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EXTREME NETWORKS INC (EXTR) Business

Verbatim Item 1 Business section from EXTREME NETWORKS INC's latest 10-K. Filing date: 2025-08-18. Accession: 0000950170-25-109742.

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Item 1. Business

Overview

Extreme Networks, Inc. (EXTR) (collectively referred to as “Extreme,” “Company,” and as “we,” “us” and “our”) is a leader in AI-powered cloud networking, focused on delivering simple and secure solutions that help businesses address challenges and enable connections among devices, applications, and users. We push the boundaries of technology, leveraging the powers of artificial intelligence (“AI”), analytics, and automation and have industry leading support services. Tens of thousands of customers globally trust Extreme to drive value, foster innovation, and overcome extreme challenges. Extreme also designs, develops, and manufactures wired, wireless, and software-defined wide area network (“SD-WAN”) infrastructure equipment. Our Extreme Platform ONETM solution, announced in December 2024 and made generally available in July 2025, is a technology platform that is designed to reduce complexity for enterprises by seamlessly integrating networking, security and AI solutions into a single platform. AI-powered automation includes conversational, interactive and autonomous AI agents—to assist, advise and accelerate the productivity of networking, security and business teams—reducing the time to complete complex tasks.

Our global footprint provides service to some of the world’s leading names in business across verticals such as large sports and entertainment venues, hospitality, retail, transportation and logistics, education, government, healthcare, manufacturing and service providers. We derive all our revenues from the sale of our networking equipment, software subscriptions, and related maintenance contracts.

Our global headquarters is located at 2121 RDU Center Drive, Suite 300, Morrisville, North Carolina 27560, and our telephone number is (408) 579-2800. We have several corporate offices in the United States and international locations. Our website is www.extremenetworks.com.

Industry Background

Enterprises across every industry are going through unprecedented changes, such as digital transformation initiatives, migrating their workloads to cloud-based environments, modernizing applications, finding new ways to leverage multimodal and agentic AI technology, and adapting to a distributed workforce. To accomplish this, they are adopting new Information Technology (“IT”) delivery models and applications that require fundamental network alterations and enhancements spanning from the access edge to the data center. As networks become more complex and more distributed in nature, we believe IT teams in every industry will need more control and better insights than ever before to deliver secure, distributed connectivity and comprehensive centralized visibility. Networking is mission critical and touches all elements of how services are delivered to customers, employees, students, and patients. Managing networks from a single platform that integrates AI networking and security is critical to help reduce complexity and minimize the time it takes to complete tasks. A new category has emerged in the industry to address challenges related to managing the breadth and depth of complexities related to network administration, deployment and on-going management termed AI for networking. This new category is defined by innovation in generative, multimodal and agentic AI technology.

As the edge of the network continues to expand, our customers are managing more endpoints which comes with a host of challenges. This continued expansion creates issues such as a higher risk of cyberattacks and a need for more bandwidth due to an increase in applications running across the network.

Network complexity manifests itself in the form of more endpoints to manage, more applications to monitor, and more services that rely on the network for service delivery and enablement. When performance suffers, and the tug on internal systems and IT staff becomes more intense, technology is often being overworked. Resolving network problems expeditiously and identifying their root cause, can improve organizational productivity and result in higher performance of operations. AI for networking is needed to improve an IT team’s agility and responsiveness to address these challenges.

We believe that the network has never been more vital than it is today. As administrators grapple with more data, coming from more places, more connected devices, and more Software-as-a-service (“SaaS”) based applications, the cloud is fundamental to managing and maintaining a modern network. Traditional network offerings are not well-suited to fulfill enterprise expectations for rapid delivery of new services, more flexible business models, real-time response, and massive scalability. We expect Extreme Platform ONE to deliver significant productivity gains for IT teams by streamlining network design, deployment, management, and commercial operations through its generative, multimodal, and agentic AI capabilities.

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As enterprises continue to migrate increasing numbers of applications and services to either private clouds or public clouds offered by third parties and to adopt new IT delivery models and applications, they are required to make fundamental network alterations and enhancements spanning from wireless access points (“APs”) to the network core. In either case, the network infrastructure must adapt to this new dynamic environment. AI and automation are key if enterprises are to derive maximum benefit from their cloud deployments. With automation applications becoming increasingly critical in manufacturing, warehousing, logistics, healthcare and other key industries, we believe this will continue to create demand for networking technology to serve as a foundation to run these services.

