What are end users seeking and are the vendors meeting this demand?
Customers are seeking simplicity, value for money, choice and reliability. They need the flexibility to deploy 10/100 or gigabit technologies where appropriate, and insist on having the freedom to deploy best-of-breed technologies.

Most vendors are aware of these demands, but some have responded faster than others. At Extreme Networks we design, build and install a complete range of Ethernet infrastructure solutions that solve the toughest business communications challenges. Our commitment to open networking sets us apart from the alternatives by delivering meaningful insight and unprecedented control to applications and services. We believe openness is the best foundation for growth, freedom, flexibility and choice.

Extreme Networks focuses on enterprises and service providers who demand high performance, converged networks that support voice, video and data over a wired and wireless infrastructure. The market is responding readily to this approach.

Where is the market heading?
Ethernet take-up matches global levels of technology adoption. End users are taking advantage of the trend towards higher speed communications.  Service providers are already planning for 100Gb technology and preparing their infrastructure (optics etc.) to be ready for when the standards are ratified.  Ethernet will also have a large role to play in the data centre, which is an increasing part of our business at Extreme.  

Extreme Networks: Where is the company heading?
Extreme Networks focuses on the delivery of innovative network solutions that solve real world business challenges. We specialise in converged Ethernet networks that support data, voice and video for both enterprises and service providers.  Our solutions feature high performance and high availability switching that deliver insight and control enabling customers to solve their real-world business communications challenges.  Today, we operate in more than 50 countries and throughout Asia Pacific.

We have a proven record of accomplishing this since inception of the organization and with our track record of Enterprise-empowering capabilities including Universal Port to automate common tasks, Ethernet Automatic Protection Switching (EAPS), providing rapid, sub 50 millisecond failover, and native XML support on all our switching products.

We will continue to prove that there is more to an Enterprise vendor than just their presentation. Our value is the mission to deliver to our customers leading price/performance, low power demands compared to other vendors, the simplicity and reliability of a single, modular Operating System, ExtremeXOS software, across our portfolio and to provide the most intelligent switch stacking within the industry.

The author is Country Manager, Extreme Networks India.