Extreme Networks posted better than expected fourth-quarter 2020 earnings today with revenues up 3% quarter over quarter to $215.5 million. While the company's revenues are still down 14% year over year, the company's Q4 performance had CEO Edward Meyercord sounding optimistic for the company's future.

"Our Q4 results reflect the resilience of our business and our ability to move quickly to adapt to the new normal," Meyercord said on his company's earnings call, according to a transcript. "Networking infrastructure remains vital for our customers, and demand remains strong."

Meyercord also talked up Extreme's recent deployments, which included a complete overhaul of the vendor's own branch infrastructure and a contract to enable digital health and social services for 1.5 million people in Spain.

However, for all this talk of digital transformations, it should be noted that Extreme has undergone a rather substantial transformation of its own in the year since it acquired wireless and LAN switching vendor Aerohive for $272 million.

While the acquisition certainly bought Extreme a robust hardware and SD-WAN portfolio, Aerohive's cloud management platform made the company an attractive target, said Meyercord in an interview in June 2019.

So, it was no surprise that the evolution of Aerohive's Hive Manager, ExtremeCloud IQ, came up repeatedly throughout Meyercord's presentation, including a brief vignette on how he had used the platform to deploy several wireless access points in his home.

Alongside Extreme's management platform, the company's leadership team has undergone a refresh with Joe Vitalone and Wes Durow, appointed chief revenue officer and CMO respectively.

"The strong quarter-over-quarter recovery in our bottom line was the result of high revenue and a material reduction in our cost and expenses," said CFO Remi Thomas.

According to Thomas, Extreme's Q4 earnings were driven in large part by product revenues which were up 4% during the quarter. "Total product revenue was $141.5 million and our total product book-to-bill ratio was approximately 1:1," he said. "Revenue associated with newly introduced products grew 58% quarter over quarter."

Extreme's services revenues were another bright spot for the vendor with revenues up 18% year over year and 1% quarter over quarter.

Meanwhile, the company saw strong adoption of its cloud services which were up 31% year over year and 42% quarter over quarter.

Turning to the first quarter of fiscal year 2021, both Meyercord and Thomas anticipate continued quarter-over-quarter gains. "We expect gradual recovery from COVID to continue through fiscal '21 and believe Extreme will emerge from all of this as a stronger more competitive company," Meyercord said.

Looking forward to Q1, which is traditionally a slow quarter for Extreme, Thomas predicts revenues between $220 million and $230 million, up roughly 4% quarter over quarter.