“This is probably the most exciting time in the world of delivery and security in the last 20 years,” F5 President and CEO François Rocaud-Denoux told CRN during AppWorld 2026. “The trend of delivering and securing apps and APIs across hybrid and multi-cloud environments is accelerating, requiring more delivery and security, and it’s largely fueled by AI.”
Application delivery and security specialist F5 is reinforcing the message of its unified application delivery and security platform (ADSP) in the AI era by enhancing its flagship product with more security and observability features, the company revealed Wednesday at its annual AppWorld 2026 event.
“This is probably the most exciting time in the world of shipping and security in the last 20 years,” F5 President and CEO François Rocaud-Denoux told CRN. “The trend of delivering and securing apps and APIs across hybrid and multi-cloud environments is accelerating, requiring more delivery and security, and this is largely fueled by AI.”
Last year at AppWorld 2025, F5 first announced ADSP, which brings together BIG-IP, distributed cloud services, and NGINX technology in one place for complete delivery and security for all applications. One year later, F5 is introducing several significant platform enhancements, including the addition of F5 Insight for ADSP with enhanced platform-wide observability, support for agent-driven AI-driven workloads, and future-ready cryptographic capabilities.
[Related: F5 Acquires MantisNet For Cloud-Native Observability, Security Push]
As many companies grapple with increasingly complex and distributed IT environments, ADSP can eliminate the need for point products to handle applications that reside in different locations, including different data centers, multiple clouds, and edge environments, the company said.
Chris Conrad, vice president of global cyber at F5 partner WWT, says IT consolidation and “platformization” are now critical for many customers who are rethinking their architectures with AI in mind.
ADSP is helping companies modernize their infrastructure to support AI workloads, Konrad said.
“Our customers are always trying to understand what the role of the platform is because it is something that they can leverage,” he said. “[ADSP] provides all the tools to help customers manage a variety of challenges. Achieve hybrid, multicloud, and more while addressing the varying demands of your AI workloads. [The platform] It helps you consolidate your operations and provides the consistency you’re looking for. ”
F5’s technology is a component of WWT’s AI Proving Ground, a unique lab environment and significant investment the solution provider giant has made to help end customers test, train and implement AI solutions, Conrad said.
“F5 helps our customers ask, ‘How can I use AI to accelerate innovation while ensuring my applications are resilient and secure?’ It’s the perfect story for that,” he said.
F5 Insight, a new addition to F5’s ADSP, leverages tools such as OpenTelemetry to provide end-to-end observability and analytics tailored to a customer’s environment. F5 Insight includes Model Context Protocol (MCP) integration and support for popular large-scale language models to provide predictive analytics and generate operational narratives to help teams prioritize actions and address vulnerabilities, F5 said.
“At Insight, we’re very focused on giving our customers something that they can use proactively to address problems before they occur. That’s one of our mission and goals at Insight.” [Insight]Especially in the age of AI, application environments have become much more complex, with client-server flows as well as client-server flows belonging to AI agents, and a lot of disparate data has to be stitched together to understand how the environment is actually working. That requires collecting a lot of information, analyzing a lot of information, and we felt having a platform that could do that was really important, especially for the needs of our applications,” Joel Moses, vice president of strategic engineering and CTO of platforms and systems at F5, told CRN.
F5 Insight for ADSP is available through self-managed software and an upcoming SaaS model. It is currently generally available on BIG-IP, and the Seattle-based company says it has plans to extend functionality to F5 NGINX and distributed cloud services.
New “packaging” for distributed cloud services
The company also attended AppWorld 2026 to introduce what it calls a “simple packaging approach” to F5 Distributed Cloud Services, the company’s SaaS-based platform that provides security, networking, and application management across multicloud, on-premises, and edge environments. F5 says the new package was created to simplify ADSP deployment within SaaS deployment frameworks and facilitate infrastructure integration.
To that end, F5 offers two new starter packages, Essentials and Enterprise, that provide integrated services such as CDN and API security features. The company said the new package will simplify subscriptions for end customers.
According to Moses, partners must be “sherpas” to the emerging application landscape as a result of AI adoption.
“[Partners are] You need to help your customers through the transition from old to new and through technology. “We’re going to need to support them as they incorporate legacy environments in addition to these new model environments. It’s becoming more complex with the rise of artificial intelligence applications and AI agents, and there’s definitely a role for them to play there,” he said.