Service providers are investing in network enhancements with platforms and applications that deliver data insights, provide flexibility, and can quickly respond to new user demands and 5G use cases. The scale of issues and challenges seen within service provider networks is even greater than the enterprise network -- thus they too can greatly benefit from operational gains from Extreme Platform ONE.

We believe Extreme will continue to benefit from the use of its technology to manage distributed campus network architecture centrally from the cloud. Extreme has blended a dynamic network fabric architecture that delivers simplicity for moves and changes at the edge of the network, together with corporate-wide role-based policy. This enables customers to migrate to new cloud managed switching, Wi-Fi, and SD-WAN, agnostic of the existing switching or wireless equipment they already have installed. In the end, we expect these customers to see lower operating and capital expenditures, lower subscription costs, lower overall cost of ownership and more flexibility along with a more resilient network, powered by Extreme Platform ONE.

We estimate the total addressable market (“TAM”) for our networking solutions, consisting of cloud networking, wireless local area networks (“WLAN”), campus local area networks (“LAN”), Ethernet switching, data center networking, SD-WAN solutions, and elements of the Secure Access Service Edge (“SASE”), exceeded $42 billion in calendar year 2024. Based on data from 650 Group, Gartner, IDC, and Dell'Oro Group, demand is projected to grow at a five-year compound annual growth rate (“CAGR”) of approximately 7%, reaching $59 billion by 2029. Within this market, cloud-managed networking solutions are expected to grow at a CAGR of approximately 15% through 2029. And with Extreme Platform ONE, we are addressing AI Networking for the Campus, a high-growth segment forecasted to grow at a 72% CAGR over the next five years.

The Extreme Strategy

Extreme is committed to empowering organizations with new ways to simply and securely connect with Extreme's intelligent technology platform that help move their organizations forward.

Extreme Platform ONE is designed to reduce complexity for enterprises by seamlessly integrating networking, security and AI solutions. The platform’s AI-powered automation includes conversational, interactive and autonomous AI agents, to assist, advise and accelerate the productivity of networking, security and business teams—reducing the time to complete complex tasks. Extreme Platform ONE is also designed to offer the industry's simplest licensing.

Key elements of Extreme’s strategy and differentiation include:


Deliver AI that is fully integrated into the networking experience. As IT environments grow in complexity, enterprises need simpler, smarter ways to manage their networks. Extreme Platform ONE delivers significant benefits including:

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AI-Driven Insight and Automation: Customers gain instant insights while the network adapts in real time to bandwidth spikes and security threats. Network administrators can set guardrails for policy, risk, and approvals, while AI agents act autonomously to optimize performance and reliability in real time.

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End-to-End Network Visibility: With real-time network topology and lifecycle data, customers can improve compliance, simplify onboarding, and enable proactive planning for refreshes, expansions, or support alignment. Extreme Platform ONE eliminates fragmented screenshots of the network and delivers a complete view in one place.

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Unified Operations Dashboard: Extreme Platform ONE consolidates license, contract, and asset management into a single, intuitive platform, delivering real-time visibility into usage, renewals, support coverage, and device inventory across all sites and product lines.

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Integrated Experience: One integrated experience for everyone in an organization, including Network Operations (“NetOps”), Security Operations (“SecOps”), and business teams, to access just what they need to do high quality work from a fully customizable workspace.

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Simplified licensing: Extreme Platform ONE is backwards compatible to ExtremeCloud IQ and is now bundled with support services to facilitate license to asset tracking.


Provide a differentiated end-to-end cloud networking architecture. Cloud networking is estimated to be a $15 billion segment of the networking market comprising cloud-managed services and cloud-managed products, which are largely WLAN access points and ethernet switches, growing at 15% annually over the next five years, according to data from the 650

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Group, Gartner, IDC and Dell'Oro. Cloud management technology has evolved significantly over the past decade. Extreme offers:

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Cloud Platform: A robust cloud management platform that delivers visibility, intelligence, and assurance from the network edge to the core.

