Extreme Networks this week rolled out pre-packaged WiFi 6 connectivity kits for sports and entertainment venues. It’s the latest in a series of product updates the company execs say will help customers adjust to the “new normal” working environments brought about by COVID-19.

The Event and Venue Operations (EVO) kits provide venue-optimized, high-density WiFi access points to support digital ticketing and touchless payments. Extreme is targeting colleges, universities, and professional sports organizations with these kits, and says they can help customers meet the new safety requirements related to social distancing and reduced physical contact. The EVO kits meet connectivity requirements for gates, concession stands, and anywhere else touchless transactions occur. And Extreme offers both cloud and on-premises options.

Beyond the pandemic, the company says the technology at venues will support a more immersive, interactive experience for fans.

Extreme was the first vendor to provide WiFi 6 across the National Football League (NFL), Major League Soccer, and university stadiums to customers including the NFL’s Tennessee Titans, Seattle Seahawks, and Green Bay Packers.

In addition to WiFi 6 bundles, Extreme recently announced an initiative it calls #NewNormal that aims to give customers greater access to its fourth-generation cloud to support remote working and online learning. And on July 1 it will begin offering unlimited data to its cloud customers for the lifetime of their subscriptions. This will initially target new cloud customers, and Extreme will update existing subscribers to unlimited data during the calendar year.

Companies of all sizes and across sectors “have settled into what the new normal is with COVID-19,” said Norman Rice, Extreme Networks’ COO, whether it’s sports leagues trying to support fans’ connectivity and touchless payment to Volkswagen executing a 40-point plan to return workers to the factory floor.

“Fundamentally, from our point of view, everything has to run on a very solid network,” Rice said. “And our networks have to be flexible enough to be managed remotely through the cloud, and they have to be flexible enough to be very dynamic to take on all types of new responsibility requirements that were not foreseen just six months ago.”

To that end, Extreme’s new normal campaign focuses on four areas: contract tracing, remote site and worker management, occupancy management within facilities, and IoT monitoring and robotics automation.

All of these use Extreme’s networking technologies and its ExtremeCloud IQ, which is a machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) powered cloud management product that Extreme originally acquired when it bought Aerohive last year. ExtremeCloud IQ manages more than 1 million devices with an average of 25,000-plus administrator logins per day and ingests over 4.6 billion management messages daily that feed its ML and AI engine.

The vendor last month also announced its new, unlimited cloud data offering. Abby Strong, VP of product marketing at Extreme,  said this will give customers access to historical data to inform future planning that they can’t get from any other vendor in the market.

All of Extreme’s competitors, including Cisco Meraki, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Aruba, and Juniper Mist, offer a 30-day standard for data retention, Strong added. “They cap out at 30 days, or have a very expensive analytics tier that you can buy into for the long duration,” she said. “In April we announced we were going to go to 90 days, and in looking into the efficiencies that we put into the architecture we saw an opportunity to say there doesn’t need to be a cap anymore. That’s what a true, fourth-gen product architecture looks like.”

“It gives us an opportunity to look at the reliance on WiFi,” Strong said. “A really important one to us is agile working environments because companies aren’t really sure what going back to an office is going to look like anymore, or do we stay in these remote locations? The need for enterprise quality networking has never been stronger than it is right now. So how we can use the cloud management platform that we’ve designed and developed to build out a more intelligent and scalable way to manage these large-scale networks and next-generation use cases?”

Since last year when it closed its $272 million Aerohive acquisition, which Extreme execs say solidified its position as the No. 3 player in the enterprise networking market behind Cisco and Aruba, the vendor has made several updates to its cloud architecture, Strong said. “We’ve invested more into our cloud platform and the architecture, and we are continuing to build out the ML, AI-driven functionalities that we have available to our customers.”

“We see the need for data duration,” Rice added. The new unlimited data option supports retailers that want to review data from Black Fridays year-over-year and make strategic decisions about this year. And it also can help health officials identify patterns for contract tracing, he added. “It makes a lot of sense for us to offer that to our customers and it can be a differentiation because the need is here. And it’s going up. 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.”