Extreme Networks Partner Conference: Day 1 Live Blog

Extreme Networks (EXTR) kicked off its North America Partner Conference today in Summerlin, Nevada, where the temperature is expected to hit 110 degrees today. More than 220 former Enterasys and Extreme partners have gathered to see what the new company's plans are for its channel.

To kick off the two-day event, President and CEO Chuck Berger recapped the last year and offered up some strategic ideas for the coming year. Here's a live blog for your reading enjoyment. (please excuse any incomplete sentences). More to come as the day progresses.

Theresa Caragol, VP, Global Channels – Thank you for working over the last seven months as we integrate this company. Team has been working 24/7 to build a new channel program. This year is your year to double or triple the money you’ve been making with Extreme. If you invest with us you will have a very profitable business with us.

John Fabiaschi, VP, North America Sales – Big thank you to all partners and distributors. Done a lot in last several months – now one extreme with one product portfolio and one channel. Going to grow this business together and I am proud of that.

Chuck Berger, President and CEO – I promise to make it hotter in here than the 115 degrees outside. Last year at Miami partner conference challenged everyone to be great. Had no idea how great people were going to have to be – integrate a New England-based company into a Silicon Valley-based company.

Earnings: Had we combined the two companies on a full fiscal year we would have done in excess of $620 million in revenue – it would have been flat, but a monumental accomplishment given the integration of the two companies. The channel is responsible for half that.

The market reacted strongly – we added about $100 million to our market cap. Earnings will be announced Aug. 14.

NFL deals: We added the Bengals, Tigers and Seahawks as customers. This aligns our brand with one of the strongest global brands and shows the power of our wireless solution – that 80,000 people can show up in a stadium and use wi-fi to post pictures to Facebook, status updates and play fantasy football shows the strength of our product.

Next going after the Division 1 schools—we announced a deal with Baylor University.

Business with stadiums in schools is the tip of the spear for other opportunities.

In January introduced Purview – gave us opportunity to be named the official analytics provider for the NFL.

Brand: Our brand is as powerful as any brand I’ve seen in the marketplace. 

Service: A year ago customers told me how terrible our service was, that it was a terrible decision to outsource our service to a third party. The day I left Interop in 2013 we started a process to in-house our services. Now you know if your customer picks up the phone for service they will be talking to an Extreme-badged person on the other end.

Inside sales: Now have 40 people generating leads that will eventually close through our North American partners.

Products: Big year for engineering team – we delivered 12 new switching products in fiscal year 2014.  Wireless team also busy.

Introduced Purview – partners wanted more visibility into the network to serve customers better. Purview does that. We are in six NFL stadiums with a complete wi-fi solution and in nine with Purview.  We are getting incredible attention in the healthcare market—it is a huge moneymaking opportunity.

SDN, which we announced in May, is starkly different than competitors’ who have used SDN to build more proprietary networks to promote vendor lock-in.

Moved up and to the right in Gartner’s Magic Quadrants. “Moving this far up in the Magic Quadrant during a difficult integration is a great achievement,” Gartner said.

Promised we need to be a lot easier to do business with – working with two-tier distributors to take advantage of their logistics and their capabilities moving forward.

This is becoming a software and solution-based industry and we now have the solutions portfolio to play there.

Aligning product direction with growth pillars. We still think LAN campus network opportunity is there. Wireless – expect 50 percent growth through 2014. Data center – expect 40 percent growth through 2017.

One Partner Program: Introduced last week and unifies all partners under single set of business terms that incents you to grow with us. The story moving forward needs to be one of growth.

We can’t grow if we can’t build a relationship with you. We put you first in our comp plan, our service plan … we want to make it easy to be a partner with Extreme and make money with Extreme.

Inventory: The biggest thing we did in the past 12 months was no more empty warehouses. We’ve doubled the amount of inventory, and the delivery to customer request date was 95 percent-plus.

Partnership with Lenovo – Lenovo made it its mission to be No. 1 in the server market. $5 billion in servers will mean $1 billion in networking revenue. This should be one of the biggest things that has ever happened to us as a networking vendor.

Customer Service: Enterasys was known for customer care – customer first always – that is now the mantra of the combined company.

I have never seen a better opportunity than the one we have before us. Go be great.