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Cloud Choice for Customers: Our cloud networking solution is available on all major cloud providers (Amazon Web Services (“AWS”), Google Cloud Platform (“GCP”) and Microsoft Azure.

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ExtremeCloud IQ: Our ExtremeCloud IQ offering conforms to ISO/IEC 27001, ISO/IEC 27017 and ISO/IEC 27701 standards for data privacy and protection as set forth by the International Standards Organization (“ISO”), and is CSA STAR certified.

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Cloud Continuum: We provide hosting flexibility across a range of options including public, private, and on-premises edge cloud options.

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Consumption Flexibility: We offer a range of financing and network purchase options. Our value-based subscription tiers provide customers with flexibility to grow, as well as offer pool-able and portable licenses that can be transferred between products (e.g., access points and switches) at one fixed price.


Offer customers choice: public or private cloud, or on-premises. We leverage the cloud where it makes sense for our customers and provide on-premises solutions where customers need it and also have a solution for those who want to harness the power of both. Our hybrid approach gives our customers options to adapt the technology to their business. At the same time, all of our solutions have visibility, control and strategic information built in, all tightly integrated with a single view across all of the installed products. Our customers can understand what is going on across their network and applications in real time – who, when, and what is connected to the network, which is critical for bring your own device (“BYOD”) and Internet of Things (“IoT”) usage.


Offers universal platforms for enterprise class switching and wireless infrastructure. We offer universal platforms which support multiple deployment use cases, providing flexibility and investment protection.

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Universal switches (7720/5720/5520/5420/5320/4220/4120) support fabric or traditional networking with a choice of cloud or on-premises (air-gapped or cloud connected) management.

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Universal Wi-Fi 6/6E/7 APs (300/400, 4000 and 5000 series) support campus or distributed deployments with a choice of cloud or on-premises (air-gapped or cloud-connected) management.

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Universal licensing with one portable management license for any device and for any type of management. For switches, operating system feature licenses are portable, and bulk activated through ExtremeCloud IQ.


Enable a common fabric to simplify and automate the network. Fabric technologies virtualize the network infrastructure (decoupling network services from physical connectivity) which enables network services to be provisioned faster, with lower likelihood of error. They make the underlying network much easier to design, implement, manage, and troubleshoot.


Offer a frictionless experience for secure hybrid work. Our layered security approach is managed from one cloud and secure by design. We offer tightly integrated security with network fabric and infrastructure.

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ExtremeCloud Universal ZTNA, is the first network security offering to integrate network, application, and device security within a single solution. By combining Cloud Network Access Control (“NAC”) and Zero Trust Network Authentication (“ZTNA”) into a single, easy-to-use SaaS offering, we help customers ensure unified observability, frictionless user experiences and a consistent security policy for applications and devices as well as support secure hybrid work use cases for customers. As the virtual private network (“VPN”) market transitions to ZTNA, the proliferation of individual applications, each with their own policy and dashboard, is adding complexity and expense for enterprise customers. We expect the broadening of our security offering to drive significant traction for our business with growth opportunities.

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Extreme’s unique and highly differentiated network fabric makes it simple to orchestrate applications and policy across the entire campus, from the core to the wireless edge, and across the wide area network. We bring enhanced security, the ability to segment networks and zero touch provisioning, thus reducing confusion, complexity and the need for additional IT staff. This is in stark contrast to our competitors’ fabric solutions, which were designed for service providers and data center networks and not meant for the campus.

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End-to-End Portfolio. Our cloud-driven solutions provide visibility, control and strategic intelligence from the edge to the data center, across networks and applications. Our solutions include wired switching, wireless switching, wireless access points, WLAN controllers, routers, and an extensive portfolio of software applications that deliver AI-enhanced access control, network and application analytics, as well as network management. All can be managed, assessed, and controlled from a single pane of glass on premises or from the cloud.


Provide high-quality insourced customer service and support. We seek to enhance customer satisfaction and build customer loyalty through high-quality service and support. This includes a wide range of standard support programs to the level of service our customers require, from standard business hours to global 24-hour-a-day, 365-days-a-year real-time responsive support.


