From a surge in large enterprise projects to rapid adoption of its AI-powered Platform ONE, Extreme Networks CEO Ed Meyercord says the company’s strategy is creating bigger opportunities for partners, accelerating customer migration and helping it take share from rivals Cisco and HPE.
A 36 percent jump in large enterprise opportunities, rapid adoption of Extreme Platform ONE and a growing pipeline of competitive takeouts have Extreme Networks feeling confident about its growth prospects.
The networking specialist is now one year into the general availability of Platform ONE, its AI-powered platform that unifies network management, security and automation. Earlier this month, the Morrisville, N.C.-based company launched Agent ONE Coworker, an agentic AI assistant designed to proactively help IT teams identify issues, recommend actions and accelerate troubleshooting based on the unique context of their network environments. New features aside, Extreme believes that its one-year-old, context-aware AI platform is out in front of the “closed systems” that networking rivals are bringing to the table, as evidenced by the rapid adoption it’s seeing of its platform by end users. In fact, adoption is happening much faster than cloud, according to CEO Ed Meyercord.
Channel partners are playing a central role in that momentum. In this Q&A, Meyercord discusses how Extreme’s AI strategy, fabric networking technology and channel-first approach are helping partners land larger enterprise projects, drive platform adoption and take market share from industry heavyweights Cisco and HPE.
Extreme is seeing double-digit growth and bigger enterprise wins. What’s driving the increase in large channel-led networking projects?
We’re doing some unique things with the channel that relates to our supply position and other things. With [our most recent earnings call in August], we highlighted strong growth that highlights that we’re taking share at 14 percent top-line growth. We’re having a lot of success moving upmarket, and by moving upmarket we mean larger networking projects with larger customers. We’re creating bigger opportunities with the channel, and it’s these bigger opportunities that are driving the growth in the company.
We talk a lot about our fabric technology being highly differentiated … each quarter we get new quotes about people that love the automation of the fabric, the resiliency of the fabric, our ability to segment networks [and] the security benefits. [We’ve had a customer while] doing a proof of concept say, ‘In the same Cisco environment, I have over 300 issues that I’m constantly chasing. With Extreme and the fabric, it’s six. What took Cisco six hours took Extreme six minutes.’ That’s resonating with our customers [and] with our partners. We’re kind of taking a micro-vertical approach, but in each of our verticals we’re seeing this growth, and we’re seeing this move upmarket, and we’re seeing it across all of our geos globally, especially in the Americas. That’s been a highlight for us. Norman [Rice, Extreme’s COO] has done a great job driving the sales teams and aligning with marketing and with the channel on how we go after and win these larger projects. We’re better able today than ever before to support the channel in winning these larger projects.
When we look at the funnel of opportunities that we have with channel partners, and again, 90 percent of everything we do is through the channel, as we sort of earmark and draw a line and say a million dollars or greater is a larger project for enterprise customers, our volume of enterprise deals is up 36 percent year over year in terms of what we’re looking at. Then, the size of those deals on a per-project basis is up another 10 percent. It portends good things for us as we look to the future, and we’re looking at growth.
How is Agent ONE Coworker helping Extreme differentiate itself from other networking vendors’ AI offerings?
We just [went GA] with Agent ONE Coworker, and Agent ONE is part of the continued success that we’re having with Platform ONE, but it’s sort of the next generation for us where we are leading the charge. For a company our size, it’s kind of interesting because we are out in front, and we’re the first networking vendor that has a proactive, context-aware, always-on agent that is built into the platform.
When we look at our competitor platforms as people are evolving and investing and developing AI platforms and modern tools, it’s still very much an AI prompt in the corner where you could go in and ask a question, and it’s almost like a chatbot and what we’ve done is we’ve elevated the bar with now a full-time agent built in as a ‘co-worker’ to Platform ONE, and it has context. It understands what you’re doing, and it’s offering to support, to help, to do tasks, and it really does act like a co-worker. It’s only [two weeks] old at this point in terms of the release. We released this into the platform, so it’s just part of that subscription. We’re getting a lot of response from our channel partners and our customers about the evolution of what is the most modern agentic platform and bringing the most modern tools to our customers and our partners.
