F5 unveils ADC 3.0 vision with its Application Delivery and Security Platform, tackling hybrid multi-cloud complexity and AI security challenges for enterprise customers.
At F5's AppWorld 2025 in Las Vegas, the company revealed its vision for addressing what President and CEO François Locoh-Donou describes as the "ball of fire" – the daunting complexity created by hybrid multi-cloud architectures, modern distributed applications and the emerging security challenges of AI-powered workloads. The company's answer? A complete reimagining of Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs) for the new era.
From Complexity Crisis to Convergence
"We have established that the prevalence of hybrid and multi-cloud architectures and the rise of modern, highly distributed applications has made delivering and securing apps dauntingly complex," said Locoh-Donou during his keynote address. "That daunting complexity is about to be significantly worse with the rapid proliferation of hyper-distributed, hyper-connected, hyper-hybrid AI applications."
The numbers tell a stark story. Enterprises today operate in an average of four or more infrastructure environments. Over the last decade, the number of applications organizations manage has grown four times, APIs have grown even faster, and the application services needed for each app have increased six-fold. Meanwhile, cyber-attacks have quadrupled.
This complexity has created what Locoh-Donou called a "ball of fire" with apparent symptoms: escalating costs, multiplying vendors and tools, complex infrastructure changes, human errors causing catastrophic outages, and expanding attack surfaces – all while teams struggle to find and retain skilled personnel.
Chief Innovation Officer Kunal Anand illustrated this complexity through a whiteboard exercise that traced the evolution of AI-powered applications from simple retrieval augmented generation (RAG) models to agentic AI systems that autonomously access various data sources, APIs, and other agents. "What you see behind me is an architectural perjury of the ball of fire," Anand explained.
The ADC 3.0 Vision
F5's response to this challenge is what they call ADC 3.0, embodied in their new Application Delivery and Security Platform. The concept represents a significant evolution from earlier generations of application delivery controllers:
ADC 1.0: Hardware appliances in privately owned data centers supporting monolithic applications (late 1990s to early 2010s)
ADC 2.0: Cloud-native services for applications in public clouds (early 2010s onward)
ADC 3.0: A converged platform approach spanning all environments and addressing modern security challenges
According to Anand, this new approach isn't just a controller but a comprehensive platform with six key properties: a single converged platform for all delivery and security functions; deployment flexibility across any environment and form factor; single policy management across locations; AI-powered analytics and insights; programmable data planes; and simplified lifecycle management.
The Competitive Landscape
What sets F5's approach apart from competitors is its commitment to meeting enterprises where they are today while providing a path forward. Locoh-Donou noted that some competitors believe all application delivery and security services should be delivered only as SaaS and in their cloud – a rigid approach that doesn't acknowledge the reality of hybrid environments. Others have simply stopped investing in hardware, abandoning customers who have significantly invested in appliance-based infrastructure.
F5, by contrast, has invested across hardware, software, and SaaS, making strategic acquisitions (Shape, Volterra, NGINX, Threat Stack, and WebScaleAI) to build a comprehensive solution. "No company could predict exactly what was coming, but we followed a course that led us here to ensure that the infrastructure that we are best known for—ADCs—was ready, ready for hybrid and multi-cloud, ready for AI, and ready to tame this ball of fire once and for all," Locoh-Donou said.
A practical example came from Mike Rau, SVP of Technology Alliances and Enterprise Technical Strategy, who explained F5's approach to simplifying data connections for AI: "Networking existing data to American models is running was certainly possible with traditional technologies, right? It was just complex. It required a lot of coordination between teams, so we just simplified that and added the security components."
AI-Enhanced Security and Management
The increasing adoption of AI applications creates new security challenges that traditional ADCs weren't designed to address. As Shawn Wormke, VP and General Manager, noted in his keynote, "AI is changing our conversation. These applications demand the same delivery and security excellence level that your traditional apps have always required. It's just harder and more complex with AI."
Chuck Herrin, Field CISO, compared today's AI security landscape to internet security in the early 2000s. "We all understand the potential of A, and we're focused on basic security, like connecting our data securely to our applications and controlling who has access to and what applications have access to what data. But you see, securing AI goes beyond traditional application protection. It's not just about safeguarding code and endpoints like normal apps. It's about controlling the dynamic flow into and out of those AI models."
F5's platform includes several AI-focused innovations:
F5 AI Gateway: A containerized solution to streamline interactions between applications, APIs, and large language models while providing security controls
AI assistants for BIG-IP and NGINX One: Tools that help administrators manage configurations, identify anomalies, and generate policies through natural language interfaces
iRules code generation: AI-powered automation for creating and optimizing traffic management policies
Addressing Hybrid Realities
A key strength of F5's strategy is acknowledging the reality of today's enterprise environments. Maggie Stringfellow, VP and GM of BIG-IP at F5, noted in an interview that "one of the main complaints I see in my research is that folks who used to have kind of end-to-end control used to spend none of their time doing security. Four years ago, they spent 8% of their time doing security. Today, on average, they spend 37% of their time doing security."
This trend toward converged responsibilities is reflected in F5's platform approach, which combines previously siloed functions. As Stringfellow explained, "We are creating this tool with convergence in mind. It makes collaboration across different silos much easier and more effective."
The platform also addresses another reality of hybrid environments: the need to connect data across locations. F5's partnership with NetApp, announced during AppWorld, illustrates this approach. Haiyan Song, VP at NetApp and former F5 executive, explained: "The success of AI is not just powerful compute. It's about connectivity and access to the right data at the right time and place."
Building for an AI-Powered Future
F5's research indicates that 96% of organizations are already deploying AI models, and the company predicts 80% of all applications will be AI-enabled within three years. This rapid transformation is driving the need for new approaches to application delivery and security.
"The applications you deliver with AI represent the pinnacle of modern application design. They're highly connected, APIs drive them, and they're distributed across multiple clouds and locations," explained Wormke.
For enterprises navigating this transition, F5's platform provides a path that acknowledges where they are today and where they need to go. By combining the high-performance capabilities required for AI workloads with comprehensive security and consistent policy management across environments, F5 aims to help organizations overcome the complex challenges of modern application delivery.
As Locoh-Donou concluded in his keynote, "The world will continue to throw new challenges and complexities at us, but it will also reveal new ways in which you can deliver bigger and more meaningful digital experiences that bring joy and delight to your customers. Our promise is to be your partner and guide as you innovate, dream big, and build them all."