Cloud giant F5 lays off 120 employees to ‘align investments’

San Francisco/New Delhi, Nov 7

US-based F5, a global leader in multi-cloud application security and delivery, has reportedly laid off 120 employees.

According to a report in GeekWire, the F5 layoffs “align investments and resources to initiatives that accelerate our strategy to make hybrid and multi-cloud application security and delivery easier for our customers”.

The job cuts affect less than 2 per cent of the company’s workforce, which employs nearly 6,400 people.

Late last month, the Seattle-based F5 announced financial results for its fourth quarter and fiscal year ended September 30.

The fiscal year 2023 revenue grew 4 per cent from the year-ago period, to $2.8 billion, up from $2.7 billion in fiscal year 2022.

Global services revenue grew 7 per cent from the year-ago period while product revenue grew 1 per cent.

“In our fourth quarter, we delivered 11 per cent software revenue growth, operating margin improvement, and double-digit earnings per share growth,” said Francois Locoh-Donou, F5’s President and CEO.

“We enter fiscal year 2024 in an environment that seems to be stabilizing. In fact, from a demand perspective, subscription renewals performed well throughout fiscal year 2023, and we saw encouraging signs from enterprise customers in our fourth quarter,” Locoh-Donou added.

For fiscal year 2024, F5 expects revenue that is flat to a low-single-digit percentage decline from its fiscal year 2023 revenue.

In May this year, F5 opened its new engineering centre in Bengaluru that will help drive research, development and product innovation.

The 50,000 square feet development centre has a seating capacity for 250 employees.

"India has a thriving technology ecosystem and benefits from strong public sector-led innovation through programmes such as Digital India," said Locoh-Donou.

Operating for more than two decades in India, F5's largest R&D centre in Hyderabad drives work aimed at enhancing its solution portfolio in conjunction with its other global engineering centres in the US and Israel.