And that, at some point, demand is being pent up and demand is going to pick up. When that is going to happen is a bit of an uncertainty, but it’s reasonable to assume that we would see some of that at some point in 2024.So I can’t give you a position on revenue growth for 2024, but what we can control, of course, is our cost base and you see that we have made an adjustment to our cost base that will give us meaningful expansion of operating margins in 2024 and secure our ability to deliver double-digit earnings growth in fiscal 2024.Samik Chatterjee Okay. Thank you. And so for my follow-up, I mean, it was on the cost structure, obviously, with some of the actions you are taking and the rules you are sort of taking out, you will operate at a much lower level of operating expense as a percent of revenue than you have historically.
I mean, how much of that is sort of sustainable and you can operate at that level for a multiyear period versus just more of a function of how you are looking at the macro and trying to be more conservative around it, like, is there a more structural upside to how you can — how you think about margins in operating at a lower cost structure?François Locoh-Donou Well, a couple of things there, Samik. Number one is, our objective has been and continue to be to drive operating leverage in the business and we think from where we are at today at the 30% operating margin for the year.If you look at it in the second half of the year, it’s going to be — the first half was in the 26%, 27% zone, the second half of the year is going to be meaningfully higher than that when you look at the full year being at 30% and from there our intent is to drive further operating leverage in 2024 and beyond.
And we see the opportunity to do that with a combination of getting more efficient in our business and driving productivity, as well as continuing to drive topline growth.We said at our Analyst Day in 2020 that we were going to invest in driving some efficiencies and costs out of the business. We have been doing that. Today, we are announcing some changes to our cost base, but whilst we are doing that, we are also doubling down on investments in automation that will allow us to drive operating leverage going forward.So we see that as an ongoing journey of driving operating leverage, which we will — you will start to see the benefits of that in the second half of this fiscal year, but that will continue in 2024.Samik Chatterjee Okay. Thank you.
Thanks for taking the questions.Operator Thank you. And the next question comes from the line of Simon Leopold with Raymond James. Please proceed with your questions.Simon Leopold Thank you very much for taking the question. First, it does seem as if there’s maybe a bit of a potential conflict in sort of the tone of really describing the situation that’s temporary, but taking this the action of cutting staff levels and cutting expenses, because I guess the expense cuts sort of implies something about the duration of how you see the risk. And I just — I have heard everything you have said, I just feel like maybe it would be helpful to get a little bit more handholding on how you are thinking about the duration and what led you to make the decision.
Maybe it’s — where are the cuts coming from, I appreciate you can’t give us all the detail, but a little handholding would help to sort of help understand the potential conflict there?François Locoh-Donou Simon, thank you for the question. So let me start with saying, when we looked at our — we spent quite a bit of time in the first half of our fiscal year looking at the demand signals that we were seeing from our customers.And if you recall, Simon, last year, we have challenges on our revenue in the second half of the year that were driven largely by issues of supply. And at the top, we said, we did not want to reduce our staffing levels, because this was not a demand issue, it was a supply issue.We also said at the time that if we did see a softening in demand, that that would cause us to relook at our cost base and potentially address our staffing levels and that’s exactly what we are doing.This year, we are seeing a softening of demand and whilst we appreciate that, that is driven by macro environment and it is temporary, we are also being quite disciplined about driving our earnings performance, but also ensuring that in this environment.We are operating as lean as we can be and as lean as we should be and that’s what’s driven our approach to reducing our staffing levels.
We do feel that with these staffing levels we are well positioned to drive growth and capture the opportunity when demand levels normalize and our customers are ready to spend.In terms of giving you a couple of pointers, Simon, on where we have made some cuts? It’s across the Board. But if I park it in roughly three categories. In G&A, we have looked at increasing productivity and driving some efficiencies and just being able to rationalize the G&A organization for the size of the company we are post these cuts.In sales, we are — we have looked at realigning or consolidating some territories and we are configuring some of the roles in our go-to-market to have a leaner go-to-market motion and having focus on the territories that will drive the best returns in the near- to medium-term.And then the product organizations, we have looked at all R&D projects that we have underway and really are focusing on the ones that will drive the best returns and where we have made cuts is on those projects that are perhaps more speculative or have longer term returns.
And all of those really amount to us focusing on our top priority projects, and really being leaner and positioned for when demand will normalize.I would add that whilst we are doing that, we are doubling down on investment in our software, our hybrid and multi-cloud portfolio, because we are seeing growing evidence from customers from architecture conversations that we are ideally positioned for where their applications are going, where the security challenges are going, which is really about securing and delivering apps not in a single infrastructure environment, but across multiple public clouds, private clouds in the edge and being able to network all these environments together and I think we are in a unique position in that, so we are continuing to make these investments.Simon Leopold That’s very helpful.
So thank you for that. And just one quick follow-up, I know you mentioned that you thought you would have backlog normalized either at the end of the third quarter or fourth quarter, certainly, in fiscal 2024. Can we — can you quantify where backlog was at the end of the March quarter?Frank Pelzer Yeah. Simon, we are not in the — our normal course is not to update backlog in any one particular quarter. We talk about it at the end of the year. We tried to highlight to people during this particular call that we did expect to be through most of our shippable backlog by the end of the fiscal year, whether that’s Q3 or Q4, I can’t tell you. But we didn’t quantify where we were at the end of Q1 and we are not quantifying where we are at the end of Q2.Simon Leopold Thank you for taking the questions.
Thank you.François Locoh-Donou Yeah.Operator And the next question comes from the line of Meta Marshall with Morgan Stanley. Please proceed with your question.Meta Marshall Great. Thanks. A couple for me, maybe to start with, you mentioned that customers are kind of running their networks at higher utilization of the F5 equipment. Just wondered if you could give a sense of is that matching kind of previous levels that you have seen in prior kind of macro pullbacks or just kind of where we are on kind of how hot they are running their networks versus peaks that we have previously seen if there’s any way to contextualize that maybe as a first question?François Locoh-Donou Yeah. I would say on that front we were — the sample size of customers where we have really the ability to see that and understand that is limited.
But for those where we can see it, we have a number of customers that are getting close to or exceeding kind of, I want to call it a red line, but the maximum they would have normally gone to in normal times and so that just points to us that, at some point, they will expand capacity.And this is consistent actually with what we have seen in prior macro slowdowns where customers have tended to sweat their assets in this way. And in the past, when we have seen customers sweat their assets this way, we have seen it happen for four quarter to six quarters. Now every micro slowdown is different in shape and in different in how it plays out, but that’s what we have seen in the past.What we are also seeing made a kind of evidence to this behavior is that the attach rate — the services attach rate that we see on our platforms, especially the platforms that are four years old and beyond, we are seeing the attach rate on this platform — the maintenance attachment on these platforms go up, which is also very typical of customers sweating these older assets for a little longer and that, again, is consistent with what we have seen in prior micro slowdowns.So all of that points to us that that’s the behavior of customers that they are sweating assets.
That is not a change in their thinking around architecture or a change really in our competitive position. We are seeing customer’s kind of hunkering down with us for a period of time.Meta Marshall Got it. That’s helpful. And then maybe as a follow-up question. Obviously, a lot of your software revenue tied to kind of the cloud transformation projects are now being delayed a little bit with cloud optimization projects. But is there a way to — are — is that largely virtual ADC projects, which are being kind of postponed, but security projects are going ahead. I am just trying to get a sense of is this kind of across the Board or are there certain secure or certain projects that are more security attached that are getting higher prioritization.
