F5 Networks Inc., the Seattle-based maker of computer networking equipment, says its expanding its Liberty Lake plant by about 5,000 square feet, and is adding employees there.


The company, which opened a facility here in 2000 in the Liberty Lake Corporate Park after operating for two years in Spokane Valley, has asked its landlord, Baker Construction & Development Inc., of Spokane, to expand its building there to 15,000 square feet, says Jeff Stockdale, F5s Liberty Lake-based vice president of platform technology.


Baker Construction began work on that $700,000 project July 1, and F5 expects to move into the new space by mid-October. The original building, designed with expansion in mind, was built at a cost of about $1.5 million in 2000.


F5 has hired five employees here in the past three months, and now employs 39 people at Liberty Lake. Stockdale says F5 will hire more people here once the expansion is completed. The new space will include 12 new work cubicles for engineers, three managerial offices, two conference rooms, and another 1,200 square feet of laboratory space. The additional lab area will nearly double what F5 now has there, he says.


Stockdale says about 90 percent of the facilitys staff are engineers. The branch develops all the hardware for F5 products sold worldwide, and the hardware itself is built at a plant in Milpitas, Calif.


We do all (the design) but the software, he says.


Publicly traded F5 listed assets of about $505 million as of June 30, and posted revenue of about $200 million for the first nine months of its fiscal year. It employs about 700 people worldwide.


The company makes devices such as proxies, firewalls, and virtual-private network systems designed to provide its customers employees with secure access to corporate applications and Web sites.


We expect the expansion will meet our needs for the next three to five years, then we will either have to build another building or relocate to a larger facility, Stockdale says.