Extreme Networks is relying heavily on a number of key technologies—including its network fabric and cloud management portfolios to build toward the future—but more immediately, it is leaning on a system memory advantage, Wi-Fi 7 development and the changing competitive landscape to drive growth.

For now momentum is represented as five consecutive quarters of double-digit financial growth—its most recent 3Q ended March 31 with sales of $316.9 million, an 11% year-over-year increase and eight consecutive quarters of product growth.

“Our results reinforce our momentum as the fastest-growing enterprise networking player,” president, CEO & executive director, Ed Meyercord told Wall Street analysts this week on the company’s 3Q financial call. 

There are a number of elements in the vendor’s growth story that are unique, at least in this moment in the industry. The first is system memory supply—the company reports it has secured enough memory supply to take it through fiscal ’27 and beyond.

“At this point, we have DDR memory supply through fiscal 2027 and then the first quarter of fiscal 2028. Then we have new vendors who have already committed to entering the market, who will have chips in, beginning in calendar 2028 that will fill demand for the market,” Meyercord told Network World. 

“I think it could turn into an advantage for Extreme because what we hear is that our competitors are not going to be able to get supply. And if that’s the case, then we’ll be able to step in to channel partners or direct to end-user customers,” Meyercord said.

Meyercord said Extreme has been able to qualify alternative components that were designed for other industrial sectors, which has given it another source of supply and the company has been able to redesign its products to reduce the number of chips required, which is another factor, he told analysts. 

“So it’s through a combination of a variety of initiatives that we’ve been able to solve for this, and we’re confident in saying that we have no near-term, nor do we believe a long-term, issue with memory and currently any of our components going forward,” Meyercord said.

Meyercord also credited Extreme’s core relationship with Broadcom as a key reason for its chipset and memory success. “Broadcom is a strategic partner to Extreme, and they go out of their way to support us and help us in these situations,” Meyercord said.

The supply and cost of memory components is causing industry anxiety in general, with Arista CEO Jayshree Ullal proclaiming that memory prices are “horrendous, an order of magnitude, exponentially higher,” in the company’s 4Q financial call in February. “So, clearly, with the situation worsening and also expected to last multiple years, we are experiencing shortages in memory…we are planning for this,” Ullal said. 

“Memory is typically a sort of boom-and-bust component industry, and right now, it’s booming for the memory guys, and I don’t think they’re in a huge rush to try to solve the issue, even if they could,” Tom Mainelli, group vice president of device and consumer research at IDC said in a recent Network World article. And even if they wanted to, Mainelli said it would take 12 to 18 months, if not longer, to increase capacity.

Another high-impact technology moving Extreme forward is Wi-Fi 7. During its financial call, Extreme reports Wi-Fi 7 represented 37% of total wireless unit shipments in the quarter, up from 27% last quarter. In terms of bookings dollars, nearly half of wireless bookings came from Wi-Fi 7, the vendor reported.

“Wi Fi 7 is a meaningful step up from a quality standpoint, from a bandwidth and from a quality and reliability perspective and with Wi Fi 7, you can now run mission-critical applications, business applications,” Meyercord said.  “It’s the first generation of Wi-Fi where that’s been the case.”

If a customer is going to make an investment today in a network, I think you’re going to want to go with the latest technology. And so I think that’s what’s driving Wi-Fi 7 growth, and we’re seeing it across all the industry verticals that we support,” Meyercord said.

The state of the current networking industry is also helping Extreme, according to Meyercord. For example AI gets a lot of attention but many of the networking opportunities in the data center and campus are customers refreshing their existing equipment, Meyercord said. 

“The idea of AI inferencing and the idea of agentic AI, where you have a master agent, and then sub agents—basically an army of sub agents, that are just perpetually active in a network that weren’t there before, is on the horizon. But for most enterprise customers, I don’t think that’s prevalent today. It’s not, it’s not where our customers are today,” Meyercord said.

“We took our time with 400G for that reason, because our customers were not using 400G. And even enterprise data centers today, I think it’s something like less than 10% are moving in that direction, and even of those 10% are things like banks, large banks, and with significant data needs. But we are seeing that evolve now where it’s becoming more prevalent,” Meyercord said.  “We’re going to be announcing our enterprise stack and enterprise solution for the evolution of AI into the enterprise network, but that’s for the future.”

The competitive landscape also moves Extreme. “Today, the competitive environment is such that Cisco continues to grow and expand outside the networking market to simply focus on other things. That opens the door for us,” Meyercord said. 

“And then there’s HPE Juniper, the complexity of that deal and the challenges that they’ll have with integration filters out into the field and into the channel. And so here, again, with Extreme, with a very clean vision, a clean portfolio and hardware and solutions that are very easy for customers to use and simplify operations in something that’s inherently complex is getting us more at bats and our win rates are going up,” Meyercord said.

Also key to that growth is the underlying Extreme network fabric. Built on extended L2 networking technology, the fabric provides virtualized network services across wired, wireless, SD‑WAN, and third‑party devices—delivering end‑to‑end segmentation for security and services. 

“Everybody has network fabrics but ours is unique in the efficiency it brings to deploying networks, configuring networks, upgrading networks, it’s much faster and more automated. And then, in terms of security, the ability to segment networks and protect your environment. So instead of having a broad open network that someone could hack and attack and then laterally move about, you know, in this case, we create segmented networks, and it’s very easy to do that, and if someone hacks a segment of the network, they have nowhere to go except for that segment,” Meyercord said. 

During the financial call Meyercord said: “The feedback we hear most often is, ‘It’s so easy,’ and our favorite customer quote is, ‘What took us six hours with Cisco, took only six minutes with Extreme.’ We’re the only vendor that offers this fabric.”