We’ve seen a lot of success. We released [Extreme Platform ONE] a year ago when we first went GA, and the growth rate has been 3, 5, 10, 20, 30 [percent], so this evolution of growth has happened very quickly. When we go back to cycles and we look at cloud and the adoption of cloud, what took us three years with cloud is taking us less than a year with Platform ONE.
Why do you believe Extreme has an advantage in the race to build the industry’s leading AI networking platform?
Size is an advantage for Extreme, and our focus. Keep in mind, everything that we do is around enterprise networks. We’re the only player that has end-to-end wired, wireless, SD-WAN, security—all of this baked into a single platform. Instead of having disparate systems that are sort of connected with an over-the-top management platform, all this is built into a single platform. So, we’ve done the work to combine our different systems—cloud-based, on-prem-based wired, cloud-based and on-prem-based wireless, SD-WAN—whereas our competitors have not integrated all these different solutions into a single platform. I think because of our size and because of our focus, we’ve been able to move very quickly to integrate all of these into a single platform. And where we’re going with this is to open it up to our partners, to the channel. And I think there’ll be a lot of excitement. We have an AI Summit in Amsterdam in October and we’re releasing what we’re calling ‘Operator Mode,’ which is going to basically allow us to extend the platform and open networking capabilities to our partners and our customers to develop their own agents and their own capabilities with our networking tools.
We’ve been investing now [for] three-plus years in this platform and how we elevate our Extreme IQ Cloud into this new agentic platform, and it’s given us the ability to have an agent that is completely context-aware of your entire environment, and that’s something we’re proud to say. We had 10 percent of our customers on the platform at the end of the year, [and] by the end of this year we expect to have over 50 percent, which is kind of unprecedented in our industry. As we look to our competitors, our view there is it will take them a lot longer to move customers onto their platform.
How have you balanced introducing next-generation AI capabilities while allowing customers to move at their own pace?
I want to make sure it’s clear, and this is something that Norman [Rice] and the sales teams have been at the front of, we very intentionally decided that when we rolled out Platform ONE, it’s not a flash cut. Basically, you have this new modern user interface, which is Platform ONE with agentic AI, and then … you still have access to Extreme IQ. You have access to all the other tools that you’ve always used. But what’s happening is that we have a new refresh every month, and so the capabilities inside of Platform ONE just keep getting better and better. People are spending less time working in the old systems, if you will, and they’re spending more of their time in Platform ONE.
We set it up in a way that people can move at their own pace. It’s not a leap of faith where you’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m doing it. Let’s jump.’ It’s more that customers can move at their own pace. They can start playing with Agent ONE and the capabilities that we have in the platform, and if they need to go back and they want to go back to something that they’re more accustomed to while they’re learning or while they’re training, they have that capability. That’s something that’s been a key part of our success. I would say what we’re seeing today, because we look at this very closely, is we’re looking at where people spend their time, and we’re seeing people making the move. Now we’re a year into this, we’ve just come out with the second generation [of Extreme Platform ONE] with Agent ONE, and we’re seeing a massive change in terms of people moving and basically spending all their time in the platform.
Do you see Platform ONE evolving from a network management tool into the primary way customers and partners interact with Extreme’s entire portfolio?
It’s becoming more and more about consuming Extreme. When we look at the capabilities, it’s really the entire life cycle of the customer experience, from planning and developing and deploying networks, configuring networks, to managing the network from a troubleshooting and remediation perspective across wired, wireless, cloud, on-prem—the entire portfolio is built-in.
So, yes, as we look at, for example, our stadium customers and building in the stadium analytics and the capabilities that we bring in terms of insights into networking platforms, tools that we can open up and provide in terms of what the network can deliver to other customers, things that may be important to them, and making that available to applications outside of networking—I think you’ll see us continue in our leadership position here. If you’re in the channel, basically, Extreme is out front, and we’re going to open up more capabilities, and we will be more open than the larger competitors that I would say are building more closed systems.
