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F5 Networks Inc (FFIV -1.26%)
Q1Â 2019 Earnings Conference Call
Jan. 23, 2019, 4:30 p.m. ET
Contents:
- Prepared Remarks
- Questions and Answers
- Call Participants
See all our earnings call transcripts.
Prepared Remarks:
Operator
Good afternoon and welcome to the F5 Networks' First Quarter Fiscal 2019 Financial Results Conference Call. At this time, all parties will be able to listen only until the question-and-answer portion. Also, today's conference is being recorded. (Operator Instructions)
I now like to turn the call over to Ms. DuLong. Ma'am you may begin.
Suzanne DuLong -- Vice President of Investor Relations
Hello and welcome. I'm Suzanne DuLong, F5's Vice President of Investor Relations. Francois Locoh-Donou, F5's President and CEO; and Frank Pelzer, F5's Executive Vice President and CFO will be making prepared remarks on today's call. Other members of the F5 executive team are also on hand to answer questions during the Q&A portion of the call.
A copy of today's press release is available on our website at f5.com and an archived version of today's call also will be available through April 24th, 2019. A telephonic replay of today's discussion will be available through midnight Pacific Time tomorrow, January 24, and can be accessed by dialing 800-688-2171 or 402-998-0565. For additional information or follow-up questions, please reach out to me directly at [email protected].
Our discussion today will contain forward-looking statements, which includes words such as believe, anticipate, expect, and target. These forward-looking statements involve uncertainties and risks that may cause our actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by these statements. Factors that may affect our results are summarized in the press release announcing our financial results and described in detail in our SEC filings. Please note that F5 has no duty to update any information presented in this call.
With that, I will turn the call over to Francois.
Francois Locoh-Donou -- President, Chief Executive Office, and Director
Thank you, Suzanne, and good afternoon everyone. Thank you for joining us today. I'll talk briefly to our business drivers before handing over to Frank to review the quarter's results in detail.
We delivered a solid Q1, overachieving on earnings with revenue growth of 4%. Year-on-year software growth of 21% drove our third sequential quarter of product revenue growth. Focusing on software, public cloud continues to be our strongest software growth area in this quarter. We also saw increasing demand for our security solutions, particularly Advanced Web Application Firewalls. Our new software consumption models, including Virtual Editions subscriptions and ELAs also contributed to software growth in the quarter.
Our ELA pipeline continues to grow, accelerating in Q1 and we expect ELA sales to continue to pick up as our customers continue to shift to multi-cloud deployments. Overall, our software story is evolving to plan, putting us on pace to achieve our Horizon 1 target of 30% to 35% software growth in our fiscal year 2019 to fiscal year 2020 time frame.
Our services business had another strong quarter, delivering 5% growth with robust gross margins resulting from transformation initiatives we've been executing to improve an already effective and efficient business. The scale, scope and expertise of our services team remains a differentiator for us, and with a customer satisfaction rating of 9.6 out of 10 for our technical support team, it is clear we are providing support at levels unmatched in the industry.
During the quarter, systems also continued to perform as expected, with customers choosing our traditional appliances when they want to control and manage the end-to-end application delivery solution and in most high-performance use cases. At this point, I will hand the call over to Frank to review our Q1 fiscal year 2019 results and our outlook for the second quarter of fiscal 2019. Frank?
Frank Pelzer -- Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
Thank you, Francois, and good afternoon, everyone. As Francois noted, we delivered solid revenue and strong EPS growth in the quarter. First quarter revenue of $544 million was up approximately 4% year-over-year, within our guided range of $542 million to $552 million. GAAP EPS was $2.16 per share. Non-GAAP EPS of $2.70 per share was well above our guidance of $2.51 to $2.54 per share. The beats for GAAP and non-GAAP EPS were driven largely by strong gross margin, hiring that was slightly behind plan and better-than-expected other income.
Q1 product revenue of $234 million was up 3% year-over-year and accounted for approximately 43% of total revenue. Software was approximately 19% of product revenue and grew 21% year-over-year. Systems revenue made up approximately 81% of product revenue and was down less than a 1% year-over-year. Services revenue of $310 million grew 5% year-over-year and represented approximately 57% of total revenue.
On a regional basis in Q1, Americas revenue was flat year-over-year and represented 54% of total revenue. EMEA revenue grew 7% year-over-year and accounted for 27% of overall revenue. This quarter we've combined our APAC and Japan segments for external reporting to reflect the way we now view the business internally. Revenue for this combined region grew 11% year-over-year and accounted for 19% of total revenue.
Sales to enterprise customers represented 65% of total sales for the quarter. Service providers accounted for 14% and government sales were 21%, including 10% from US Federal. In Q1, we had three greater than 10% distributors; Ingram Micro, which accounted for 17% of total revenue; and Westcon and Arrow, each of which accounted for 11% of total revenue.
Turning to our operating results; GAAP gross margin in Q1 was 84.1%. Non-GAAP gross margin was 85.2%, slightly better than our expectations, driven by improving product margins, which were benefiting from an increasing mix of software sales, as well as continuing strength in our services margins.
