation, movements of cloud, software first environments, big automation projects, those types of project.
When you speak specifically to Kubernetes environment, I think what we're seeing, there's a lot of, kind of excitement around taking these Kubernetes environments in production at scale. I think we're still in the very early innings of that. We've got a very good window into that with, Nginx. As you know, Nginx is the number one egress controller into Kubernetes environments and deployment. And so we are seeing demand there, and we're seeing an acceleration, but we still think we're in the very early innings of, those types of containerized deployment
And then just one last question for me. Just going back to the 35% plus growth in software, Can you parse that between what portion of that is organic and what portion of that is inorganic?
Well, no. But the, I think we've given information about the contributions of shape in our Q3 and Q4. So you could use some of that information to kind of, try and pass out what organic and inorganic. Remember that, shape was bought part of F5 in Q1 of 2020, but pretty much from Q2 onwards, they were, they were part of F5 last year. So the 35% is overall growth rate.
We, and that's kind of the minimum we think we'll do. We think it's likely we would do better than that. Overall, given the drivers that I've spoken to on NGINX, the acceleration. I just mentioned that we're seeing there in this Kubernetes environment. What we're seeing in the cloud.
Alex, I don't know if you picked that up in our script, but we have about $100,000,000 out cloud business has now exceeded $100,000,000. We've got the partnership with AWS, which continues to go very well. We announced last week a product integration with AWS in AWS Cloudfont, which we think will be a catalyst. And I talked about the broad base of subscriptions that will drive organic growth next year. So overall, I think the software business is in acceleration phase, and we're happy with that.
Thank you very much. Great quarter.
Your next question comes from the line of Tim Long from Barclays. Your line is open.
Thank you. Yeah, 2 quick ones, if I could. First, just curious, if you could talk a little bit about revenue synergies from both Ingenics and shape. It sounds like shape had a pretty good quarter and there's a lot of traction for Ingenics, but So you can kind of let us know where we are on that synergy basis and how much more room there is for cross selling there? And then second question is, I just want to get into a little bit the kind of the big IP moderating on the hardware side, but good traction on the software side.
Could you talk a little bit about I guess there's been there had been cannibalization. So do you think we'll start hitting a point where it's a lot more driven by newer workloads on the big IP software side so that the sum of those 2 could be more positive than maybe it was when there was some hardware to software replacement? Thank you.
Let me start on shape and engine light. And Tim, we will say more about that, at AIM in a few weeks, but a few highlights for you, in terms of the synergies. What we are seeing that the deal sizes on both NGINX, so NGINX has been part of F5 for 18 months and shape has been part of F5 for 9 months. What we are seeing for both is a substantial increase in the average deal size as a result of the 5 go to market capabilities with NGINX in which shape. And also an acceleration of, essentially new logo acquisition for, for both organizations.
And so the combination of NGINX go to market and F5 is yielding these results. And so the monetization and the platform is better. With the shape, we only have, 9 months of runway, but we're seeing exactly the same trend. Now in terms of product synergies, as you know, when NGINX came as part of 5, they were really early into monetization of the platform, very powerful platform, but early in monetization We've now just released 2 new solutions, the NGINX controller and the app security, called NGINX AppProtect which are, early days, but getting traction and will substantially also increase the deal size with NGINX. So new products coming to accelerate monetization.
And then on shape, we have moved extremely quickly to build integrations between shape and big IP and shape in our silver line offerings. So for example, we now offer, the shape bot defense technology as a managed security service, on top of the WAF and DDoS bundle that already existed in our civil line managed security service. And that has already accelerated the civil line business in the last quarter. So we're very excited about what's to come there. And I will touch on that again in a few weeks.
Now on to your question about big IP, Tim. I think the what we are seeing there is
I think the hardware, if
you think about it, the hardware load balancing business, we think that's going to continue to decline. But increasingly, our hardware business is driven by either standalone security hardware or bundles of security and ADC together, and our stand alone security hardware business is not declining, but it's a bigger mix of our total hardware business. And the result is you're seeing that, that decline of hardware, which was in the 11 percent, we think next year is going to be in the high single digits. So that's where we're at. And then to your point on cannibalization, I think we will we will continue to see more customers, that are, ADC customers adopt a software first approach, both on prem and in the cloud.