Extend switching and routing technology leadership. Our technological leadership is achieved by the development of innovative switching, routing and wireless products, the depth and focus of our market experience and our operating systems - the software that runs on all of our networking products. Our products reduce operating expenses for our customers and enable a more flexible and dynamic network environment that will help them meet the upcoming demands of IoT, mobile, and cloud.


Expand Wi-Fi technology leadership. Wireless is today’s network access method of choice and every business must deal with scale, density and BYOD challenges. The network edge landscape is changing as the explosion of mobile and IoT devices increases the demand for high-performance, transparent, and always-on wired to wireless edge services. The unified access layer requires distributed intelligent components to ensure that access control and resiliency of business services are available across the entire infrastructure and manageable from a single console. We are at a technology inflection point with the pending migration from Wi-Fi 6 solutions to 6 GHz Wi-Fi (Wi-Fi 6E and Wi-Fi 7), focused on providing more efficient access to the broad array of connected devices. We believe we have the industry’s broadest 6 GHz indoor and outdoor wireless portfolio.


Offer actionable insights. Our network-powered application analytics provide actionable business insights by capturing and analyzing context-based data about the network and applications to deliver meaningful intelligence about applications, users, locations and devices. With an easy to comprehend dashboard, our applications help businesses turn their network into a strategic business asset that helps executives make faster and more effective decisions.


Expand market penetration by targeting high-growth market segments. Within the campus, we focus on the mobile user, leveraging our automation capabilities and tracking WLAN growth. Our data center approach leverages our product portfolio to address the needs of public and private cloud data center providers. We believe that the cloud networking compound annual growth rate will continue to outpace the compound annual growth rate for on-premises managed networking. Our focus is on expanding our technology foothold in the critical cloud networking segment to accelerate not only cloud management adoption, but also subscription-based licensing consumption.


Leverage and expand multiple distribution channels. We distribute our products through select distributors, a large number of resellers and system-integrators worldwide, as well as several large strategic partners. We maintain a field sales force to support our channel partners and to sell directly to certain strategic accounts. As an independent networking vendor, we seek to provide products that, when combined with the offerings of our channel partners, create compelling solutions for end-user customers.


Maintain and extend our strategic relationships. We have established strategic relationships with a number of industry-leading vendors to provide both increased and enhanced routes to market, to collaboratively develop unique solutions.

Products

Our products and services categories include:


Cloud Networking Platform: Core to our product portfolio and providing end-to-end visibility and control from the access edge to the data center is our industry-leading cloud platform and cloud management application, ExtremeCloud IQ. ExtremeCloud IQ is a machine learning (“ML”)/AI powered, wired and wireless cloud network management solution that offers advanced visibility and control over users, devices, and applications. ExtremeCloud IQ is designed to allow customers to keep operational costs low, adjust to customer demand, and deliver robust functionality for provisioning, management, troubleshooting and provide guaranteed data durability to assure access with 100% uptime. ExtremeCloud IQ is available in public, private, or on-premises deployment options that support one goal – to provide customers with maximum flexibility, continuous innovation and consistent user experience. It can be deployed in any major data center environment such as AWS, GCP and Azure, or local private cloud options. The ExtremeCloud IQ application already manages over three million devices and is run from multiple regional data centers, giving customers greater control over the location of their data and adding to the resiliency of the platform. In fiscal year 2025, we introduced Extreme Platform ONE, a bold innovation designed to redefine the cloud networking landscape. This natively integrated platform brings together networking, security, and AI-driven automation into one cohesive solution, aligned with our long-term growth strategy. With simplified licensing and end-to-end visibility, it is designed to unlock new levels of operational efficiency and scalability. We believe the platform's generative,

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multimodal, and agentic AI capabilities position Extreme Networks as a leader in autonomous network management, creating value for customers and driving competitive advantage in a rapidly evolving market.


Automation, Analytics, and Security Applications: Our application portfolio delivers additional analytics, security, access control, and management insights both on-premises and in the cloud. ExtremeCloud IQ – Site Engine extends cloud management to non-cloud native and multi-vendor devices to provide one dashboard view of your entire network that can be managed in the cloud or on-premises. The application provides task automation, access control, granular visibility with real-time analytics and multi-vendor device management. ExtremeCloud IQ Essentials provides three key applications - Wireless Intrusion Prevention System (“WIPS”), location services, and guest management - for ExtremeCloud IQ Pilot license customers at no added cost, enabling organizations to take advantage of an all-in-one platform for wired and wireless management, business insights, location tracking, wireless security, seamless IoT onboarding and guest access, and guest access through a single user interface.


