Who wants to manage a network? Apparently fewer enterprises want to do it on their own and are increasingly leaning into managed services.

Extreme Networks is taking a cautious but optimistic outlook on its prospects for growth as near-term demand has softened due to macroeconomic pressures.

The reported its first quarter fiscal 2024 results today with revenue reported at $353.1 million for a 19% year-over-year gain.The growth was driven by continued demand for Extreme's cloud-driven networking infrastructure and solutions. The company saw broad-based strength across key verticals including education, healthcare, manufacturing, government and venues. Looking forward the company is forecasting revenue for its second quarter to be in a range of $312 million to $327 million.

"Looking ahead at the balance of fiscal 2024, we're taking a more cautious tone and weighing the current spending environment based on changing customer buying patterns and macroeconomic conditions,"   Kevin Rhodes, executive vice president and CFO of Extreme Networks said during the company's earnings call. "We are tempering our revenue outlook for this quarter and the balance of the year."

Despite the short-term concerns, Extreme Networks CEO Ed Meyercord remains optimistic about the company's long-term growth prospects.

During his company's earnings call, Meyercord highlighted Extreme Networks’ cloud fabric, AIops and SD-WAN capabilities. Meyercord claimed that Extreme Networks is the only networking provider that can deploy campus networking fabrics directly from the cloud.

"This makes moves, adds and changes to networks simple and seamless, allows customers to segment networks and provides unmatched security and resiliency," Meyercord said. "While fabrics are common in data center environments, we're the only competitor who can bring these services to the dynamic campus environment orchestrated through our cloud."

AIops is another growing area for Extreme Networks, helping organizations with intelligent insight and automation. Meyercord said that his company's AIops platform now helps organizations to manage over 200,000 devices. Extreme Networks has also developed digital twin technology to help organizations stage and test network deployments in a digital environment.

SD-WAN is another area of growth, highlighted by Meyercord. He noted that during the quarter  a global leading fast food chain selected ExtremeCloud SD-WAN to ensure consistent performance and improve guest experiences.

"With Extreme this industry leader has greater visibility across its network and will be able to simplify network management at all locations, increase overall network security, and optimize operations by improving performance for critical applications," he said.

A key focus for Extreme is building out its managed services capabilities.

Meyercord note that the company spent over a year developing what he called a modern managed services platform to make network management simpler for service providers. According to Meyercord, existing platforms from other vendors are complicated and difficult to manage. Extreme's new managed services platform aims to greatly simplify the ability to provide a managed service from a networking perspective.

Extreme is also pursuing new growth opportunities by partnering with large service providers. Meyercord noted the company is in discussions with some carriers about offering an enterprise solution through the carriers. He added that Extreme will provide more details next week when the company hosts its Investor Day event.

"The bottom line is that we have some strong relationships with some very large service providers who are dissatisfied with current networking relationships," Meyercord said. "We see some creative ways to work with them, to help them drive the profitability of their business."