F5 CEO John McAdam might finally get to retire. The company announced today that its next CEO will be Ciena executive François Locoh-Donou, effective April 3.

Locoh-Donou's departure from Ciena was announced last week and is due to take effect in late March. He'll join F5 on April 3.

McAdam retired from F5 in 2015 but returned six months later after the resignation of CEO Manny Rivelo, due to "matters regarding personal conduct," as F5 put it.

Since then, it's been no particular secret that McAdam would like to give retirement another go. He announced the new CEO search in July but warned that the company would work at a deliberate pace. "This process may take six months or more," he told investors back then.

McAdam told employees he plans to remain on F5's board.

Locoh-Donou joined Ciena in 1997, according to his official bio. He comes from an optical networking background, having previously worked at an optoelectronics company called Photonetics.

Ciena focused on optical networking in 1997 but has since moved up the stack by incorporating packet switching into its products. The company took a step further, into software-defined networking (SDN), with the 2015 acquisition of Cyan, the source of Ciena's Blue Planet product line.

Locoh-Donou will now move further up the stack by joining application delivery controller (ADC) vendor F5. The company is coming off a good quarter but will have to cope with the shift of products into software form and the growing importance of the public cloud market.