This year marks Extreme’s 25th anniversary – a milestone in any industry.
We started out in 1996 as a bold and scrappy startup, and though we’ve grown significantly through the past quarter-century, we’ve kept that confidence and hunger to innovate at our core.
I’m honored to have led Extreme through a chapter of transformation as we’ve gone from a small networking player to the industry’s third-largest vendor with over a billion dollars in revenue per year. Through acquisition, organic growth, and innovation, we’ve become the industry’s fastest-growing cloud-managed networking vendor.
The networking establishment might still believe customers want complex infrastructure and management tools with rigid licensing models to manage their digital transformation, but at Extreme, we know that’s not the case. That’s why we’ve been challenging the status quo for over 25 years.
Today, we’ve developed the capability to manage networks – from the wireless and IoT edge to the data center core – via the cloud, simplifying the complexity of managing and deploying distributed networks. The enterprise was already becoming more distributed, but the pandemic forced us to embrace huge changes overnight. The user is now the edge, and businesses are increasingly moving to the cloud to keep up with new demands for network access and security. Customers are also demanding more flexible options, and the networking industry is shifting to an as-a-service sales model. As a result, ExtremeCloud IQ, our network management platform, is the fastest-growing cloud management solution in the industry. Additionally, 5G is opening up new growth vectors for Extreme, and we are delivering new solutions to take advantage of this fast-growing opportunity.
As we accelerate innovation and seek to improve the end-user experience, we are also committed to corporate social responsibility (CSR) in our own business practices, and in fostering this with our business partners, customers, and our supply chain. We also recognize the value of service as a powerful tool for galvanizing change, and starting this year, we hosted our first annual Day of Giving. More than half of our employees participated and we supported over 50 charitable organizations.
Additionally, Extreme established a Diversity and Inclusion Council and seven Employee Resource Groups (with more in development) to ensure every voice within our company has a platform to be heard. Within the first 100 days of this program, 16% of Extreme employees plugged into one of our D&I resources.
[Hear what our employees of 20+ years have to say about working at Extreme!]
From the time we were founded to today, Extreme has always believed that progress and innovation are achieved when we connect. We are boldly moving forward at cloud speed, and we are excited to go into our next 25 years with the promise of making tomorrow’s connections more effortless than today’s.
It’s an exciting time to be part of Extreme and as I look toward the future, I’m proud to continue to lead us in the next wave of networking innovations.
[Hear from our customers, partners, suppliers, distributors, and employees.]