GAAP operating expenses were $299 million. Non-GAAP operating expenses were $262 million. Our GAAP operating margin in Q1 was 29.1% and our non-GAAP operating margin was 37%, above our guidance of in the mid-30% range, driven largely by gross margin strength and operating expense efficiency. Our GAAP effective tax rate for the quarter was 20.8%. Our non-GAAP effective tax rate was 21.5%, in-line with our 21% to 22% guidance range.
Turning to the balance sheet; in Q1 we generated $198 million in cash flow from operations, which contributed to cash and investments totaling $1.55 billion at quarter end. DSO at the end of the quarter was 54 days, driven by service maintenance renewals at the end of FY '18. Capital expenditures for the quarter were $21 million. Inventory at the end of the quarter was $31.6 million. While our adoption of ASC 606 had a de minimis impact on our income statement, we did experience a few changes on our balance sheet items. Deferred revenue increased 16% year-over-year to $1.15 billion. Approximately half of the $134.2 million increase over the previous quarter was due to the adoption of 606.
Other current and long-term assets increased by $135.5 million from the previous quarter, of which approximately 80% was due to the adoption of 606 as we are now capitalizing unbilled receivables and commission paid for sales of service contracts. Finally, retained earnings increased by $130.7 million in the quarter, approximately $36 million of which was driven by the adoption of 606.
We ended the quarter with approximately 4,518 employees, up 170 people from Q4 as we execute in our plan to aggressively hire in our growth areas. In Q1 we repurchased approximately 569,000 shares of our common stock at an average price of $177.64 per share for a total of $101 million.
Now let me share our guidance for Q2 '19. Unless otherwise stated, please note that all of my comments reference non-GAAP operating metrics. Overall, we remain confident in our position in the market and in the growth opportunities for the business with solid software momentum. We believe the long-term trend toward multi-cloud environment is strong and will be a fundamental growth driver for the solutions we offer today and those we will launch in the first half of calendar 2019. While sales to enterprise customers continues to remain strong, we have seen some softness within our service providers vertical as some of our larger customers are planning their next-generation application architectures.
F5 is positioned very well to capitalize on the massive increase in application traffic anticipated with 5G architectures. But we believe it is prudent to factor in a measure of near-term softness with our service provider customers in our outlook. Our guidance does not include the impact of a US federal government shutdown, should it extend into February.
With this in mind, we are targeting revenue in the range of $543 million to $553 million. We expect gross margins in the 85% to 85.5% range. We are estimating operating expenses of $270 million to $282 million. You will recall that last quarter we mentioned we expected operating margin to move down slightly in Q2 and Q3 before moving into the upper 30% range in Q4.
We anticipate our effective tax rate for the year will remain in the 21% to 22% range we previously provided for the full fiscal year, with some fluctuations quarter-to-quarter.
Our Q2 earnings target is $2.53 per share to $2.56 per share. In the quarter, we expect share-based compensation expense of approximately $40 million and $1.8 million in amortization of purchased intangible assets. As a reminder, we anticipate stock-based compensation to be in the range of $155 million to $165 million for the year.
Capital expenditures are expected to be in the range of $110 million to $130 million for the year. This range includes approximately $17 million of cost related to our previously announced move of our corporate headquarters to F5 Tower in downtown Seattle as we readied the space for occupancy this year.
With that, I will turn the call back over to Francois. Francois?
Francois Locoh-Donou -- President, Chief Executive Office, and Director
Thank you, Frank. Before we move to Q&A, I'll spend just a few minutes on the trends we're seeing in the business, highlighting some customer wins from the quarter and talking to innovation at F5 . On January 15th we released our Fifth Annual State of Application Services Report. With input from nearly 2,000 respondents across a range of industries, company sizes and roles, the report provides a view into application trends impacting our customers globally.
One of the key takeaways from this year survey is that as organisations progress on their digital transformation journeys, they see application services as vital for cloud adoption. The report also shows that multi-cloud has evolved from an experiment to a key strategy, with nearly 90% of respondents reporting they are implementing multi-cloud architectures. And forcing consistent security and ensuring reliable performance in these multi-cloud environments remains challenging.
These and other trends highlighted in the report align with our vision of expanding F5's reach and role, and with our efforts in the last year to repurpose investment and focus on growth areas for our business. These trends are also playing out in real-time with our customers and you can see them in some of our customer wins from Q1. These include a win with a global software and service provider customer who is already leveraging F5 solutions across their multi-cloud environments, including a bring your own license in AWS marketplace and Virtual Editions in Equinix and Azure.
This quarter, they purchased licenses for their procurement and supply chain software-as-a-service offering on Google's cloud platform. Customers increasingly are making decisions on a per-app basis and during Q1 we had a per-app multi-cloud deployment with a US based crypto currency exchange. This customer wanted to differentiated its services to the financial industry through best-in-class security solutions for blockchain transactions. They chose F5's cloud addition virtual web application firewall for its more robust performance over latest public cloud tools and BIG-IQ for the ability to manage and scale their per-app infrastructure. We also provided a software subscription consumption model to match their enduser billing cycles.
