Extreme Networks CEO On Win Rates Against Cisco And HPE And Using AI To Help Admins ‘Cheat On Their Papers’
‘This is really important for the channel – it’s going to be so easy to train up and use our modern platform, and the reason is, you always have an AI expert at your side. So, we want the kids to cheat on their papers,’ Extreme's CEO Ed Meyercord tells CRN about the company's 'next generation' AI strategy.
Despite uncertainty in the competitive landscape and geopolitical factors at play, Extreme Networks continues to make strides against the biggest networking giants with an increasing win rate and a brand-new platform to unify all applications and features into one place for partners and end customers.
Morrisville, N.C.-based Extreme Networks in December unveiled Extreme Platform One, an AI-infused platform to boil down networking and security management, as well as product licensing for enterprises and channel partners. The following month, Extreme launched its first, "modern" MSP program that includes the company’s entire portfolio of networking, security and AI-powered offerings that partners can choose from and bundle with their own offerings. The new MSP program is based on Extreme Platform One.
Extreme Networks in its most recent fiscal quarter posted revenues of $279.4 million, down 5.7 percent year-over-year, and growth of 14. 4 percent year over year for its SaaS subscription revenue. The company’s win rates are improving, especially in the large enterprise market. At the same time, the company said that changes in the competitive market with the HPE-Juniper merger, which is currently the subject of a lawsuit from the U.S. Department of Justice, as well as Cisco’s recent acquisitions, are creating new opportunities for Extreme. That’s thanks to the networking specialist’s differentiated outlook on cloud networking focusing on integrated AI models and platforms, according to President and CEO Ed Meyercord.
Extreme’s CEO recently sat down with CRN to talk about its FY Q2 2025 earnings results, the recently announced Extreme Platform One and MSP program, and how the company is moving onto the next generation of AI, which will open even more doors for the channel.
Here are excerpts from the conversation.
Tell us about how your new platform and MSP program are helping Extreme stand out in the networking market in 2025?
We announced Extreme Platform One [in December] and really, the vision around that [is] we’re pulling in and unifying all the applications as part of our networking portfolio into one place, and with that, providing a very different experience for the whole lifecycle of networking above and beyond the traditional, either cloud management or from an AI perspective, just AIOps, if you will.
[Right now], our cloud management platform is ExtremeCloud IQ and the growth of the platform has been really successful. All of the different elements of our networking solutions, you can get to them through ExtremeCloud IQ, but they all have different user interfaces, effectively. So ,the idea is, we’re unifying all these together, so you have a common user interface, common set of services, and then, importantly, common data [on Extreme Platform One]. That will be very helpful because, for example, you will be able to visualize and have a complete view of the network topology with our campus fabric, which is really a massive differentiator for us in the marketplace. Now from the cloud, you'll be able to visualize, deploy and configure and manage our campus fabric from the cloud. That's a big step up.
The [new,] modern [MSP program] is built on [Extreme Platform One]. We have about [40] partners today that are on our MSP platform and people love it because of some of the capabilities we have when we look at consumption billing, for example, and the economics and the ease and simplicity of licensing and multi tenancy, etc. There's a lot of enhancements that are coming in terms of capabilities and what you can do from the cloud on this unified platform with all those applications coming into one, as well as capabilities from next-gen AI that built into the platform.
Networking and networks are inherently complex; inherently complicated. And almost everyone is talking about: “How do we make it simple?” The most complicated of all, the most expensive of all and the least integrated solutions [are from] the largest player. Their policy was not to integrate. They acquire and don't integrate. Our nine applications are unifying. [The largest competitor] has [many more] and I don't know how long it would take them to unify that, but if you think about the capabilities and having everything in one place, a common set of services, common user interface, common data, and then this AI Expert that’s there to guide you in whatever you want to do across all facets of network, not just troubleshooting and gen-one AIOps. We've had this gen-one AI technology for several years and was obviously competing against [Juniper] Mist. Mist did a great job with that gen-one solution, but this is fundamentally a step up into second-generation AI, and we believe will be first to market and we think it will create a noticeable difference in experience. We believe it's going to be an important ingredient to unlocking the channel.
