Cloud and virtualisation software provider VMware has announced plans to cut 800 jobs amid a company restructure designed to better invest in key growth areas.

With the layoffs scheduled for the first half of 2016, VMware expects the cuts to cost between $55m to $65m.

In addition to the job cuts, VMware’s CFO, COO and executive vice president, Jonathan Chadwick, have decided to leave the company. The company has named Zane Rowe as its new CFO and executive vice president. The CFO change will be effective 1 March.

The job cut announcement was made in VMware’s fourth quarter earnings release, with the company posting $1.87bn revenue for the quarter.

Net income increased to $373m, or $0.88 per diluted share, compared to $326m, or $0.75 per diluted share, for the same period in 2014.

In 2015, the company’s end-user computing business increased more than 30% year-over-year, bringing the total annual bookings run rate to over $1.2bn.

The VMware NSX business, the network virtualisation and security platform for the software-defined data centre, increased more than 100% year-over-year, bringing the total annual bookings run rate to more than $600m.

The company’s virtual SAN business rose about 200% in Q4, with a total annual bookings run rate of more than $100m.

Chadwick said: "Our Q4 and 2015 results met or exceeded our revenue and operating margin expectations for the quarter and the year.

"We are seeing the results of our product transitions and have positive momentum with our newer solutions heading into 2016."

VMWare is a subsidiary of EMC, which is the company Dell is buying for approximately $67bn.

Last year, Dell said in a regulatory filing that it could repurchase about $3bn in VMWare tracking stock to help finance its EMC acquisition.

VMware pulled out of a joint Virtustream cloud agreement with EMC. The proposed Virtustream venture would have included VMware’s vCloud Air hybrid cloud service, Virtustream’s Infrastructure-as-a-Service, VCE’s Cloud Managed Services, and EMC’s Storage Managed and Object Storage services.

Last October, VMWare released an array of products that it hopes will further the adoption of hybrid cloud environments.

The three releases were enhancements to its Hybrid Cloud Management Platform, vCloud NFV and enhancements to its Unified Hybrid Cloud.