It’s event season, and this week Extreme Networks held its Connect user event in Paris, where it unveiled Platform ONE, Extreme’s revamped connectivity platform that brings together networking, security and AI. The company also announced some new hardware, including Wi-Fi 7 access points as well as core and campus switches.
While new products tend to steal the headlines, I attend IT events for the conversations, meet-ups and keynotes to better understand networking trends. Below are my top five thoughts from Extreme Networks Connect 2025.
1. Network professionals need to embrace AI now.
Extreme demonstrated its AI for networking capabilities. On the main stage, Nabil Bukhari, chief technology and product officer, and Hardik Ajmera, vice president of product management, walked through a troubleshooting scenario where AI was used to automate most of the many steps required to fix a performance issue. What would typically take hours to do was done in minutes.
One would think such a strong value proposition would be appealing to network engineers. While some seemed excited, many of the customers I talked to were apprehensive about bringing AI into network operations. Common questions were centered around the accuracy and effectives of it. To that I say: AI systems do make mistakes, but the error rate is far less than people and AI gets better over time. One of the best quotes from the event is from Eduardo Kassner, chief data and AI officer for Microsoft, who stated, “there are no fast followers for AI,” indicating you get on board now or fall behind. I know change is scary, but network engineers should be looking to AI to help them work faster and smarter.
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Nabil Bukhari, chief technology and product officer at Extreme Networks
Extreme Networks
2. Extreme Networks is the king of complicated Wi-Fi.
To say Wi-Fi at scale is hard is about as big an understatement as there is in networking. Add in the complications of many buildings, such as those with glass, steel and electronic equipment, and it’s easy to see why we all have Wi-Fi frustrations from time to time.
The hardest place to put Wi-Fi is in buildings that were not designed for it, and Extreme seems to have a monopoly on these environments. Fenway Park, Lambeau Field, LA Memorial, the Dubai World Trade Center, old airports and more are all customers of Extreme Networks. At the event, Drew Crisp, senior vice president of digital for Liverpool FC, was asked why they went with Extreme at Anfield Stadium, another old and iconic sporting venue. Crisp stated: “Putting a Wi-Fi network into a 125-year-old stadium is hard. It was way more technically complicated than I understood it to be. We worked with Extreme because they know what they are doing in environments like ours and they have a proven track record.”
Wi-Fi is hard, but if Extreme can make it work in these stadiums, it can certainly do so in traditional carpeted offices.
3. Wi-Fi 6E/7 will likely require a wired refresh.
I’ve been in networking a long time. My days as an engineer pre-date Wi-Fi, and I don’t ever remember a wireless upgrade driving a refresh of the wired network. However, as with many things in life, there is a first time for everything. The 6 Ghz spectrum on Wi-Fi 6E/7 pushes the wireless connection close to 1 Gbps of throughout. This means multiple Wi-Fi clients connected over Ghz will cause the wired network to bottleneck. Almost every customer I talked to said they weren’t sure at first whether a wired upgrade was necessary, but after only a short time, upgraded the campus to a multi-gig network. Any business out there planning for Wi-Fi 6E/7 should also be planning to go from 1 Gig-E to 2.5/5 Gig-E on the wired network.
4. Extreme’s Fabric remains the industry’s best kept secret.
It seems every network vendor has a fabric, but not all fabrics are created equal. Extreme is only of only two vendors (the other is Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise) that has an SPB based fabric, which operates at Layer 2. The L2 fabric has some significant benefits over L3, but SPB has trouble scaling, which is why the technology has been used historically in data centers.
To solve the scale-out problem, Extreme developed something called a “multi-area fabric,” giving customers the scale of an L3 fabric with the simplicity and reliability of an L2 (more on this in a future post). Every Extreme customer I talk to loves the technology, although several of them admit they were a bit skeptical at first given so few vendors support SPB.
I talked the Farid Farouq, vice president of innovation for the Dubai World Trade Center, at the event, and he explained how the Extreme Fabric enables his team to run 500 events at the facility each year. For many events, the IT team must set up custom virtual networks within the physical network for security and other purposes. With a traditional L3 network, the days of work it would take to make this happen isn’t realistic given the fast turnarounds. But the L2 fabric can be reconfigured in a matter of hours. The Extreme Fabric has been and continues to be the network industry’s best kept secret, but for customers that embrace SPB, the benefits are clearly there.
5. It’s go time for Extreme Networks.
This year is the 10-year anniversary for CEO Ed Meyercord and COO Norman Rice, the dynamic duo that changed what was once a forgotten company. Over the past decade, the company has been rebuilt using homegrown innovation coupled with some shrewd acquisitions, including the Avaya Network business (which brought the fabric), Aerohive (cloud Wi-Fi management), Motorola’s Wi-Fi business, and Brocade (data center). Each acquisition brought new customers, products, people and technology.
However, the challenge in assembling a portfolio using acquisitions is that it can be messy as products need to be rationalized, software migrated and products brought to end of life. The company is now through all that messy work and has a set of universal hardware, a cloud-native management platform, an AIOps platform, and Platform ONE for improved manageability and visibility. Rolled out at the event, Platform ONE is in many ways the culmination of all the other work that had to be done first to create the single data set to enable better automation and unified control.
Now it’s time for the company to take this innovation and start winning bigger deals and taking meaningful share. The early signs are there as the company has reported consistent growth over the past several quarters, resulting in the stock price being up more than 40% in the past 12 months.
Overall, my experience at Extreme Connect was more than positive. The company showed continued progress in helping customers simplify networking, even with the IT infrastructure landscape continuing to grow in complexity. For many organizations, the network is the backbone of the business, and I think Extreme made a compelling case for its solutions.
Source:: Network World