We’ve embedded at the core of Extreme Platform One our AI engine. Instead of just having an AI capability for traditional machine learning AIops, which is what you know from Juniper Mist, it's what you know from our Copilot and ExtremeCloud IQ, this is where we have machine learning capabilities sitting on top of our cloud, looking at all the network elements in our cloud. In our case, we have over three million network access point, switches, etc., that are being managed from the cloud. And in this case, we can learn a lot about what's happening in networking environments. One of the things we can do, for example, is predict network failure. That was generation-one AI. Now what we're introducing is a much wider, more expansive use of AI from the journey of planning a network project, literally, you can just [tell] the AI expert: "Here are the specs. This is what we're building. Configure the network consistent with my other network configurations" — and boom: you'll have a network configuration and a network plan. So, all through the life cycle, in addition to network management prompts and issues, you'll be able to interact with and ultimately automate certain issues with the network. Let's say that you're a client and you lose a connection. We can diagnose why that happens. And in diagnosing why it happens, we see that this is something that repeats itself in your environment. So, we can say: Why did this happen? It gives an answer, and then over time, we can set it up to say: "Let me know every time this happens and suggest a remediation." And then you’ll have trust now, because you see that every time this incident occurs, this is the right fix, and it works. Now you trust the AI expert to do it on its own and we’ve introduced this full automation. There’s 10s and 10s of examples where we’ll be in a position to deploy an AI agent to do these things for you … This is a much more expanded use of AI and this is something that that will fundamentally change the experience of people delivering networks.
How is Extreme using AI to more quickly train partners on its products, which is often a barrier to entry with new partners?
This is really important for the channel — it’s going to be so easy to train up and use our modern platform, and the reason is, you always have an AI expert at your side. So, we want the kids to cheat on their papers. What we're saying is: We want to help you fix the problem faster and in doing so, we’re going to take what are months of training to become an expert on Extreme and we’re going to boil that down into a few days, because the AI Expert is going to tell you what's happening in the network and it's going to recommend steps, or networking tasks — it’s going to tell you what to do. For enablement and training for the channel, it means that it's much easier for your system engineers and your technical teams to train up on Extreme and become Extreme experts, and that for us is a big deal. With the competitive landscape today, historically, a barrier to entry has been that people are trained up on other's technology — like Cisco CCIEs and therefore, they don't want to spend all the time and energy to go train up on others' technology. In our case, now we're making it so easy. Our AI expert can tell them: "If you’re working in this environment, i.e. a competitor environment, here's the equivalent code for the Extreme environment." Our customers, end users, and the people that are delivering the network, are fundamentally going to have a different user experience with their teams across multiple personas. We also have an AI expert tool for partners on how to position our solutions competitively. We have tools to make it very easy to respond to RFPs, for example. So, we're way ahead on this next-generation AI, and we feel like this is where Extreme has a real advantage.
You told CRN in November that you’re going to be the fastest-growing networking player in 2025. Are you still on that path?
Yes, and you’ll see it in our March results. We're seeing a lot of growth in our funnel. If you look at our company, we’ve created what we call pods, which are different regions of go to market teams. You can imagine a pod being in the German team and the team in Japan, or the team in southern EMEA or the Middle East. We've gotten very localized and very targeted in our marketing approach with the channel, and it's been very effective. We're seeing a better perception and greater interest from new partners, and so our ability to grow through the channel is really what I believe will distinguish Extreme. A small point of market share goes a long way for us. I like to say large crumbs and when we clean up some of the crumbs, for Extreme, it creates much larger growth than let’s say, the same business opportunity for our competitors. We're winning on the merits of our solution and how we do business with people. So, I think that's what's attracting new channel partners to Extreme and how we're getting more wallet share. Then, with our managed services platform and Extreme Platform One, people are curious. People want to understand: What is this and how does it work? and our partners, when we demoed the early versions of Extreme Platform One and capabilities and look and feel of what we're doing, and the response has been very positive, so there’s a lot of excitement around bringing this out and how it will change the experience. It'll change things. It’ll make life so much easier for partners. Partners working with Extreme — they're in a position to make more money. Traditionally, if you align with Cisco, in the past it's been: "Nobody gets fired by buying Cisco. It's a brand that's out there." But, if you actually look at the quality of the solution, the ease and simplicity of deployment and capabilities going forward, the ease of being a partner and supporting the end user customer and you can make more money with Extreme.
One of the things that we announced in Q2 is the volume of customers that placed orders for over $1 million. Greater than $1 million-dollar networking projects in the quarter were up 30 percent quarter-over-quarter. We're moving upmarket where Extreme is being considered by larger enterprise customers. These customers are usually surprised about the quality of our solutions because maybe historically, they haven't worked with us, and we're moving further and further into the competitive processes. If we're losing, we're losing in the finals. Our win ratio and conversion ratios are going up. If you're a channel partner, the good news is it's easier to win with Extreme today than it's ever been.
We’re taking it from the competitors. The competitive wins are across the across the board, but primarily, I think the competitive wins are consistent with the market share data. So, most are coming from Cisco, then from HPE Aruba, and then from Juniper.
