F5 has named Manny Rivelo as President and Chief Executive Officer effective July 1, 2015. Rivelo will replace current CEO John McAdam, who announced his retirement earlier this year. Rivelo is currently F5’s Executive Vice President of Strategic Solutions.
F5’s new CEO announcement was made during the company’s second quarter fiscal 2015 earnings call. F5 reported second quarter revenue of $472.1 million, for a 12 percent year-over-year gain. Net income was reported at $85.7 million, $1.18 per diluted share.
“I am confident that Manny’s understanding of technology trends, his strategic vision, operational experience and tremendous culture fit with the F5 values will ensure that F5 continues to have a fantastic future, and I’m sure you will join me in wishing him great success in his new role,” McAdam said during his company’s earnings call.
Rivelo commented that F5 has evolved in recent years beyond its traditional data center roots to include a robust hybrid products and services portfolio, including virtual editions and cloud products.
During the call, Rivelo was asked about the impact of virtualized software on F5 traditional hardware sales. Rivelo said that in his view it’s all complementary.
“We are seeing actually our virtual ADCs grow at a nice clip over the last couple of quarters and really over the last couple of years, but what we are seeing is two trends,” Rivelo said.
One of those trends is that new applications are getting virtual ADCs. What that means is that in today’s architecture, where applications are moving to the cloud or to a much more software defined data center, virtual ADCs take over.
“However, in those same instances, customers are looking for traditional hardware solutions in what we tend to call internally a two-tier architecture,” Rivelo said. “Meaning the exterior tier of the data center is usually hardware, and in that level, we provide services with our custom-built hardware that provides high throughput, high performance.”
Rivelo emphasized that it is F5’s view that to succeed in the market, it is necessary to have both the hardware components and the software components working in tandem, providing both on-prem and off-prem solutions.
During the call, Rivelo was also asked about the competitive positioning of F5 against other vendors. Rivelo said that during the coming quarter, the expectation is that F5 will gain market share across the board.
“Our competitors continue to be Citrix, A10, Radware, those are the primary competitors we see out there,” Rivelo. “Our selling motions, our win rate in the field, everything is favorable, very favorable, so we expect another year of continuing to gain market share.]
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at Enterprise Networking Planet and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.
