F5 Expands Platform With AI‑Era Observability To ‘Get In Front Of Problems,’ Top Execs Says

“This is the most exciting time to be in world of in the world of delivery and security in probably two decades,” F5 President and CEO François Locoh-Donou told CRN during AppWorld 2026. “The trend of delivering and securing apps and APIs across hybrid and multi-cloud environments is accelerating and it requires more delivery and security, and it’s accelerating in large part because of AI.”

Application delivery and security specialist F5 is reinforcing its unified application delivery and security platform (ADSP) message in the age of AI by bolstering its flagship offering with more security and observability features, the company revealed on Wednesday during its annual event, AppWorld 2026.

“This is the most exciting time to be in the world of delivery and security in probably two decades,” F5 President and CEO François Locoh-Donou told CRN. “The trend of delivering and securing apps and APIs across hybrid and multi-cloud environments is accelerating and it requires more delivery and security, and it’s accelerating in large part because of AI.”

F5 last year at AppWorld 2025 first unveiled ADSP, which integrated BIG-IP, distributed cloud services, and NGINX technology into a single place for complete delivery and security for every application. A year later, F5 is introducing a handful of important platform enhancements, including the addition of F5 Insight for ADSP with enhanced observability across the platform, support for agentic AI-driven workloads, future-ready cryptographic capabilities.

[Related: F5 Acquires MantisNet For Cloud-Native Observability, Security Push]

At a time when many enterprises are working with increasingly complex and distributed IT environments, ADSP can remove the need for point products to handle applications existing in a variety of locations, including disparate data centers, multiple clouds, or edge environments, the company said.

IT consolidation and “platformization” is critical right now to many customers that are rethinking their architectures in light of AI, said Chris Konrad, vice president of global cyber for F5 partner WWT.

ADSP is helping businesses modernize their infrastructures to support AI workloads, Konrad said.

“Our customers are always looking to understand what the platform play is because it’s something they can take advantage of,” he said. “[ADSP] provides all the tools to help customers manage the various challenges that they have — you’ve got hybrid, multi-cloud, all that while trying to address the various demands of AI workloads. [The platform] helps unify their operations and gives them the consistency that they’re looking for.”

F5’s technology is a component of WWT’s AI Proving Ground, a unique lab environment and big investment the solution provider giant has made to help end customers test, train and implement AI solutions, Konrad said.

“F5 is in there helping customers say: ‘How do I how do I accelerate my innovation with AI, while making sure my applications are remaining resilient and secure?’ It’s the perfect story for it,” he said.

New to F5’s ADSP is F5 Insight, a feature that offers end-to-end observability and analytics tailored to the customers’ environments by harnessing tools such as OpenTelemetry. F5 Insight includes Model Context Protocol (MCP) integration and support for popular large language models to provide predictive analytics and generate operational narratives to guide teams in prioritizing actions and addressing vulnerabilities, F5 said.

“Insight is very much attuned to delivering to customers things that they can actively use to get in front of problems before they occur. That’s one of the missions and the goals of [Insight], especially as application environments become far more complex, especially in the era of AI, where not only do you have client server flows, but you also have client server flows that belong to AI agents and you have to stitch together a lot of different data in order to understand how an environment is actually functioning. It demands a collection of a lot of information, analysis of a lot of information, and having a platform that can do that — specifically for the needs of applications, we felt, was really important,” Joel Moses, vice president of strategic engineering and CTO of platforms and systems for F5, told CRN.

F5 Insight for ADSP is available via self-managed software and a forthcoming SaaS model. It is now generally available for BIG-IP, with plans to extend capabilities to F5 NGINX and Distributed Cloud Services, the Seattle-based company said.

New ‘Packaging’ For Distributed Cloud Services

The company also took to AppWorld 2026 to introduce what it is calling a “straightforward packaging approach” to F5 Distributed Cloud Services, the company’s SaaS-based platform that provides security, networking, and application management across multi-cloud, on-premises, and edge environments. The new packaging was created to simplify ADSP adoption within a SaaS deployment framework and to promote infrastructure convergence, F5 said.

To that end, F5 two new starter packages, Essentials and Enterprise, that both offer integrated services such as CDN and API security capabilities. The company said that the new packages will simplify subscriptions for end customers.

Partners, Moses said, must be “sherpas” of the emerging application landscape that’s a result of AI adoption.

“[Partners are] going to have to be to help their customers through some of the transitions and technologies from old to new. They’re going to need to support them as they incorporate legacy environments alongside these new model environments,” he said. “The rise of artificial intelligence applications and AI agents even makes that more complex, and so they definitely have a role to play there.”