F5 Networks announced a round of job cuts Wednesday as part of its third quarter earnings, as it continues to shift the long-term direction of the company.
The company is eliminating approximately 230 positions, primarily in IT, product development, sales support, and marketing organizations in the U.S. On a call with investors, CEO François Locoh-Donou said the move, which he referred to as restructuring, isn’t about cutting costs, but is part of the company’s larger shift to cloud computing.
“We are very focused on the transition of F5 as a multicloud application leader,” Locoh-Donou said on the call. “As a result, there is some legacy spend that is less important to the future.”
F5 pointed out that it is still hiring at a large scale. On its job site, F5 lists more than 340 open positions, mostly in product development and sales.
According to its website, F5 employs 4,475 people across the globe.
F5 cut an undisclosed number of positions last September, which the company said at the time was part of aligning resources toward the growing parts of the company.
The news comes the same day that the company reported $542 million in revenue and $150 million in profits, ahead of Wall Street expectations. F5 stock is down slightly in after-hours trading following its third quarter financial report.
The Seattle-based company rose to prominence thanks to its expertise in networking and application-delivery products designed for on-premises data centers, but fewer companies are building data centers these days and the ones still operating data centers are shifting important workloads to cloud providers like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.
The company has in recent years shifted to offer more cloud-focused software solutions, specifically application-delivery services for customers running public cloud and hybrid cloud strategies.
