With yet another strong quarter of sequential growth under its belt, Extreme Networks has its sights set on unseating rivals Cisco and Aruba in the wireless and LAN switching market.

Extreme Networks CEO Ed Meyercord told SDxCentral that the company's strategy is simple: provide customers an "effortless experience."

"That's where our message is resonating," he said. "We're winning business frankly because of the ease of deployment and ease of deploying the cloud."

At the heart of this strategy is ExtremeCloud IQ, the company's unified cloud management console, which it acquired from Aerohive in 2019. In a bid to simplify hardware and software licensing, the company has adopted a tiered model. Basic deployment and management capabilities are available as part of Extreme's freemium Connect tier, while more advanced functionality can be unlocked with the company's Pilot tier.

Meyercord argues that Aruba and Cisco Meraki's licensing models are too complicated.

"That's where Extreme can come in, and we can clean up for an enterprise. ... We have the simplest licensing model, by far, in the industry," he said. "What we've come out with is one price; it doesn't matter if it's an access point or if it's a core switch in the middle of the network."

And since the Aerohive acquisition, Extreme has leaned heavily on ExtremeCloud IQ to differentiate itself from its competitors.

In June, the company announced it was eliminating data retention caps, enabling customers to keep logs indefinitely. By comparison, Aruba and Cisco only retain logs for 30 days. According to Meyercord, this opens the doors for customers to glean insights from their networking data.

"The other thing we're doing is we're saying 'hey, you keep the data ... and we're going to give you unlimited data," Meyercord said.

By eliminating retention caps, Extreme claims retailers can now track network data from shopping events, like Black Friday, year to year, and use that information to guide decisions about the next year.

Meanwhile, it also opens the door to long-term COVID-19 contract tracing. "If you’re purging your data every 30 days or every 90 days, you can’t really establish a long-term pattern to understand how do you make your people better protected,” said Norman Rice, Extreme Networks’ COO, in an earlier interview with SDxCentral.

Extreme further sweetened the deal in September when it announced it was adding five "essential services" to its base Pilot tier at no additional cost. These services included wireless intrusion protection, guest access, location services, IoT management, and compliance apps.

Extreme Networks claims its competition offers these services as standalone applications at a “substantial additional charge.” However, it should be noted that while the company refers to them as essential services, they are not available on the company's free Connect tier.

"Now you have this single license — it's very inexpensive on a relative basis — and you're getting a lot of capability with it," Meyercord said. This results in a "huge amount of savings" compared to Cisco's Meraki platform.

Based on Extreme Networks revenues from the first quarter of its fiscal 2021, the company's cloud push seems to be paying off.

"We beat on literally every single metric," boasted Meyercord. "We had a strong quarter."

While the company posted an 8% year-over-year decline in revenues due to ongoing challenges associated with COVID-19, the company's quarter-over-quarter performance told a different story. The company grew 9% sequentially during the quarter, thanks to better than expected cloud services revenues.

Cloud-based networking products drove 20% of the company's growth during the quarter, an area of real strength for the company. "Importantly for us, year over year, we grew our earnings and we grew our cash flow, despite the environment," Meyercord said.

Meanwhile, Extreme added another high-profile customer to its roster, signing Major League Baseball as a client. Extreme is also the "official WiFi solutions provider" for the National Football League.

Looking to the future and with the pandemic in the rearview mirror, Meyercord expects Extreme to continue to chip away at Cisco and Aruba's market share, moving toward double-digit growth by the end of 2021.