There are two BIG-IP cloud edition wins I'd highlight from the quarter, one with an international stock exchange and the other with a large energy supplier in Europe. In both cases, customers are using Cloud Edition for application service isolation, enabling agile application development. This includes simplifying the move from a development environment into production across multiple clouds and ensuring policy compliance through self-service templates.
We continue to see security use cases driving a significant portion of our customer conversations and net new customer wins. That's not surprising when you consider data from our application services report shows that customers are increasingly deploying a combination of security services to protect their applications and data. Our advanced web application firewall solution plays right into that trend and our bug detection and mitigation capabilities are a significant differentiator.
During the quarter we had a number of customers select our advanced WAF solution for its Anti-Bot and machine-generated traffic monitoring and blocking capabilities. This includes a major US city's police department that needed enhanced features and functionality beyond the native cloud toolsets that they have been using.
Turning to service providers, we are driving continued adoption of our NFV solutions in new areas of business with our service provider customers. In Q1, we closed deals for our DNS offerings with multiple Tier-1s globally. These customers are leveraging the combination of our extreme scale DNS infrastructure along with the ability to protect data infrastructure with our integrated security capabilities.
In addition, we also continued to win 4G and now 5G-related deals with our mobile customers, and we see continued strength in firewall use cases including GPRS tunneling protocol. We see 2019 as a significant pivot point for our business, a point where our customers will begin to experience a different F5. What do I mean by that? I mean they will be able to migrate or upgrade their F5 instances in minutes. They will be able to consume F5 technology as a native cloud service without owning F5 hardware or software. They will be able to try and buy F5 technology in new ways. Over the last 18 months, we significantly shifted our investments and resources toward innovation in automation and orchestration, Cloud-Native software and Software-as-a-Service, and we are excited our customers will experience these new capabilities firsthand in 2019.
BIG-IP Cloud Edition was introduced in May and continues to gain traction with customers wanting to consume ADC on a per-app basis or wanting to offer better SLAs to their DevOps users. The majority of use cases for BIG-IP Cloud Edition continue to be net new applications we were not addressing before. As we continue to bring new solutions and new innovations to our customers, F5's reach and role will continue to evolve.
Our development teams continue to drive our Cloud-Native software and F5-as-a-service platforms forward. These are two disruptive platforms that we are convinced will change the paradigm of application delivery. Both are well on track for first commercial availability in the first half of calendar 2019. And I have to tell you, I am so proud of these teams. They have moved forward relentlessly and have taken these solutions from paper to reality in an incredibly short period of time. Both of these offerings are now at beta stage and in the hands of early customers providing feedback on initial features.
At the same time we're moving full-steam ahead with the internal digital transformation required to support our digital touch motions and ensure frictionless procurement and service renewals for our new offerings. It's a different kind of innovation, but innovation none the less. We believe that robust and constant innovation is a necessity for F5, so we're also innovating in new ways.
For more than a year now we have had teams dedicated to focusing on testing new disruptive innovations in technology, business models or customer segments. Operating under the supervision of Tom Fountain, our Chief Strategy Officer, each team is led by General Manager and staff with dedicated employees. We expect innovations will be complimentary to our goal of delivering the broadest and most consistent portfolio of app services across cloud and on-premises environments.
During Q1 we announced one of the first innovations to come from this program and the open beta of our Aspen Mesh Solution. With the shift from monolithic to micro-service architectures, a rapidly increasing number of applications are being deployed in container environments. Yet there is still a need for services that help enterprises monitor, manage and control microservice-based applications at runtime.
Aspen Mesh provides critical enterprise features in a platform built on top of HTL (ph), so organizations enjoy the benefits of an open source approach without forgoing the features, support and guarantee needed to power enterprise applications. It's very early days for the solution, but we've already got customers who are very interested in exploring it. These innovations represent incredible forward movement and speak to the drive and dedication of our global team.
In closing, my thanks to the entire F5 team, our partners and our customers. We are excited about the progress we're making toward our long-term vision for F5. We are expanding our reach and our role, expanding our reach by taking our industry-leading solutions beyond traditional data centers and need to private and public clouds and expanding the role we play for applications by providing additional high value services.
With that, we will now open the call to Q&A.
Questions and Answers:
Operator
Thank you. We'll now begin the question-and-answer session. (Operator Instructions) And our first question is from Sami Badri of Credit Suisse. Your line is now open.
Sami Badri -- Credit Suisse -- Analyst
Hi, thank you for the question. I first want to kick it off with just talking about your guidance for 1Q or calendar 1Q coming up, and it does not include any partial government shutdown impacts, just as a clarification, I believe I heard that earlier. And then the second piece of that is, if there is any customer impact so far from the US partial government shutdown, that'd be great color?
Frank Pelzer -- Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
Sure, Sami, so it's Frank. I'll take that one first. So to answer the second part of the question first, we have seen an impact but it's not in probably the way that you might expect. We've actually won business, but there's no one in the central procurement agency to actually process the paperwork. And so our guidance anticipates that this does not go on through the remainder of the quarter, but somebody is actually going to be there to process or we will find another route in which to process those orders. If we find that this continues to go throughout the quarter, we probably would expect some impact that is not anticipated in our guidance.
