Extreme now has an SD-WAN offering. Why is this important?  

In the enterprise, customers are going to be taking more ownership over the end-user experience outside of the office. And that dovetails into the investment that we just made. We acquired Ipanema SD-WAN [a subsidiary of network management and performance player Infovista], a cloud-driven SD-WAN solution. What we’re building is the capability to provide the application performance, visibility and insight at the edge of the network [or] wherever the user may be. It’s not necessarily a traditional branch solution, but we can actually follow the individual, and in order to do that, it has to come from the cloud, again, reinforcing why the cloud is so important in the future of the enterprise network. The idea that the next-generation SD-WAN solution also now incorporates security elements and then supports this more distributed enterprise, that’s another contributing factor to the heightened interest in Extreme.

We didn’t have a SD-WAN capability previously, and the exciting thing for us is the quality of the technology and the quality of the platform that they’ve built. We have leadership in cloud and networking solutions, and so the combination here, and then the ability for us to leverage a base cloud license to use our cloud platform as an orchestration platform for more services—that’s really what this is about. The first service coming out, which is a software subscription service, is ExtremeCloud SD-WAN. We’re packaging what Ipanema built as a pure subscription service that comes out in our third fiscal 2022 quarter. There’s a lot of interest, enthusiasm and excitement around that. We are ahead of schedule with the service integration, the business integration, and then opening up SD-WAN solutions for our field globally. It’s the cloud-driven capability. In other words, instead of having the traditional hardware and a branch office, [it’s] the ability to deliver services from the cloud in a more distributed environment. There’s a lot of excitement there, as well as the new branch solution that we’ll bring to market. It’s opening up the door for us because of the cloud and the core ExtremeCloud IQ license to sell more services over the top.