F5 Channel Chief Lisa Citron To Partners: Don’t Miss This AI And Tech Refresh Moment

“What we have said to our partners is, ‘This is the immediate opportunity. Understand what AI is being done within your customers right now, help them build rules and help them organize their data and make sure that they’ve got high availability on that data for when they start to scale out their projects,’” says F5 Channel Chief Lisa Citron.

On the heels of AppWorld 2026, F5 Channel Chief Lisa Citron urged partners to capitalize on a rare convergence of AI momentum, a massive tech refresh cycle, and the continued evolution of F5’s flagship Application Delivery and Security Platform (ADSP). Citron said ADSP, introduced last year, has given partners a more compelling story as customers rethink hybrid and multi‑cloud architectures and move key workloads back into private clouds and data centers. With roughly half of F5’s iRules and VIPRION install base nearing end of support in 2026 and 2027, she said partners have a prime opening to lead broader ADSP and AI conversations tied to data access, availability and security.

Citron, vice president of global ecosystem at Seattle-based F5, emphasized the fact that AI is accelerating a shift in the channel away from transactional resale in favor of high‑value consulting, architecture and post‑sale services. With many enterprises trying to figure out how to turn AI initiatives into real outcomes, F5 is pushing partners to build deep expertise in AI data delivery and AI runtime security. Through new enablement efforts like its upcoming F5 Foundations program, Citron said the company aims to lower technical barriers while helping partners monetize AI skills, expand services margins, and differentiate through long‑term implementation and managed services.

With that in mind, Citron shared her thoughts with CRN on the key skills partners should focus on and how they can be the most successful in 2026. Here’s what she had to say.

What’s your message to partners right now on the heels of AppWorld 2026?

We really focused on these winning sales plays. It starts with ADSP [and] we launched that message last year at AppWorld and have built on it both with acquisitions as well as capabilities. That story has really resonated. Partners felt like [F5] finally has a story of how this all came together. This power of the ADSP message and what customers are facing is really driving that [story]—the need for converged infrastructure, the need for the flexibility that they have in how they deploy multi-cloud. We see more hardware being sold now as we see so many key workloads coming back out of cloud into private data centers and private clouds. AI, and what’s going on there and how, most importantly, to leverage this giant tech refresh motion that we’re in this [moment will be the] way to land those conversations. Everybody is always looking for a compelling conversation to have with your customer and to broaden what you’re talking about. A lot of our focus [at AppWorld 2026] was: Don’t miss the opportunity with 50 percent of our iRules series and VIPRION [application delivery controller] base end of support in 2026 and 2027. Now is the time to go in and have those ADSP conversations and those AI conversations. A lot has been focused on how we’re building out ADSP and then what can people do to practically use that as a lever to build more business.

What specific skills and capabilities are now table stakes for partners, in your opinion, that weren’t just three years ago?

Those consulting skills right now, especially as we think about the enterprise clients, are so key. Take a big partner, like a WWT [World Wide Technology]—as you compare across the partner landscape, they’re kind of a unicorn to compare to, but if you think about the element that they’re focusing on, on the business transformation side, it’s less about selling the customer what they ask for and more going in and really understanding the why and the what that the customer is trying to do. So those architecture skills, the understanding of that AI journey and what that customer is doing—all the way through the integration of the many different vendors, [are something] I think partners have always been good at. But so many times that architecture piece? I think that is really key in this era of AI. We had Accenture [on stage at AppWorld 2026], obviously a very big partner, they validated what our field CTOs are doing, which is that 85 percent-plus of enterprise customers are saying they’re launching an AI initiative and [only about] 12 percent are claiming success. So when you think about the opportunity for a partner to help move the customer from that learning that they’re doing into something that’s greater than 12 [percent to] 14 percent success, that’s a huge opportunity. That’s a service opportunity and starting to differentiate and getting out of the resale motion. Which, again, so many default to, but there's so much positive opportunity with AI.

How do you think AI has fundamentally changed the channel’s role?

I think what we’re seeing right now is that normal wave of the early set of folks who are going to kind of pave the way, and you can look back to cloud in the same way. We’re seeing the rise of some of these specialized partners, [and] so many [of them] got absorbed. They got bought by CDW, SHI or WWT or somebody else. I think right now we’re seeing this rise of a group that are, call it the ‘frontier group’ around AI and when I’m talking AI here, I’ll differentiate between the folks who are helping people deploy Copilot and Gemini—that type of workforce productivity—versus helping the enterprise architect and outcome around things like agents or how is it going to reduce dollars inside of my risk model at a large bank? I think we’re seeing this emerging group of partners who really leaned into it. If you look at the DNA of them, they likely have an Nvidia relationship. They’ve kind of focused in on an area, or maybe they're doing it with Dell and they’re taking that Dell path, but they’ve got an anchor partnership and they’re building an ecosystem of sorts around that anchor partnership. So, you could take Nvidia, plus an F5, plus a Red Hat, plus a NetApp, and now all of a sudden, I’m building a purposeful reference architecture of what I see as success with the technologies that I have already proven my deep knowledge in and my success with. And I think right now the masses are in the wait-and-see [mode], and it’s going to be this frontier group [that is] going to pave the way, and I think then we’ll see that kind of normalized across a set of channel partners.