Francois Locoh-Donou -- President, Chief Executive Office, and Director
Just to complete on the question and no, we have not seen an impact outside of the federal government in our broader enterprise business to-date.
Sami Badri -- Credit Suisse -- Analyst
Got it. Thank you. And then my second question has to do with the GAAP services gross margin that continues to expand and it continues to hit a record high as of this quarter. And can you walk us through what are the dynamics that are driving this expansion? Could you potentially attribute the EPS beat in the quarter to both services margin expanding and on top of that the ELA that was reported in the quarter?
Frank Pelzer -- Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
Yes. So the dynamics on the services business, there are essentially two initiatives we've put in place last year that are bearing fruits. Generally there's a set of transformation initiatives we have in services, but specifically we're leveraging more tools and more AI tools and automation to deflect as many cases as possible where we can and it's allowing us to have better efficiencies, better utilization of our resources. We've also embarked on having a better distribution of our resources globally to support different geographies. And both of these efforts are benefiting in our gross margins.
Sami Badri -- Credit Suisse -- Analyst
Got it, thank you.
Operator
Thank you. The next question is from Samik Chatterjee of JP Morgan. Your line is now open.
Samik Chatterjee -- JP Morgan -- Analyst
Hi, thanks for taking my question. Francois, I just wanted to start off with the Horizon 1 targets that you have, which kind of you alluded to in terms of software growth of 30% to 35% this year. So clearly you're expecting an acceleration in the coming quarters. Just want to understand if you expect that to be more driven by the Cloud Edition product that you're ramping up on or is there also a contribution kind of that you are thinking of from the products that are coming up in terms of Cloud-Native apps, as well as F5-as-a-service coming through later this year? How are you thinking kind of the driver of this acceleration in software this year?
Francois Locoh-Donou -- President, Chief Executive Office, and Director
Hi, Samik. Yes, we are expecting an acceleration. Generally, we feel we are on track with this Horizon 1 target. For everybody's benefit, we said in Horizon 1, which is 2019 and 2020, we expected software growth to be in the 30% to 35% range and we still feel that, when you look at these two years in aggregate, that's where we're going to be. So there is going to be an acceleration.
The contributors, Samik, in 2019, I do expect Cloud Edition to be a meaningful contributor to that growth. We have seen continued traction with Cloud Edition. We did actually more deals on Cloud Edition just in this past Q1 than we did for all of 2018, so we are seeing a pick up there. And I also expect that in 2019 we will see meaningful contributions from our new modes of consumption, specifically this ELA, this enterprise license agreements and the subscription models, which are also gaining traction with our customers. The newer products that will be released in the first half of calendar '19, specifically the cloud-native app services platform and our F5-as-a-service, our FaaS offering, they will start contributing in 2019, but I would expect that the ramp -- that the more meaningful contribution comes in 2020 for these newer propositions.
Samik Chatterjee -- JP Morgan -- Analyst
All right. And I just had a quick follow up for Frank, the -- Frank, the pace of repurchases moderate over the last -- over what we've seen as a pace for you -- over the last year, is that something persistent (ph) in terms of like blackout periods, etcetera or is this more for reflection of how you're thinking about capital allocation this year?
Frank Pelzer -- Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
I think I would just say capital allocation, not just this year, but just broadly how we think about our capital allocation strategy. We think cash is a very strategic asset and for the first time in a long time, we're actually getting, some decent interest rate return on it that, you know, we saw a beat on our other income. It's clearly not necessarily where we want to beat. We want to beat on the top line but we'll take it on the operating -- on the other income line as well.
I think, you know, share repurchase is one of several alternatives for our cash. Dividends are also a possibility. M&A is also a possibility and several other things. And so we view this as strategic to the business and we also believe we're likely going to be in the $100 million to $150 million range for the quarters to come. And so I think that should be the expectation that we set. It's what we baked into the guidance that we've given you.
Samik Chatterjee -- JP Morgan -- Analyst
Okay, got it, thank you.
Operator
Thank you. The next question is from Paul Silverstein of Cowen. Your line is now open.
Paul Silverstein -- Cowen & Company -- Analyst
Thanks guys. If we could just focus on the telecom segment, Francois, if I'm going to give the numbers correctly, we'd have to go back over five years the last time telecom was this low, it looks like you did around $76 million down from the $100 plus million level that prevailed throughout fiscal '18. That's a $30 plus million drop. I know you made some comments during the call, but I'm hoping you can give us some more insight in terms of what is going on in that segment and your expectations going forward.
Francois Locoh-Donou -- President, Chief Executive Office, and Director
Yep. Hi Paul, so generally we had a soft quarter on service providers in Q1 and we actually expect the softness to prolong for a couple of quarters, that the softness was particularly marked more in North America than globally. And I would say that generally what we're seeing is, we're in a bit of a transition between 4G and 5G where we had a number of projects, 4G-related projects that are kind of tailing off and 5G-related projects that haven't yet picked up. We feel pretty good about our position for 5G because as 5G radios get deployed, we are going to be in line of that traffic. So we expect to see potentially significant capacity upgrades down the road as that 5G traffic start hitting the GI core. But that's not in place yet and we think we're seeing a bit of a transition from one to the other and we're in between. And we also...
