On May 30, 2017, Extreme officially won the bid to acquire Avaya’s networking business. We held an informational webinar last week to provide insight on Extreme and Avaya’s commitment to existing product families and to help customers and partners better understand the latest updates related to the transition. The webinar can be replayed in its entirety on our Acquisitions & Integrations Page, but I wanted to provide you with a summary, as this is the key focus of our entire executive team.
Why Avaya?
This strategic acquisition establishes Extreme as the third largest competitor in our enterprise markets and the only company in the world exclusively focused on delivering the highest quality end-to-end, wired and wireless enterprise IP networking. Summarising the acquisition, there’s three main reasons why we pursued this deal:
Tech innovation: Avaya’s unique fabric technology is proven, complementary to our existing end-to-end portfolio and brings with it automation, simplicity and security to infrastructure environments. As a whole, Extreme and Avaya’s networking technology is synergistic and our visions are aligned to deliver end-to end-networking solutions that not only simplify network operations but do so in a secure manner.
Talent: We are bringing a majority of the Avaya employee base over to Extreme and we couldn’t be happier about that. With Avaya, we saw a very strong cultural fit and it’s truly hard to be successful without this. We’re looking forward to welcoming the team – which will span various part of the business – to the Extreme family.
Loyal Customers and Partners: One common thread between the Extreme and Avaya customer and partner bases is loyalty and passion for technologies to simplify the network.
Addressing Your Key Concerns
With any kind of technology acquisition, it’s reasonable that customers and partners will have questions and concerns over product roadmaps and the continuity of programs and services. Here’s a look at the key concerns we’ve heard over the past few months – particularly around service and support continuity – and how we’re addressing them:
Customers and partners with an existing Avaya networking warranty or support contract will have those transferred to Extreme. Post-close, Avaya support services and warranties will be mapped to Extreme’s offerings with the goal of providing equal or better service and coverage. With our 100% in-sourced service and support, we believe that new customers and partners will be happy with the level of support they will receive moving forward. Our GTAC team is comprised of the best of the best in the industry. With an average of 8.5 years of tenure, they deliver a 94% first call resolution rate.
We have consistently said that a key reason why this deal was pursued is because Avaya’s networking technology is very complementary to our existing products. We remain committed to preserving and enhancing the acquired technology, with no disruption to your business during the integration process.
Our commitment to no disruption during the integration process extends across all sales channels so customers can continue to purchase technology and services via the same process and people they currently use.
This technology also provides Extreme with some important differentiators that a variety of enterprise organisations need:
Hyper-segmentation: This is very important with the rollout of IoT. Traffic is isolated and protected end to end.
Native stealth: Hackers trying to penetrate networks will try to discover every node, switch and router on a network. With this technology, the network is completely invisible to the end user/hacker.
Automatic elasticity: We can provision segments of the network when an end user device plugs in, which is also very important for IoT. Network services extend and retract dynamically which removes a lot of the complexity from the edge of the network.
Partner Support
There are many benefits to partnering with Extreme. Not only are we hyper-focused on networking, but we offer some of the best rewards and incentives in the industry. For existing Avaya partners, we will continue the existing Avaya partner program without any change for a period of time following the acquisition close. After that, we’ll fast track you into the Extreme Partner Network.
For Extreme partners, nothing major will change in the near-term, however, we will be offering a lot of sales/technical enablement so you can take advantage of new technology. We’ll have a help desk with a click to chat function to provide you with the necessary support to help you move through transition. In October, we’ll officially launch a unified program. We’ll have more on that in coming months.
With that, I encourage you to check out last week’s webinar and we look forward to an exciting July!
Guest blog provided by Norman Rice, EVP, Marketing & Corporate Development, Extreme Networks
UC Today Note: Extreme Networks’ Bob Gault, EVP, WW Sales, Services, and Channels followed this up on 30th June by publishing this open letter to Avaya’s networking partners.
