Amit Daryanani : I guess I have two as well. François, maybe just going back to this product systems discussion a little bit. Yes, the risk of the fear folks would have is listen, if the macro remains soft and IT budgets remain under pressure, why wouldn’t customers push out or sweat the appliances more. And so then maybe just about how do you have confidence that this appliance or systems business recovers in the back half if the macro remains challenging and the backlog can remain strong.
François Locoh-Donou: Well, I would say, look, where we have strong visibility is for us to achieve the revenue forecast we have in hardware, we don’t necessarily need a very strong fundamental recovery in hardware demand than we have today because of the visibility we have on revenue and our ability to ship, including our backlog. In terms of what I think — there’s a real question as to when do I think this recovers and demand picks up again. It’s difficult to predict. But what I can tell you is that the fundamental drivers of what gets customers to buy hardware or software are still there. They are tied to the growth in applications and applications continue to grow the complexity of these applications. And the deployment models, the fact that these applications increasingly live in hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
All of these drivers are fundamentally there. So demand can be suppressed for a period of time, a couple of quarters, three quarters, four quarters. But where we have a ton of confidence is that it is going to come back because the fundamental drivers of our business and what our customer is doing are still there and will continue, including, I should say, attacks on applications that drive demand for security for applications. So all of those things are part of what gives us a lot of confidence that it’s going to come back. In this current environment, the fact that we’ve built the flexibility that we have built around our consumption models and our deployment models, plays very well because some customers have pressures on CapEx, others on OpEx and our ability to serve them one way or the other is one mitigant, if you will.
And it’s one of the aspects that we think provides the resilience that you’re seeing in our business and operating model.
Amit Daryanani : Got it. That’s really helpful. And then if I just touch on the software side. I know you folks talked about in the ability — the growth will be sub the 15% to 20% range that you talked about previously. Is there anything about what the new range would be? Or what does the trajectory of software look through fiscal ’23? And then does this alter at all what you’re seeing your longer-term expectations you’ve had from the software business beyond just this year?
François Locoh-Donou: Let me start with the last part. It does not alter our long-term view, Amit, because of the drivers that I’ve just taking you through. We think our customers will continue to deploy software in — sorry, we’ll continue to deploy our software in cloud and hybrid cloud environment. We think that the architectures are evolving to be multi-cloud architectures, and that absolutely favors that if I go back to where we were five years ago when we were hearing customers and why everything is going to go to a single cloud location, and we’re not sure we’re going to need an F5 ADC. Today, we are positioned where the architectures are going. They’re going to multi-cloud. We’re very well positioned in these architectural conversations.