Paul Silverstein -- Cowen & Company -- Analyst
I'm sorry, go ahead.
Francois Locoh-Donou -- President, Chief Executive Office, and Director
I was gonna say, we also saw a couple of projects that we won in quarter that were pushed out that we think will pick up in the next quarter. But if you look at the broader trend, which we also saw in last quarter by the way, we're soft in service providers in Q1 -- sorry now at Q4, that is kind of a similar trend we're seeing, this transition between 4G and 5G.
Paul Silverstein -- Cowen & Company -- Analyst
Francois, just to be clear. I understand it's hard -- in situation like this it is hard to project or forecast. But given the magnitude of the softness where, again from the $100 -- $110 million quarterly run rate that have prevailed for the past three years, this dramatic fall off. Is this -- do you have visibility that this is primarily or just a function of the 4G to 5G transition? How much of this is true insight, how much of this is speculation?
Francois Locoh-Donou -- President, Chief Executive Office, and Director
I would hope more of it is insight. I generally think we are experiencing -- we are in the middle of this transition, Paul. There are of course always areas you can look at and say, look there are areas where in terms of our go-to market we could execute better. In fact, we are in the process of hiring at the front end of our business. In one area where we are actually doing significant hiring is in the service provider space both in North America and internationally because we see strong opportunity. We think that architecturally we are well positioned. You know, we brought in a new GM, as you know, James Feger a few months back and we are getting a lot of clarity around some of the future developments we're going to make.
So, you know, generally I feel good about where our service provider business is going to go. But I do think the softness we're seeing is not going to go away in just a quarter or two. I think we're going to see that for few quarters.
Paul Silverstein -- Cowen & Company -- Analyst
I appreciate it. Thank you.
Operator
The next question is from Alex Kurtz of Key Capital Markets. Your line is now open.
Alex Kurtz -- KeyBanc Capital Markets -- Analyst
Yes, thanks for taking the question guys. Just on the ELA outlook. Can you just kind of reset for us how long the enterprise sales organization has been talking to your top enterprise accounts about ELAs and what's your multi year outlook for ELA as far as adoption within your enterprise accounts or service provider accounts and kind of what it's done, maybe the deal size, share wins, any kind of qualitative, quantitative feedback on kind of how long it's been in this system for the sales organization and kind of what outcomes you are seeing from it?
Francois Locoh-Donou -- President, Chief Executive Office, and Director
I think Alex -- I'll start and then I'll ask to Chad Whalen to add in terms of the pick up with the sales team. Last year -- we introduced the ELAs just last year and really in 2018, we're essentially experimenting with the sale motion. We've now launched it as of November to our sales team and we're seeing significant excitement and traction with it.
In terms of your question around the multi-year outlook for ELAs, I would say we expect over time in our horizon to -- for a meaningful portion of our software business, if not the majority of the time to be ELA or subscription based. And we'll see that we believe both in the enterprise space and to some extent in the service provider space. So it is a meaningful and important development for us, it gives our customers a lot more flexibility around wherever they deploy their licenses and when they have uncertainty around the lifecycle of an application or the amount of capacity or (inaudible) certain application, it's a great vehicle for them to deal with that uncertainty and it also allows them to consume much faster because they don't have to deal with multiple procurement cycles. So for the first ELAs that we have signed, we're actually seeing a good opportunity to expand on those ELAs when we renew them sometime in 2019.
Alex Kurtz -- KeyBanc Capital Markets -- Analyst
And just to clarify, every sales -- every account exec can quote out an ELA or is it just in certain pods, in certain verticals?
Chad Whalen -- Executive Vice President, Worldwide Sales
Yes. Hi, Alex. This is Chad Whalen. Yes, every account exec can and does quote out ELA. In fact, we just launched an aggressive and incentive campaign for all of them and that's really driven appreciable increase of the pipeline of opportunities. At the end of the day, our customers are really embracing this vehicle because it's an easy commercial construct to consume our services in any kind of mode that they want across their different application suites, whether it's on-prem or in the cloud, it's a great vehicle that can take away some of the complexity as we're going through these digital transformations.
In terms of the adoption from our sales team, it takes time to get the motion right in the market, understanding how to size it from a customer perspective and take friction out of that process. What we're seeing now, after we've spent the time that Francois talked about, in terms of pressure testing and learning last year, we're getting a lot more velocity in the motion and we're seeing that translate into the pipeline of opportunities now and in the near-future quarters.
Alex Kurtz -- KeyBanc Capital Markets -- Analyst
Thank you.
Operator
The next question is from Jim Suva of Citi. Your line is now open.
Jim Suva -- Citi -- Analyst
Thanks very much. When you mentioned about your cloud-native solutions without having to buy F5 hardware, can you walk us through such transactions and specifically some economics of it, you know, dollar amount, gross margins or just generally how we should think about that on the premise if this continues to increase, is it -- is there any way for us to frame about the detriment to the hardware and the uptake on a software and the impact of margins in dollars?