How is F5 sort of evolving its channel program or resources for partners to help support big AI projects?

That’s a great question. We’re doing two things, and one of them sort of speaks to the skill gap conversation. In April, we’ll launch something called F5 Foundations, and Foundations will go across four categories: Big IP, NGINX, Distributed Cloud and AI. What I was able to say to so many of our expert partners [at AppWorld] is: ‘This is not about you. You’re going to test out of this easy because you have deep, rich knowledge. But there may be one of these areas that you’re not an expert in or have that foundational knowledge.’ The thing about F5 is that we have been complex and [have a] highly technical product. Partners like us because of our large deal sizes. They like us for the stickiness of services, but we’re complex, which meant that there is a high barrier to entry for engineers on their side. So, Foundations has a lot to do with: How can you build more engineers? And so much of what we’re doing with AI in F5 is simplifying—code generation with iRules and things like that. The next step of that is specialization, and it’s really about building the expert capability associated with these [things like] AI delivery, data delivery and AI runtime security. Getting [partners] super deep, super able to not only do the presale side of it, but the post-sale side of it. We think this is going to be an even bigger post-sale opportunity for our partners than ever before.

Is there a particular area that you’re encouraging partners to get well versed in right now?

It’s the two core use cases. It’s AI data delivery and AI runtime security. AI data delivery sitting in front of those storage areas and then putting in the traffic management—what everyone has known and loved us for. Who thought load balancing would be cool again? And what we’re able to do there with the high throughput piece, because AI needs to see the data, and it needs to see it fast, right? So, we don’t sit with the blinking light waiting for an answer. That runtime security piece is so important in understanding what is going into it and then, how do I build rules to make sure that the information that I need to keep internal is not giving out [things] like, ‘What is [a specific employee’s] compensation?’

What we have said to our partners is, ‘This is the immediate opportunity. Understand what AI is being done within your customers right now, help them build rules and help them organize their data and make sure that they’ve got high availability on that data for when they start to scale out their projects.’

Do you think AI-focused projects are changing services margins or life-cycle opportunities for partners and, if so, how should they be thinking about those shifts?

I think that architecture was always a high-value service for [partners]. It was either a high-value service, or it was a loss leader, right? Because you went in and you did a bunch of that architecture work for free, but you did it based on proving value. Customers won’t love me saying this, but I think when something is as new and emerging as AI is, partners should look to hold value around the consulting work that they do there. Those who invest deeply in building that knowledge skill set, because it is rarer in the industry right now, that’s a valuable, monetizable piece of work. My advice to partners I sit with is, ‘Don’t underestimate that value that you bring to the table and the knowledge that you have,’ though some will still use that as a loss leader because that’s the business that they built.

I think the other side of it is, what partners loved as, say, the rise of the data center [was happening], was actually getting in and then figuring out how things were going to work together. So, I do think that implementation and even managed services are going to come up even more so around new tech stacks. There is an opportunity for partners that’s different than it was in on both ends of the spectrum, and the nice resale piece sits in the middle. But I do think it’s reminding partners because some of the implementation stuff even became table stakes. We’re in a new era, and I think building that domain expertise that they did, going back with the rise of the data center, and coming at this from that standpoint with AI is going to be really important. I think it’s the next wave of something we’ve, in a way, seen before.

How can partners be successful in 2026 with F5 and the emerging opportunities around AI?

The go-do is take leverage of that 50 percent of the install base that’s up for tech refresh and go have a conversation with your customer about what they’re doing in AI and what they need to be thinking about regarding the access and availability of their data and making sure they have the right security controls, and then leveraging it as an opportunity because customers are looking for less vendors than they have. These are customers with a longtime reliance on F5—use it as an opportunity to expose the other things that we do in this ADSP platform and how this platform is going to give them visibility and the ability to do policy enforcement across their F5 environments, no matter where it sits. That’s always been the power of us. You can use us anywhere you need to—on-prem, in the cloud [and in] multiple private clouds. That’s the message. Use that tech refresh motion.