Extreme Networks Positions Open Fabric For Converged Infrastructure Growth

Extreme Highlights

• A small vendor with strong technology
• Certifies its offerings and partners with Lenovo for servers and EMC for storage (both situations are the “stack” storage, servers, switches)
• Targets midrange to large data centres (cloud-ready)
• Seeks to take advantage of the rise of Converged Infrastructure
• Will leverage Lenovo and its own channels to take advantage of the CI and IS market

Having just published our research findings into Converged Infrastructure and Integrated Systems (CI and IS) Pim and I were very keen to talk to Jake Howering, Director, Data Center Marketing/Solutions at Extreme Networks. You’ll want to know more about its approach.

Extreme – Dedicated To Ethernet Enterprise Network Markets

Extreme is one of the smaller Enterprise Network suppliers, with annual revenues of $308 million in the year to the end of March 2013. In our research it has a 0.4% market share of the $60 billion market dominated by Cisco (see Figure). It focuses on Ethernet products and the data centre market. It has around 650 employees and more than 6k customers in over 60 countries around the world. According to research firm the Dell’Oro Group, Extreme has sold 35 million Ethernet ports since it started business 15 years ago. Its headquarters is in San Jose, California.

Certifies And Partners With Lenovo And EMC For CI And IS Markets

Extreme’s Open Fabric architecture includes Ethernet switches managed by its Linux-based ExtremeXOS software. It also endorses OpenStack and Open Network Foundation approaches, which it thinks will become vital in 2014.
It has just announced 2 partnerships for the data centre market. In particular:

• It has signed a alliance with Lenovo and certified its offerings with its Think Servers; Lenovo currently has a market share of just 0.7%, but it will have a stronger position if and when it acquires IBM’s low-end ‘pizza box’ business, although we don’t expect IBM to offload any of its own data centre servers
• Its Open Fabric architecture has been certified for use in EMC’s VSPEX solutions and it is now an official solution partner (although ‘silver’ to Brocade and Cisco ‘platinum’ levels); Extreme’s users can build their own storage solutions, adopt VSPEX or even use its modular switches to connect between pods of vBlock integrated systems; EMC is market leader of the storage systems market with a 22.7% share; however it is atypical in the CI and IS market in not having its own servers

Both announcements are important in demonstrating Extreme’s commitment to Converged Infrastructure markets: Lenovo’s channel partners will extend the sales coverage of its pre-validated technical integration offerings, while Extreme will be using its own partners to provide VSPEX solutions to customers.
It is not yet as thoroughly engaged as hardware suppliers in SAP HANA, or NetApp and Cisco in FlexPod. Such a move would probably involve a new go-to-market approach, although Keith Humphries of euroLAN points out that NetApp has done very little direct selling.

Some Conclusions – The Chances Of Success

Almost all Converged Infrastructure and Integrated System offerings today are supplied by large system suppliers, who propose these new systems to save their largest users time, money and hassle through pre-integration of standard system management software. Extreme is right to position its Ethernet-based fabric approach for customers aiming to achieve similar results and it has been smart to certify its offerings, although currently Lenovo Is too small and VSPEX too well-connected in networking for it to make much from the CI and IS market yet.
It will be interesting to see how it develops its offerings and go-to-market approaches over time to take advantage of a small, but strongly growing part of the Enterprise IT market.