Frank Pelzer -- Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
Yes. Hey, Jim, let's start with margins. As you know, our gross margins in hardware are in the early 80s and our gross margins on cloud-native software by bought as a package software are going to be in the early 90s. So, there's not a huge difference. We said in our guidance that, you know, in our Horizon 2, which was 2021, 2022, we potentially would see a bit of an uptick in gross margins. We're in the 85% range now and we will be in the 85% to 87% range in that Horizon.
As it relates to the price or the top line impact of this, the equation is actually fairly simple for us. The hardware, today, you know, we -- primarily what our customers continue today before the introduction of our Cloud Edition was hardware and Virtual Editions. These have been largely consumed on-prem though we have very rapid growth now happening in the cloud. The new packaged software products that we are releasing, the Cloud Edition that came out last year and this Cloud-Native application services platform that's coming out in the first half of '19, those are opening up new use cases and allowing us to address applications that we have not addressed in the past. That was characterized as the longer tail of applications.
The price per unit for each of those applications is going to be less than when you're buying a big unit of hardware, of course, but the volume of applications we can address is much greater. And so we look at it as an expansion of our addressable market and we think that largely the new platform address an incremental market and an incremental opportunity for us.
Jim Suva -- Citi -- Analyst
Thank you so much for the detail.
Suzanne DuLong -- Vice President of Investor Relations
Operator, can we move to the next question, please?
Operator
I believe the next question is from Simon Leopold of Raymond James. Your line is now open.
Simon Leopold -- Raymond James -- Analyst
Great. Thank you for taking the question. I wanted to come back to the topic of capital allocation. The Company up until this most recent quarter has been pretty steadily buying back at least $150 million and then with the renewal you updated (inaudible) an additional billion. I want to see if we can get a better understanding of the Board's logic and your logic for why wouldn't you institute a dividend, perhaps a 3% or 4% yield that could give you some wiggle room, maybe $75 million to $100 million per quarter if you go to a dividend and be attractive to a larger set of shareholders. Could you help us understand that?
Francois Locoh-Donou -- President, Chief Executive Office, and Director
Yes, Simon, look, I will bring you back, Simon, to what we said at our Analyst and Investor Meeting in March. We are pursuing a growth strategy and we laid out what we think the financials are of that growth strategy and part of that we said is we want to use our cash as a strategic asset to pursue that growth, some of which can be used potentially for acquisitions. And so we want to have that flexibility. If we see opportunities in the market to accelerate our growth or derisk part of our plan, to take the opportunity and use our cash as a strategic asset to do that, and we don't want to lose that flexibility because that's the strategy we're pursuing.
Simon Leopold -- Raymond James -- Analyst
And could you just maybe outline your acquisition, lots of things in terms of what type or size of deals, would you be biased toward technology tuck-ins or larger deals that might require the Company actually take on debt?
Francois Locoh-Donou -- President, Chief Executive Office, and Director
Simon, here's what I would share with you about our philosophy as it relates to acquisitions. We feel that we have a significant opportunity to extend our reach in terms of being able to reach every application anywhere. We think the world is becoming more application-centric. We believe our growth is going to be linked to applications and we want to reach every application anywhere. In addition to that, we offer a number of apps services today and we believe we have an opportunity because of our position to offer more application services and extend our role.
We will look at acquisitions that allow us to accelerate the expansion of our reach or the expansion of our role. And when you look at within this context, we may look at things that are, you know, what you would call tuck-ins or even acqui-hires or small acquisitions and/or there may be opportunities for things that are bigger. We're not constrained and we're not looking at it just in terms of, is it small or big. We're really looking at it in terms of, is there a strategic aspect.
The most important thing for me as we go through and potentially explore these opportunity is to make sure that we remain disciplined about it, discipline in terms of -- of course, you know, being -- continuing to focus on organic innovation as our first priority and discipline in making sure that, if and when we make an acquisition that we have truly thought through how we create value from having the asset inside of F5 as opposed to outside. And that -- as a result of that we have a very strong value creation plan through a transaction.
Simon Leopold -- Raymond James -- Analyst
Great. Thank you, Francois, that was helpful.
Francois Locoh-Donou -- President, Chief Executive Office, and Director
Thank you, Simon.
Operator
The next question is from Jason Ader of William Blair. Your line is now open.
Jason Ader -- William Blair -- Analyst
Yes, thank you. I have two questions. First, can you comment on the Federal strength, it looks like that grew about 30% year-over-year, and I'd love to get any comments on what's happening there? And then secondly, Francois, could you remind us the difference between the Cloud Edition and the upcoming Cloud-Native app services platform so we can kind of level-set the differentiation there?
Francois Locoh-Donou -- President, Chief Executive Office, and Director
Sure, I'll take your first question, and Kara here will pick your second one. We generally have a strong fourth quarter on Federal. So we had a good quarter there. We saw specific traction in security in that space and specifically with our SSL orchestration solution. So we announced in 2018 that we were coming to market with new solutions to provide encryption, decryption of SSL traffic and be able to chain services for security stack inside of large enterprise customers.
We're seeing traction actually across the enterprise base with us. We're very excited about the pipeline we have for these solutions. And our Federal team was early off the blocks with the solution and as a result we had a pretty strong quarter there.
