A simplistic, one-cloud approach to secure networking is what enterprises are craving if Morrisville, N.C.-based Extreme's more recent enterprise wins are any indication, Meyercord said. The networking CEO spoke with CRN about how Extreme's capabilities are helping the company stand out and take share and how M&A in 2025 will impact the market.

How are Extreme's networking capabilities helping the company stand out in a shrinking market that has been led by traditional networking heavyweights?

One thing that relates to our solution, which is different from everyone else's, [is our] unique fabric that no one else has. On the enterprise campus, things are happening -- let's take WashU [an Extreme customer]. It's a whole campus. You have a stadium, you have dorms, academic buildings [and] research facilities. This really diverse environment -- indoor, outdoor and changes happening all the time -- and we have unique benefits for resiliency. Inadvertently, something always happens where people plug something into the network and it's like, 'Uh oh, the network doesn't like it. It doesn't recognize it' or you get network outages. With our solution, the network never goes down. With all these things that happen in the environment, we have what we call 'sub-second convergence,' and no one else can do that. The reason why we won a huge Fortune 50 company is that that was important to them, and none of the larger competitors could do it. That was a big deal for us. And again, these are all capabilities in the cloud.

The other thing we have [that helps us stand out] is segmentation. On the campus, we're able to create networks within a network. An example of this would be the Dubai World Trade Center. Effectively, in their exhibition hall where they have Gitax, which is one of the biggest tech events in the Middle East, within the same network infrastructure for each booth, they can deliver an SLA [service-level agreement] for what they want for network, and it's different for the booth next to them and for the booth next to them, and they can do this with very few IT staff because it's so easy to deliver an independent SLA. Hospitals love this technology because at the U Penn Medical Center, a beautiful new facility in Philadelphia, each operating room has its own network. They can say, 'OK, we'll just create a network within a network' and what that means is that if someone were to hack, let's say, through a medical device, or someone was to go and plug into the network, and maybe it's a bad actor, you can't go anywhere else. You can't start moving laterally throughout the hospital and start looking for patient health information. There's no lateral movement. We have the endorsement of the FBI that said that the limitation of the blast radius is so powerful from a security standpoint.

We have this micro-segmentation in the data center through a different product, but we have this unique nugget on campus, across the enterprise, that no one else has. So that's the reason why we're winning. And then finally, we have this unique capability as it relates to provisioning in a network. Basically, what we're able to do is build and expand networks, make changes to networks, add services to the network in a plug-and-play environment. In our case, you can provision an access point, say, in a network, and then it calls for the services and they come. So there's a huge amount of operating efficiency, a huge uplift in security, which is so important, and then a huge uplift in resiliency, which is incredibly important. And all this is automated. When people are talking about automation, security and resiliency, which are the most important things in today's world, we have unique benefits that are allowing us to move upmarket and to take share. And you're starting to see that that's kind of behind where we are, and that's what's giving us confidence as we turn the corner and go into next year. Of the traditional networking companies, we'll be the fastest-growing. We'll be taking share. Our outlook is double-digit growth. You'll see that in March, you'll see it in June. With everything behind us, you'll look at Extreme as the fastest-growing network [vendor].