‘We’re Taking Share’: Extreme Networks CEO Sees MSPs, AI Driving Growth
‘We see the pendulum swinging back to enterprise and enterprise data centers as AI workloads move over time,’ says Extreme Networks CEO Ed Meyercord.
Extreme Networks is counting on the channel to help drive its next phase of growth as the networking vendor moves up-market, expands its MSP business and leans into new AI capabilities.
With about 85 percent of Extreme Networks’ revenue flowing through indirect channels, CEO Ed Meyercord told CRN that his company is recruiting partners that can help it win larger enterprise networking deals while giving existing partners new opportunities around Platform ONE, MSP services, and supply-chain-driven competitive wins.
Meyercord said Extreme Networks finished fiscal 2026 strong with continued momentum moving up-market and fast adoption of Extreme Platform ONE.
[Related: Extreme Networks CEO Ed Meyercord: ‘We’re Giving Predictability To The Channel’]
Meyercord said Extreme had “a really nice adoption” of Platform ONE subscriptions, with quarterly subscription bookings rising from an expected $3 million in the first quarter after general availability to $30 million, and the latest quarter coming in closer to $50 million versus a $38 million estimate.
Extreme Networks Wednesday unveiled its fourth fiscal quarter 2026 and fiscal year 2026 financials before the opening of the stock market, and despite a drop in share price, Meyercord said the Morrisville, N.C.-based networking technology developer enjoyed a strong quarter, with Extreme ahead of revenue and gross margin expectations, even as incremental selling expense rose because of incentives tied to larger, more sophisticated networking projects and Platform ONE accelerators.
He said investors pushed the stock down because Extreme Networks guided to a lower growth rate for next year. The stock sank 19 percent Wednesday and was down nearly 4 percent on Thursday to $25.20.
“Share prices will come back,” he said. “I think what happened is, we just came off a year of 13-percent revenue growth, and now we’re pointing to 8-percent revenue growth, and I think investors are saying, ‘Why is there a deceleration?’”
Meyercord said Extreme is taking share from competitors such as Cisco and HPE Juniper, pointing to several large wins and to the fact that his company is gaining share because it is outgrowing the enterprise networking market.
“We know we’re taking share because we’re outgrowing the market growth rate,” he said. “If the market growth for enterprise networking is 6 to 8 percent, and we just put 13 percent growth on the board, we know we’re outgrowing the market. The hyperscale data center market is a bit different. But we’re focusing on enterprise campus and enterprise data centers, and that’s a different growth trajectory.”
The channel remains central to Extreme Networks’ business, with Meyercord saying about 85 percent of revenue goes through indirect channels. Extreme is recruiting partners, especially larger partners that can help it move up-market. He also highlighted Extreme’s MSP opportunity, saying the MSP business grew 112 percent in fiscal 2026.
Meyercord also said Platform ONE, Agent ONE and the Coworker assistant are key priorities, with Extreme preparing for more autonomous agentic AI capabilities. On the supply side, Meyercord said Extreme has secured memory, maintained normal lead times, and turned competitors’ product constraints into a tailwind.
“If anyone out there in the industry has an issue, they can come to Extreme,” he said. “We’ll take care of it.”
There’s a lot going on in the networking business and at Extreme Networks. To learn more, read CRN’s complete conversation with Meyercord which has been lightly edited for clarity.
What was your biggest takeaway from fiscal fourth quarter 2026?
We had a strong Q4. We continue our move upmarket. Ten percent year-over-year growth is good from a bookings perspective, but our bookings numbers are higher than that. We have a combination of product growth and transitioning customers onto Extreme Platform ONE, and I would say that transition has been very successful. We have a revenue line that’s going away, traditional break-fix service maintenance, which we’re rolling into our subscription line. Quarter over quarter, [over the last several quarters] we doubled our bookings of Platform ONE subscriptions. … We went GA (general availability) a year ago, and we expected $3 million worth of subscriptions in the first quarter, then $5 million, then $10 million, then $20 million. It was a step function. This quarter it’s going to $30 million. That’s a pretty big ramp. And exceeded the numbers. The collective estimate was $38 million, and we came in closer to $50 million. We’ve had a really nice adoption.
How about the overall financials?
We reported three cents ahead of the street. We had tax benefits that kind of pushed the reported number up, but we were in line with the street. We were ahead in revenue. We were ahead in gross margin. We also had incremental selling expense higher than expected. A lot of that had to do with the fact that we have incentives for moving up market as we’re doing more sophisticated and larger networking projects for larger customers. At the same time, we had some accelerators around Platform ONE. But it was a strong quarter.