Kara Sprague -- Senior Vice President and General Manager, Application Services
And with regard to your question about the difference between Cloud Edition and our Cloud-Native application services, I'll call out a few of the distinctions. Our Cloud Edition is based on our industry-leading BIG-IP application delivery controller platform. And so what that is, is effectively a -- our Virtual Edition, which is licensed in a per-app model to allow for isolation of services for those application services with our Big-IQ, centralized manager solution and that enables a whole bunch of new use cases for our customers, including things like operating dedicated instances for each of their applications. So it's a per-app model, as well as application troubleshooting such that application developers no longer have to go through tedious ticketing processes to get things examined in terms of if applications go down.
Another component of the Cloud Edition is something that is really targeted for our customers that have already invested heavily In our Big-IP platform and want to extend the reach of that platform to more applications in their environment. Now in contrast the Cloud-Native application services will be a pure software-based solution. It will be only available as a software subscription and that will be targeted to more of a developer and a DevOps audience and is intended to provide very easy-to-use, very intuitive insertion of application services into applications at the time of the application inception, which means that it will come out with very strong integration into CI and CD pipelines.
Jason Ader -- William Blair -- Analyst
Thanks very much.
Operator
The next question is from Tal Liani of Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Your line is now open.
Tal Liani -- Bank of America Merrill Lynch -- Analyst
Hi guys. Hopefully you can hear me OK. I want to discuss the slow down you discussed in the prepared remarks. I still don't understand, is the slowdown is -- it's more limited to just service providers, telecom service providers kind of slowing down purchases and then why is it just there and/or the government and what about the general enterprise? What do you see in the general enterprise? I'm trying to understand, if also during the quarter if you noticed the slow down kind of throughout the quarter or it deteriorated kind of what was the seasonality within the quarter? Thanks. Or linearity, I mean?
Francois Locoh-Donou -- President, Chief Executive Office, and Director
Hi, Tal. So let's take the three segments that you brought up. So, no, in the Federal space, we did not see a slowdown. Frank mentioned to you the situation we have right now where we won business that cannot be processed but we hope this resolves itself over the next few weeks, So, no change in the Federal government space. Largely in the enterprise space, if I look at it globally, I would also say that generally there's been no change in buying behavior. We do hear from our customers that they are watching the macro environment and being a bit cautious about their future plans, but that potential cautiousness hasn't translated yet into any change in buying behaviors in the general enterprise space across the globe.
In the service provider space, as I said, it was a -- I believe it's a transition we're seeing a bit because -- between 4G and 5G and specific to what we've seen in terms of projects tailing off and net new projects haven't really picked up yet. There wasn't a particularly linearity, as you know, a service provider business can be quite lumpy. So there wasn't a particular linearity in the quarter associated with that.
Tal Liani -- Bank of America Merrill Lynch -- Analyst
Now, 5G has a lot of edge data centers, how do you participate in edge data centers? Is it playing to your strength or is it going to be more generic solutions from other vendors?
Francois Locoh-Donou -- President, Chief Executive Office, and Director
No, so we participate potentially in several ways in 5G, but the first way is we are in line of a lot of the core traffic for mobile service providers and 5G radios are going to bring more traffic on to these core and so we expect to see capacity upgrades as a result of these deployments. When the architectures evolve to a different 5G core and not every service provider will go to a 5G core, but when the architectures evolve to that I think we will have an opportunity to expand our role and we will get into that in future calls. But generally we see ourselves having a probably an expanded role in 5G from what we have to-date.
Tal Liani -- Bank of America Merrill Lynch -- Analyst
So far we discussed just the demand side, not the supply side, just customers and verticals. What about the supply side? What about your portfolio? What are the plans for 2019 in terms of product launches and things that are coming out to the market, and what do you think is going to could have or the potential of changing the growth trajectory more materially than other things?
Francois Locoh-Donou -- President, Chief Executive Office, and Director
And your question Tal is specific to service providers. I...
Tal Liani -- Bank of America Merrill Lynch -- Analyst
No, my question is more general. We spoke about the demand based on verticals, but now my question is about the supply, meaning, your product portfolio changes your planning for 2019. Can you just give us kind of an outlook given that we're at the beginning of the year, changes your planning for 2019, things that you think could be material -- more material than other things you're offering et cetera?
Francois Locoh-Donou -- President, Chief Executive Office, and Director
Yes. So a couple of things, Tal. The first thing, if we're looking at in the context of 2019, are actually products and solutions that we've brought to market in the last six months that are going to ramp up through the year. And I would point to three. One is our Advanced Web Application Firewall, it's gaining a lot of traction. We had actually a very strong security quarter. We are specifically, as you know, bot-defense has become a very important theme for both service providers and enterprises. And our performance and differentiation on bot is unique and we believe unmatched in the industry. So that's one, and that's -- we offer that on our Advanced WAF today and we'll bring more features and products around bot defense throughout the year.
