F5 Networks announced today that CEO and president John McAdam will retire next September. McAdam plans to stay on F5’s board and help the company find a successor.
“Following a year of record growth, I believe F5 is better positioned in terms of our market opportunity, the breadth of our products and services, the strength of our partnerships, and the caliber and enthusiasm of the entire F5 team than at any time in the company’s history,” McAdam said in a statement.
McAdam, a native of Scotland, joined F5 as CEO in 2000 and has helped it grow from a 500-person company doing $100 million in yearly revenue to an industry leader with nearly 4,000 employees and annual revenues of more than $1.7 billion.
F5 certainly has come a long way since McAdam’s arrival. Shortly after his appointment, the dot-com bust hit, nearly wiping out F5.
“We were in survival mode,” McAdam said earlier this year, recalling that the cash position had dwindled to about $30 million.
But F5 prevailed, and the company, which develops software and hardware products designed to securely delivery applications over the Internet, now has a market cap of just under $9 billion.
F5 posted its fiscal fourth quarter results today, beating Wall Street’s expectations for both revenue and profit.
“The fourth quarter of fiscal 2014 was a solid finish to a year characterized by positive customer and partner response to our Synthesis architecture, the array of new products we rolled out in fiscal 2013, our Good Better Best pricing strategy, and the enhanced capabilities of our BIG-IQ management platform,” McAdam said in a statement.
We caught up with McAdam this past June on our GeekWire Radio Show and learned about the F5’s growth and evolution, the explosion in mobile technologies, and the related security and privacy issues that come along with the increasingly pervasive role of the Internet in everything we do. Listen to that episode here.
