Extreme Networks has a “maniacal focus on the enterprise,” along with cloudifying its networking portfolio — and taking down incumbents Cisco and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE).

The company recently renewed its WiFi partnership with the National Football League for the seventh season. It also closed its $272 million Aerohive acquisition, and the company’s top execs say this deal solidifies Extreme’s position as the No. 3 player in the enterprise networking market, behind Cisco and HPE Aruba, up from No. 13 since 2015. Aerohive is also No. 2 in cloud managed wireless LAN services.

“That acquisition changes the game for us,” said Extreme President and CEO Ed Meyercord of the Aerohive deal.

The purchase brings Aerohive’s cloud-managed WiFi and network access control (NAC) products into Extreme’s portfolio, which until now was focused on on-premises WiFi and NAC. According to Extreme, Aerohive recently delivered the industry’s first trio of WiFi 6 access points along with the first pluggable access point.

It also brings SD-WAN capabilities into Extreme’s fold, which the vendor says will expand its market by $1 billion with a compound annual growth rate of 19% between now and 2022.

And as customers increasingly choose as-a-service models and subscription-based software, Extreme expects Aerohive to grow its mix of revenues to about 30% from subscription recurring revenue.

“At this state, post Aerohive [acquisition], we have 50,000 customers around the world representing a number of verticals including health care, education, sports and entertainment, retail, government,” said Norman Rice, chief operating officer at Extreme.

The company also wants to make the transition as easy for customers as possible.

“We’re not going to go to market as a separate organization. The product name will be called Extreme Cloud IQ,” Meyercord said, adding that this will happen in April. “It’s all completely within the Extreme paradigm and our business. As a customer, the way to look at it is: we have on premises or cloud solutions to you that will extend throughout the entire portfolio.”

Meyercord said Extreme had its eye on Aerohive “for a long time because cloud was part of our strategy.” The deal gives Extreme a “third-gen cloud,” he added, saying that market leader Cisco Meraki is “a gen-one, maybe going on gen-two cloud, and it doesn’t have the feature velocity we have with our DevOps teams.”

What he means by this is that Aerohive’s cloud supports more than 1 million managed devices, and all of those devices are continually making the cloud smarter. Customers benefit from this intelligence and the automation it enables.

“For example, from the cloud and intelligence we can build into the cloud we can identify that there’s degradation at a certain access point and we can automatically send and provision a new access point out to the customer site, so we’re solving the issue before it happens,” Meyercord explained. “You can start to see the operational efficiencies and benefits when you layer in intelligence and layer in actions. So our cloud will see things and automatically begin to take action on behalf of the customer, which really makes it easier to manager for our customers.”

He also touts the fact that customers can deploy Aerohive’s network management system on premises or in a public cloud, and can scale the product in size and capabilities, and across deployment models. “None of our competitors offer that kind of choice, so we have a competitive advantage over the other players,” Meyercord said.

And he expects the company’s Broadcom partnership — Broadcom’s preferred partner for campus and edge is Extreme — to be a pull for enterprise customers as well.

“A, we have the most advanced cloud, and B, we are the second largest,” he said. “That size comes with the [intelligence] benefit — all the learnings of what the cloud does. Anyone thinking about making this move to cloud management, they have to think about Extreme.”