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Francois Locoh-Donou

Chairman, President & CEO, F5, Inc.

Search every verified Francois Locoh-Donou interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. François Locoh-Donou, chairman, president, and CEO of F5, has been active in discussing the company's recent financial performance and strategic direction. During F5's Q3 fiscal 2026 earnings call, he reported 19% product revenue growth and 11% total growth, marking the eighth consecutive quarter of double-digit product growth. He attributed part of this performance to customer responses to the "Mythos effect," noting that enterprises are addressing technology debt and vulnerabilities, which has driven demand for F5's runtime security offerings. Locoh-Donou also stated that the company raised its fiscal year 2026 outlook to reflect revenue growth of 7 to 8%, up from a prior 5 to 6% forecast. In interviews marking F5's 30th anniversary, Locoh-Donou discussed the company's evolution from a hardware-focused load-balancing firm to a platform delivering and securing applications and APIs across hybrid multicloud environments. He described AI as the company's next major chapter, emphasizing F5's role in securing and delivering traffic between AI models and applications. He also noted that AI introduces new vulnerabilities and that enterprises face challenges in maintaining visibility over AI usage, positioning F5's security offerings as a response to these concerns.

Recent appearances

Notable quotes

“We're seeing a number of companies repatriate data from the cloud, largely for cost reasons and for control reasons. As companies realize they're going to leverage more of their data into their AI applications, they want to have control of that data, repatriating data on premise, but they then need to connect this data to their AI models and F5 plays a very strong role.”

“The first one is regulation, especially outside of the US, that is pushing companies to build hybrid multicloud deployments for resilience to be able to fail over from on premise to cloud deployments and also for digital sovereignty to have their assets under control typically in their own data centers. That really creates a tailwind for F5 because we were designed to support and enable deployment across on premise a”

“Within Fortune 1000 companies, it is estimated that there are less than 20 black CEOs today. As of 2025, for Fortune 500 companies, there are only eight black CEOs.”

“I am also on the board of a Fortune 100 publicly traded company called Capital One, which is the nation's sixth largest bank and one of America's top 100 companies to work for.”

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