John McAdam, who led application delivery technology vendor F5 Networks as president and CEO for 15 years, is returning to the job after the man who replaced him in July resigned due to personal conduct issues.
F5 officials announced Dec. 14 that Manuel Rivelo had resigned the position he had held since July, when McAdam had retired. In a statement and a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), officials said that Rivelo’s resignation was unrelated to operations at the company or F5’s financial situation. The company did not elaborate on the reasons behind Rivelo’s resignation from the company and its board of directors. Rivelo had been at Cisco Systems for many years before making the move to F5 four years ago.
Rivelo’s “resignation was not due to any disagreement with the Company on any matter relating to the Company’s operations, policies or practices,” officials said in the SEC filing.
As part of the management change, McAdam will remain on the company’s board but will step down as chairman, being replaced by Alan Higginson, the board’s lead independent director. In a statement, McAdam, 64, said he was looking forward to getting back into the CEO job.
“I am excited about the opportunities F5 has before it in new hybrid cloud architectures, application security and to capitalize on emerging technology trends,” he said.
Regarding Rivelo, the new CEO thanked him for his work at F5 and said he “has been a key member of F5’s strong leadership team who have developed our current strategy.”
The company, which has 4,180 employees, is coming off a strong fiscal year 2015, which saw revenue jump 11 percent—from $1.73 billion the year before to $1.92 billion—and profits growing from $311.2 million to $365 million.
The company is looking to provide strong application delivery capabilities during a time of such trends as hybrid cloud environments, software-defined data centers (SDDCs), network virtualization and a growing demand for greater security.
“As the market evolves, so, too, does F5,” Rivelo said during a conference call in October to talk about the company’s quarterly financial numbers, according to a transcript from Seeking Alpha. “By having the application as our focus, we have been able to grow and flex to new customer demands. … We have a clear sense of purpose: Expanding our core offerings in [application delivery] to the cloud, extending into strategic markets of security, F5-as-a-service via Silverline … the service provider, and driving a world-class customer experience from our global services organization.”