Extreme Networks might not be a household brand name, but the company's CEO  argues that Extreme's technologies have been used by many, even if they don't know it.

Ed Meyercord, CEO of Extreme Networks delivered the final keynote of the company's Connect conference which was held in Fort Worth, Texas, this week. During the address he noted that he was recently on a call with a prospect that asked him if Extreme Networks was enterprise grade. Meyercord responded by providing a litany of brand name clients and organizations that use Extreme around the world. For example, every major league baseball ballpark relies on Extreme Networks. The FAA (Federal Aviation Administration), FedEx and the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) as well as a long list of airports and airlines around the world are also customers.

All those organizations and many more are relying on Extreme Networks with its expanding portfolio of wired and wireless technologies. “In the nine years since I've been here at Extreme, I can tell you, there's never been a time where the pace of change has been faster,” Meyercord said.

At the Extreme Connect event the company had a pair of product announcements. The first one is all about improving outdoor Wi-Fi connectivity.

Extreme Networks announced that it is the first vendor with outdoor Wi-Fi 6E deployments to receive a standard power grant, allowing customers to leverage faster speeds, increased range, and expanded capacity for outdoor connectivity using the 6GHz spectrum.

Through a partnership with Wi-Fi Alliance Services, Extreme can now offer secure cloud-based Automated Frequency Coordination (AFC) for outdoor 6GHz Wi-Fi in the U.S., ensuring protection for incumbent users while maximizing transmission power.

Extreme Networks also used the Connect event as the venue to announce the launch of Extreme Labs, a new hub for research, development and innovation in networking.

As part of Extreme Labs, the company previewed Extreme AI Expert, a generative artificial intelligence solution designed to optimize and streamline the design, deployment and management of enterprise networking and security. Extreme AI Expert will make use of both public and customer's private data to provide proactive recommendations and insights for enhancing network performance, operational efficiency, and troubleshooting.

Key features of Extreme AI Expert include acting as an expert on Extreme products and services, leveraging data from across the network to improve performance, and providing recommendations for preventative actions and optimizations based on business KPIs.

Extreme Networks plans to start integrating Extreme AI Expert into its solutions later this year, with the goal of simplifying networking and challenging conventional approaches through innovation.

Though Extreme Networks isn't as large as some of its rivals, Meyercord didn't mince his words when talking about competition in the networking industry.

“Cisco closes Splunk and what's their strategy? They're going to raise prices on all those customers to try to figure out how to pay for what they bought,” he said. “At the end of the day, this is going to create more disruption.”

Meyercord also argued that for Cisco less than half of its business is networking today as the company keeps expanding in different areas.

While Cisco has long been the number one networking vendor, the number two and number three networking vendors, HPE and Juniper networks, are in the process of coming together.  On January 10, HPE announced that it is acquiring Juniper in a $14 billion deal.

“HPE is paying a huge amount of money for this and the net net is a lot of confusion,” Meyercord said. “How do you know if you're buying or considering buying a certain technology if it will be there, how is it going to work and how is it going to integrate? The fact of the matter is they don't know.”

Meyercord argued that with the disruption and uncertainty, there is more opportunity for Extreme Networks

“We are solely focused on secure networking,” he said. “So we're in a very good position today to execute stronger I would say than ever before.”