Extreme Networks also guided higher revenue and earnings for next quarter and next year. So why did investors drive share prices down?
Share prices will come back. I think what happened is, we just came off a year of 13-percent revenue growth, and now we’re pointing to 8-percent revenue growth, and I think investors are saying, ‘Why is there a deceleration? Your story is great. You’re taking share from Cisco. You’re taking share from HPE Juniper. You have this differentiated Platform ONE. You’ve got a unique fabric. That fabric is part of Platform ONE and has enhanced capabilities. You’re announcing these great [customer] logos and moving up-market with big customer wins. Why aren’t we seeing an increase in the growth rate?’ So I think when we came out with a more conservative growth rate, that’s why we got punished today for that reason. I think it’s really that simple.
I think a lot of the analysts that cover us are like, ‘What’s going on? You guys came in line with our numbers and in line with our forecast.’ Obviously, behind the scenes, people were coming in thinking that we were going to take numbers up. And at the end of the day, looking backwards, I think that’s easy to see. But we have nine quarters in a row of double-digit product growth. I think we’re eight quarters in a row of beating our numbers. Maybe we’re a little too conservative with what we’re guiding. We’ll find out with the next release.
Let’s go back to something you said, that Extreme Networks is beating Cisco and HPE Juniper. Explain what you mean by that.
We have anecdotal evidence. We have deals that we look at. We have examples, calling out specific customers. Brunel University in London with 16,000 students, 20 years with Cisco, just jumped to Extreme. The University of Technology in Sydney, Australia, just jumped to Extreme from Cisco, and became our largest deal in the history of the ANZ (Australia and New Zealand) market. We have those kinds of on-the-ground examples of us winning and picking up customers. We also look at industry growth, and we know we’re growing at a higher rate [CRN has reached out to HPE and Cisco for comment].
But sometimes you lose a deal to Cisco or HPE as well, right?
Of course. But in general, we know we’re taking share because we’re outgrowing the market growth rate. If the market growth for enterprise networking is 6 to 8 percent, and we just put 13 percent growth on the board, we know we’re outgrowing the market. The hyperscale data center market is a bit different. But we’re focusing on enterprise campus and enterprise data centers, and that’s a different growth trajectory. We see the pendulum swinging back to enterprise and enterprise data centers as AI workloads move over time. It’s very early innings there, but we are very well positioned.
Is that going to be a significant shift?
I think it will be. I think it will drive higher growth rates in enterprise networks.
What percent of Extreme Networks’ total revenue goes through indirect channels?
About 85 percent. We have a handful of direct customers like Ericsson, for example, where we’re part of their 5G services platform. Schneider Electric, again we’re selling into a solution that they have in terms of services that they offer.
Are you recruiting channel partners?
We are. I would say a lot of the recruiting is at the smaller end of the partner scale. A lot of that recruiting is done by our distributors. But at the higher end of the scale, we have focused initiatives. … World Wide Technology, for example, three years ago we had no relationship with them. Two years ago, we made an effort to get our toes in the water and made a lot of progress. And a year ago, we met with the full team. And now we have a clear action plan for scaling and growing that business.
We want partners that can move up-market with us and win larger projects with us. A lot of traditional Extreme partners that are really important to us that are kind of bread-and-butter partners targeting the SLED (state, local, and education) market, for example, or smaller enterprises. They’re important. But we see the growth coming from larger partners.
How are things going for Extreme Networks and the MSP ecosystem?
Our MSP platform is running on Platform ONE which is pretty neat because now every month we have feature upgrades and advancements, etc. So there’s going to be a lot more going into our MSP platform more consistently, if you will. And we announced we’re now at 74 MSPs, up from 70 last quarter. So we continue to make progress there. Our MSP business is up over 100 percent year-over-year, but it’s starting from a small base. But we have a lot of momentum on the MSP side.
We have a multi-tenant platform, which an MSP platform needs to be. The multi-tenant platform is very easy to navigate. If you are an MSP, it’s very easy to navigate your end-user customers. When we stood this thing up, we started with a vision of making it the most modern platform. It’s taken a while to get it all right. We have consumption-based billing, and we have some things that are unique in terms of the transferability of licenses and other things. And it’s also now tied into Platform ONE from a management perspective and provides AI and automation tools.
When did Extreme Networks start its MSP push?
We started about five years ago. We hired a person who was behind Cisco’s MSP platform, and she was like, ‘Hey, let’s build something really next-gen.’ Something much better, easier to use. So we designed the platform, and then I’d say there was probably a couple years of work before we stood this thing up.
