François Locoh-Donou

François Locoh-Donou became President and CEO of F5 in 2017 after serving as CEO of Ciena Corporation. Born in Togo and educated in France, Locoh-Donou brought a transformation mindset to F5 — a company that had built its reputation on hardware-based BIG-IP application delivery controllers used by virtually every major enterprise to manage network traffic, security, and application performance. His most consequential strategic decision was the $1 billion acquisition of NGINX in 2019 — the popular open-source web server and reverse proxy used by hundreds of millions of websites. This deal gave F5 a footprint in the modern, cloud-native application delivery market and access to a massive developer community. Locoh-Donou has since driven the transition from perpetual hardware licenses to recurring software subscriptions and SaaS offerings. Key challenges include managing the declining hardware business while growing software revenue, competing with cloud-native alternatives and CDN providers in application security, monetizing the NGINX open-source community, and establishing F5 as a multi-cloud security platform. His decisions on software pricing models, AI-driven security features, and the balance between hardware maintenance revenue and software growth determine F5's stock trajectory. Software revenue growth and recurring revenue mix are the most watched metrics.