Second is Cloud Edition, I've talked about that, that will also continue to ramp up throughout the year. And third is the new security offering around SSL orchestration. We had that offering in the past, but it was an offering that required significant involvement of professional services. We've just released the solution that can be deployed much faster and much easier by our customers and we're seeing enormous traction with that solution. So I expect all of these things to contribute to 2019. I expect our NFV offering that we also released in the fourth quarter of 2018 to contribute to our numbers in the service provider space in 2019.
And then we're going to release new products that I talked about, in the first half of 2019, which will start to contribute, but again we'll have a bigger impact in 2020. So when you look at it in aggregate to use your term, Tal, on the supply side, I think we have an exciting pipeline of products and offerings that are going to contribute to the top line going forward.
Tal Liani -- Bank of America Merrill Lynch -- Analyst
Great. Thank you.
Operator
Thank you. The next question is from Catharine Trebnick of Dougherty. Your line is now open.
Catharine Trebnick -- Dougherty & Co -- Analyst
Thank you for taking my question. Can you talk a little bit about Avi Networks? You know, four or five -- five years ago we always heard A10 nipping at your heels. In the last six months the buzz on Avi has picked up. And can you tell us maybe or quantify the number -- types of use cases that you run up against them and then what's your strategy to outflank them? Thanks.
Francois Locoh-Donou -- President, Chief Executive Office, and Director
Thank you, Catharine. So specifically -- so we're not dismissive of any of our competitor, however small they may be. And so, in the case of Avi, we don't see them that often. When we do see them, we actually like our win rate. And that we probably haven't seen them as much because we haven't played in the long tail of applications as much as we're going to be playing in the long tail of applications in 2019. And as I mentioned earlier, both on our Cloud Edition and the Cloud-Native app services platform that Kara described, we're bringing to the market a per-app consumption model, as well as really lightweight nimble Cloud-Native capabilities combined with our overall capabilities and service and support and scale and a heritage of two decades of supporting mission-critical applications for our customers. And we don't think anybody is going to match that anytime soon. And so we actually feel very confident about competing with them when we see them because, again, that's -- it's frankly not a very frequent occurrence.
Catharine Trebnick -- Dougherty & Co -- Analyst
All right, thanks. Appreciate it.
Operator
The next question is from Rod Hall of Goldman Sachs. Your line is now open.
Rod Hall -- Goldman Sachs -- Analyst
You mentioned earlier, I think, Francois, that you guys are at least want to preserve some capital for acquisitions or maybe that's part of the capital plan. I just wonder, could you talk a little bit about technology areas where you would like to expand the business, places where you think you may have deficiencies or are you thinking more something aimed at the core of the business. I mean, just kind of help us understand, without giving us I guess too much what sorts of areas you might be interested in, then I have a follow up.
Francois Locoh-Donou -- President, Chief Executive Office, and Director
Yes, Rod. So this one's difficult one as you can imagine. I would tell you, if you look at our expansion of reach and role, you'll see that expanding our reach revolves more around software and cloud, and expanding our role revolves more around other application services that we might want to offer. And so those would be -- if you think about the Horizon and the way we look at the world and the filters we use, those are the filters that I would give you today for what we might do with --- it's in fact we find something that is of interest to us.
Rod Hall -- Goldman Sachs -- Analyst
Can you say which of those two, reach or role, is more strategically important?
Francois Locoh-Donou -- President, Chief Executive Office, and Director
Both are.
Rod Hall -- Goldman Sachs -- Analyst
Okay. And then I just -- a housekeeping question. Do you have a minimum cash balance that you guys feel like you need to run the business?
Frank Pelzer -- Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
Rod, I think we generally think probably in the $400 million to $500 million range.
Rod Hall -- Goldman Sachs -- Analyst
Okay. So you're kind of there, Frank? Is that right?
Frank Pelzer -- Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
I'm sorry, what you mean there? We certainly have got more than our minimum. We've got $1.55 billion. I just...
Rod Hall -- Goldman Sachs -- Analyst
Okay, of your total cash and investment. So you could run that down to $400 million or $500 million comfortably. Below that, you wouldn't be comfortable?
Frank Pelzer -- Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
That's right.
Rod Hall -- Goldman Sachs -- Analyst
Okay. Thank you. Appreciate it.
Operator
Thank you, Rod. So that is the last question for today's conference. And that concludes today's conference. Thank you for your participation. You may disconnect at this time.
Duration: 57 minutes
Call participants:
Suzanne DuLong -- Vice President of Investor Relations
Francois Locoh-Donou -- President, Chief Executive Office, and Director
Frank Pelzer -- Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
Sami Badri -- Credit Suisse -- Analyst
Samik Chatterjee -- JP Morgan -- Analyst
Paul Silverstein -- Cowen & Company -- Analyst
Alex Kurtz -- KeyBanc Capital Markets -- Analyst
Chad Whalen -- Executive Vice President, Worldwide Sales
Jim Suva -- Citi -- Analyst
Simon Leopold -- Raymond James -- Analyst
Jason Ader -- William Blair -- Analyst
Kara Sprague -- Senior Vice President and General Manager, Application Services
Tal Liani -- Bank of America Merrill Lynch -- Analyst
Catharine Trebnick -- Dougherty & Co -- Analyst
Rod Hall -- Goldman Sachs -- Analyst
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