We got a really good response, but what we didn’t realize was how long it takes for MSPs to actually move to put it in. We saw this thing taking off because of all the feedback we got, but then we saw it takes an MSP longer than we expected to operationalize the platform. We’ve never abandoned MSPs. We’ve continued to invest in the MSP business, and we believe we have the best platform to plug into if you’re looking at networking. The tools now have AI behind it.
I think we’re in our fifth year on the journey, but it’s finally started to take off. Getting the billing right was complicated. Having everything fully automated was complicated. But now it’s automated. Our MSP partners are excited, and new people picking up the platform are excited about it. So we see a lot of growth. [For full fiscal 2026] we saw 13-percent top-line revenue growth overall, but buried underneath that was our MSP growth, which was 112 percent.
So MSP revenue is still not significant enough to specifically call out?
We’re just talking about number of partners and growth range, but in terms of revenue I expect we’ll cross that threshold this year.
For the next quarter and year, what are some of your key priorities?
Our priorities are still around Platform ONE. I’m pleased to say we’ve been executing well on Platform ONE. We’re coming out with something we announced at our recent user conference called Agent ONE. Think of it as an assistant where, if you have a role in delivering network for an enterprise, it can assist you in performing tasks such as designing a network, configuring a network, orchestrating a network, troubleshooting, remediation across the scope of networking capabilities. We call that assistant Coworker. Coworker is launching at the end of this month.
In October, we have an AI summit where we’re announcing that we’re going operator mode. And here you have an agent that can be more autonomous. You’ve got complete observability over the agent. You have auditability over the agent, so you know exactly what the agent is doing. But it can be autonomous. … There will be guardrails and governance around the agent. It’s really a big step in automating, leveraging agentic AI to automate networking tasks across the range of the networking domain, and in our case across our entire portfolio. It will bring enterprise customers and partners the most advanced tools in leveraging this new technology. We are out in front, which is an exciting place for us to be.
There’s a lot of excitement. For us, a big initiative several years ago was moving customers into the cloud. It took us three years to get 250,000 active subscriptions in the cloud. In terms of active Platform ONE subscriptions, we crossed over that number in less than a year. So that’s moving very quickly.
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How is Extreme Networks doing in terms of the component shortages?
We have been able to secure supply through a variety of initiatives, so that is not an issue for Extreme. What we are hearing from the channel, and what we are hearing from our distributors, is that product lead times are being stretched in certain categories in different markets with networking vendors, but we don’t have that issue. Partners that are facing longer lead times and product shortages and constraints can come to Extreme where we have normal lead times, so that has become a tailwind for us. And we’re giving a price guarantee out into the future so that if partners were to bring business to Extreme and register the deal with Extreme, we’ll protect that price and the deal for several months out. This program has been successful in creating a pipeline. We’ve had some smaller deals close since we put that in place. People have time. In other words, it’s not pull-in pricing. We’re giving a price guarantee for a period of time. It’s created close to $100 million of new revenue, a lot of it from new customers coming from partners that have requirements but they don’t want to wait. That’s been successful, and we’ve heard a lot of positive feedback from the channel and from our distributors.
How was Extreme able to offer pricing guarantees?
They’re not infinite. We set the pricing guarantees through November, and we’ve been able to do it because we’ve been able to secure supply. In our case, the constrained component was memory. Our supply chain teams have been incredibly tactical in their approach, and that’s our strategy. We have literally 12 different initiatives. We were able to secure memory from one of our customers, Samsung, for example. Our country manager has very good relationships, so we flipped his hat from being a seller to being a supply chain guy, and lo and behold that unlocked a lot of memory.
We also were clever in working with Broadcom, who’s a partner of ours. They had memory chips that were destined for other industries, for example, automotive, where they had excess supply. We were able to qualify those memory chips and get supply. Micron has been our long-term memory supplier. They previously couldn’t allocate chips, but now they’re allocating chips, and we’ve worked channels to get to them. We have a new vendor through Broadcom that is building to our specs and is turning up memory. So we have lots of different approaches. We’ve reengineered some of our boards so that instead of two chips, we engineer for one chip.
I think because of our size, maybe it’s a little easier for us to do these things. It might be more challenging for a bigger company to do this, but we’ve been able to move very quickly, very creatively, to secure the memory and have confirmed supply into fiscal 2028 and beyond. So if anyone out there in the industry has an issue, they can come to Extreme. We’ll take care of it.