Harmonic said its chief financial officer, Harold Covert, will resign in the coming months, but will stay on until the vendor files its 2016 annual report and the appointment of a new CFO.
In a release about the transition, San Jose, Calif.-based Harmonic said Covert was resigning so he could spend more time with his family on the East Coast.
In a memo to Covert filed with the SEC, Harmonic said it understood the exec’s “desire to transition out of the CFO position because of the strain that your extensive travel has placed on your family.” Per the document, Harmonic will provide Covert with a one-time bonus equal to six months of his base salary under certain conditions, including his staying on through the filing of the aforementioned annual report.
Covert stepped down from the Harmonic board last fall to assume the CFO role, replacing then-CFO Carolyn Aver, who left to help her husband run their family winery.
Harmonic said it has launched a search for a new CFO and that Covert “has agreed to provide any needed assistance to ensure a smooth transition.”
“On behalf of the Harmonic Board of Directors and management team, I want to express my gratitude to Hal for stepping off the Board last year and into the CFO role during an important period of strategic change and acquisition integration,” Patrick Harshman, Harmonic’s president and CEO said in a statement. “We thank Hal for his contributions and his continued leadership during the transition period.”
Prior to his role at Harmonic, Covert served as CFO of several tech companies, including Lumos Networks, Silicon Image, Openwave and Adobe, and on the board of public companies that include Lumentum, JDS Uniphase and Harmonic.
In a research note issued today, Raymond James analyst Simon Leopold said the firm regard’s “C-level departures, in general, as a yellow flag that highlights potential risk.”
He also noted that the change comes as Harmonic looks to “restore the business to organic growth,” citing its plan to target the market for a new class of distributed Converged Cable Access Platform architectures and products, where it will face off with vendors such as Arris, Cisco Systems, Casa Systems, Huawei, and Nokia, which acquired virtual CCAP startup Gainspeed earlier this year.
RELATED: Harmonic Virtualizes the CCAP
For its part, Harmonic has introduced a virtual CCAP, called “CableOS,” Soon after, it announced a warrants deal with Comcast based largely on sales and deployment milestones of the new CableOS platform.
