Three Trends for CIOs in 2019, according to Extreme Networks

Three trends for CIOs in 2019: Bob Gault, Extreme

By Pradeep Chakraborty

Extreme Networks is focused on customer-driven networking to improve transformation, innovation, and customer experience – from the enterprise edge to the cloud – with software driven-solutions that are agile, adaptive, and secure. Now, it has announced the path to the new, agile data center. How is it different from the biggies?

Bob Gault, Chief Revenue and Services Officer, Extreme Networks, said: “Most vendors today sell closed technology stacks with domain-level visibility. This makes it difficult for customers to adopt new, software-driven approaches that drive the business forward, or to test new technologies that aren’t driven by the vendor they have aligned with.

“In contrast, Extreme provides technology that works in a multi-vendor heterogeneous environment, eliminating vendor lock-in. We deliver real, multi-vendor capabilities that meet the needs of the modern enterprise. For example, the Extreme Management Center allows for full visibility and management of multi-vendor networks, and Extreme Workflow Composer enables cross-domain, multi-vendor IT automation that allows organizations to automate at their pace—from automating simple tasks to deploying sophisticated workflows.

“Further, our standards-based, multi-vendor interoperable and adaptable data enter fabric gives customers the ability to build once and re-use it many times. All of this gives organizations the ability to accelerate their digital transformation initiatives, and to adapt and respond to new service demands with cloud speed.”

Enabling digital transformation
In that case, how does Extreme Networks enable digital transformation? He added: “According to a recent study, 89 percent of enterprises worldwide either plan to adopt, or have already adopted, a digital-first business strategy. The key enabler of digital transformation is an organization’s network infrastructure.

“With the advent of IoT, pervasive mobility and growing cloud service adoption, the network has become increasingly distributed. As such, Extreme collaborates with our customers to build open, software-driven networking solutions from the enterprise edge to the cloud that are agile, adaptive, and secure to enable digital transformation.

“We are a group of dedicated professionals who are passionate about helping our customers – and each other – succeed. Our 100% in-sourced services and support are #1 in the industry and even with 30,000 customers globally, including half of the Fortune 50, we remain nimble and responsive to ensure customer and partner success. We call this Customer-Driven Networking.”

There are three core drivers are: user experience, data, and insights, and the foundation to keep all that data secure. I requested Gault to elaborate.

He said: “On top of providing the network building blocks for wired and wireless LAN access (routers, switches, access points, etc.), Extreme offers an array of software capabilities including analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning to help customers gather granular insights into who is using what application, when, and where.

“With that data, customers can understand usage patterns to optimize applications, do capacity planning and fine-tune the infrastructure for optimal performance. By applying machine learning to the data, Extreme’s analytics can detect anomalies from devices and applications, and block potentially malicious access. Collectively, these capabilities allow organizations to deliver a better customer experience via personalized offers and engagement based on user behavior and with maximum security, network uptime and greater throughput.

“Extreme offers the industry’s only end-to-end, single pane of glass solution that enables customers to accelerate digitization while saving IT operations cost with automation, visibility, analytics, and control. Our solution helps secure our customers’ networks and ensure exceptional user experiences with fast Mean Time to Innocence, application performance insights, security and forensics, and automated roll-out of consistent policies.”