Networking News
Extreme Networks CEO On Growing When Competition Is Shrinking: ‘The Evidence Is In The Growth’
Gina Narcisi
While the tech industry suffers from large-scale layoffs, Extreme Networks had record hiring in the last six months. The company’s people and partners, according to CEO Ed Meyercord, are making all the difference and translating into double-digit revenue growth, while displacing the competition.
How important will the new managed services platform be for Extreme partners?
If you look at network management, there’s not really a single managed services platform that’s out there. In the channel community, if we were to poll and ask 100 channel partners about their management, we might get 100 different flavors. So, part of part of what we’re doing is we’re working with a handful of partners globally and we’re going to create a few different flavors of managed services. Then, we’ll be in a position to roll that out. We can be very prescriptive about the platform and what we can bring. We’re really excited about it because the way that we’re building our cloud; the orchestration capabilities of our cloud, we’ll be able to bring and support a lot of services that we can orchestrate and deliver through our cloud platform. So, it goes back to this one single cloud [in which] we’re orchestrating services. And all the services we’re talking about don’t have to be tethered to equipment. So, there’s a lot of excitement around that.
I’m getting a little ahead of myself -- it’s not available yet, but you have to invest early. We’re investing to support partners on that journey [and] we see more and more customers want to go there. And we think because of our size and how we can work with partners, we can be very flexible and build a few different options in terms of platforms, and then really simplify it because at the end, it gets really complicated if you’re trying to if you’re trying to combine a lot of different elements of a managed service. It can get really complicated. We’re going to bring the same tenets of simplicity into managed services and the managed service platform.