And that's why
Your next question comes from
the line of Samik Jadajay from JP Morgan. Your line is open. Hi,
thanks for squeezing me in here. Francois, if I can just start with some color from you on the traction you're seeing for shape. You talked about the opportunities that you're seeing. Can you just talk about whether you're seeing kind of the adoption happening just because there's more need for security solutions? Or are you replacing any existing solutions?
And how do we get comfort around not seeing like a wave of vendor consolidation and security once we get post kind of COVID planning from the customers? And I have a follow-up.
Hi, Samik. Can you explain that last bit around concern of seeing a wave of consolidation?
What I was trying to get to is we've had a lot of momentum here for the security vendors overall. So once we get post COVID planning from the enterprises? Do we see kind of more consolidation in the number of security vendors that most enterprises work with?
Yes, I think what we're seeing and what you'll continue to see, Samik, is that most large, so remember that F5 really is most exposed to kind of large enterprises. And both large enterprises and service providers increasingly want to use a best of suite approach. So our approach to them is to offer a combination of application security technologies, that allow their applications to stay online so stay secure and, allow us to protect the data and logic of these applications. And that overall suite for application security. It's not a component.
It's not a single slice of application security. The broadest application security portfolio that you can have.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is the operator I apologize, but there will be a slight delay in today's conference. Please hold until we reach back to speaker's line. The conference will resume momentarily. Again ladies and gentlemen, this is the operator. I do apologize for the slight delay.
In today's conference. Thank you for your patience. The call will resume momentarily.
Hello?
Ladies and gentlemen, our speakers have rejoin us and we still have Samak Tamaki Chatteri in queue for questions.
Samik, sorry about that. Our line was dropped. Did you hear the first part of the answer?
Yes. So overall product based services, yes. Yes. So if I can just follow-up maybe for Frank quickly because I know you're also up on the R here. Just looking at the operating margins here, Frank, when the shape acquisition was announced, but prior to that, you were looking at about 33% to 35% operating margin.
Now you're guiding about 31, I think, for next year when I think about the delta there, is it primarily till shape or do you think there's kind of environments that had an impact on this? And thank you for taking my questions.
Sure, absolutely. So yes, shape accounted for the large majority of that. And I think PoShape talked about, 30 to 32 we ended up on the low end of that range, to make, and, our goal is to get back above 31% for fiscal 'twenty one.
Thank you.
And our final question comes from the line of Jeff Kvaal from Wolfe Research. Your line is open.
Thank you. I guess I have a question for you, Francois, and one for you, Frank. Francois, I'm wondering if you could sketch out a little bit for us now that you're security portfolio is well integrated. Where do you find yourself having the most success in security and where do you find some of your rivals doing well? Do you run into Zscaler, etcetera, etcetera?
And then Frank, for you, I'm wondering if you could help us a little bit understand sort of the thinking behind the buyback and what we might expect in the coming year from that.
Yes, Geoff. So let me, frame more, we're having success in security. Number 1 is in application security. So we're not our focus is not on endpoint security, or really network security per se. Our focus is on protecting applications.
And we're seeing that increasingly the most sophisticated attacks go through application. The sources of, more breaches and incidents come from vulnerability in application, and that's our focus. And we have now put a portfolio together, that is not a a single solution, for application security. It's a suite of solutions for application security. And there are very few players that really provide, web application firewall, DDoS, remote access as well as, bought and fraud protection and protecting not just how an application is accessed, but how the application is used.
And protecting against fraudulent behavior of that. And if you look at where we are having success with that portfolio, it's in the large enterprises. So financial services, as you can imagine, a lot at stake in terms of securing these applications and the digital interactions with our customers. But the same in technology, some of the large, the largest, social media platforms in the world are protecting, protected by F5 and shape. And we're seeing the same, the same kind of success in government and service providers.
So that's the verticals where we get success and the types of solutions where we get a lot of traction.
And then, Jeff, on the buyback, it's the same as it's been. It's certainly one of the uses of our strategic cash that we see. The other two uses are potentially M and A as well as paying down our term loan A that we took out to acquire shape. And so, those are the three things that we're focused on. You saw in the last quarter that we did another $50,000,000 of share repurchase.
We'll continue to be opportunistic on that going forward.
Okay. That sounds great. And I look forward to more detail on security progress in a few weeks.
Thank you for attending today's call.