F5 Networks Lays Off Hundreds Amid Transformation

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F5 Networks is laying off hundreds of employees, but plans to fill hundreds of other positions as it continues to evolve to a multicloud application services company.

François Locoh-Donou, F5’s president and CEO, spoke briefly about the job cuts during the company’s third-quarter earnings call. Both its revenue and profit increased compared to the year-ago quarter.

F5 Networks’ Nathan Misner

F5 spokesman Nathan Misner tells Channel Partners the company has “eliminated approximately 230 positions, primarily in our IT, services, product development, sales support and marketing organizations in the U.S. However, we are accelerating our hiring to support our multicloud application services strategy, with over 300 open positions worldwide in geographic sales expansion, new go-to-market motions, multicloud software development and digital transformation initiatives.”

In a securities filing, F5 said it also plans to close its Lowell, Massachusetts, office and reduce leased office space.

Locoh-Donou said his company is “taking steps to notify some employees that their roles are under consideration or will be eliminated.”

“Our objective with these decisions is to further align our workforce with a long-term strategy and accelerate the transformation that we outlined in our analyst and investor meeting earlier this year,” he said. “The long-term first vision set forth is seeing significant traction with continued momentum in software and security sales. Customers continue to view our solutions as mission-critical in hybrid environments as they deploy incremental workloads dynamically, both on premise[s] and in cloud environments. The expansion of our software-asset portfolio and stand-alone security products positions us as the leader in multicloud application services.”

There is “legacy spend” that is less relevant for the future than it has been for the past, and “we are shifting our focus to the growth areas of F5,” Locoh-Donou said.

Mike Fratto, research director at GlobalData, said the hardware and software ADC market is “not performing as well as in the past due in part to shifting applications to cloud services that offer application and layer 3 and 4 load-balancing services, as well as increased use of open source software like Nginx or HAProxy for web application load.”

“F5 is adding more positions in regional sales and development on its multicloud and cloud capabilities,” he said.

Earlier this week, we reported a high-ranking member of CenturyLink‘s networking team has joined F5 as general manager of service providers. The company’s Unity Partner Program includes VARs, and hosted and managed service providers.