Wireless LAN AP: One of the industry’s broadest and most comprehensive, Extreme’s wireless AP portfolio includes both indoor and outdoor Wi-Fi 7 and prior generation APs. Proven in some of the most demanding environments, ExtremeWireless delivers an exceptional experience for BYOD and mobile users wherever they may roam. Included in that portfolio are our custom stadium and large venue outdoor Wi-Fi 7 APs, which, when combined with ExtremeAnalytics, are the basis of our selection as the Official Wi-Fi & Analytics Provider for the National Football League and Major League Baseball. In addition to powering large venues and stadiums, our Extreme APs also deliver flexible and scalable options for highly distributed environments for major companies globally. Our APs allow our customers to purchase universal hardware, starting with our Wi-Fi 7 AP portfolio, and choose the software mode option for the optimal deployment architecture in their environments. Our premier wireless security solution, Extreme AirDefense delivers intrusion detection and prevention capabilities across the wireless portfolio. Recently, we also introduced the first WIPS solution to incorporate support for Bluetooth and Bluetooth Low Energy (“BLE”) visibility and intrusion protection. This includes device location support and change detection, rogue BLE Beacon detection and unsanctioned BLE device detection.


Wired for Edge, Campus, and Data Center: Our switching portfolio includes products designed to make every connection effortless by enabling the deployment of high-speed performance at scale for access, high-density, campus, core, and data center environments. Within the Extreme Switching portfolio are Access Edge products offering connection speeds ranging from 100 Megabits per second (“Mbps”) to 25 Gigabits per second (“Gbps”) – including edge multi-rate 2.5Gbps and 5Gbps capabilities. These switches provide various physical presentations (copper and fiber) along with options to deliver traditional Ethernet or convergence-friendly Power-over-Ethernet (“PoE”), including high-power universal POE consisting of 90W power to support new classes of Ethernet-powered devices. These switching products, combined with our unique fabric capability, deliver automation and hyper-segmentation, as well as features, performance, and reliability required by our customers to deploy, operate and manage converged infrastructure, along with the ability to harden the perimeter of the network infrastructure.

Our aggregation/core switches are designed to address the demanding needs of aggregation, top-of-rack, and campus core environments. Delivering 10G, 25G, 40G, 50G, and 100G connectivity with maximum throughput and reliability, these switches provide flexible Ethernet connectivity over a range of interface types and speeds and are available in both fixed and modular configurations. These switching platforms, in conjunction with our advanced operating systems and centralized management software, provide the density, performance, and reliability required to serve in a diverse range of environments, especially where application demands and uptime expectations are mission critical.

Our campus switch portfolio also includes next-generation, low-profile, high-density Ethernet switches that empower the creation of versatile always-on campus solutions that are fabric-enabled and 25 to 100 gigabit-ready. The technologies supported by these innovative platforms can also leverage automated network attachment to proactively reduce operational burden and time-to-service.

Extreme’s data center switches and routers provide high levels of reliability and throughput - specifically designed to address the exacting demands of high-performance enterprise and cloud data centers. These products are available in both fixed and modular chassis configurations and include a set of advanced features such as redundant management and fabric modules, hot-swappable line cards on our chassis-based platforms, as well as multi-speed stacking of up to 100G and flexible 10/25/40/50/100G port options on our fixed-form platforms, which makes these switches well-suited for enterprise data center environments. Both platform types also provide redundant power supplies and fan trays to ensure high hardware availability.

These switches also provide key feature extensions for data centers through technologies that include Virtual Extensible LAN, MPLS/VPLS, and Shortest Path Bridging capabilities. Our industry-first integrated Extreme Fabric Automation simplifies and adds scalability to even the highest performance environments. In addition to these capabilities, our data center switches offer innovative traffic optimization enabling virtual machine mobility via Layer 3 Data Center Interconnect. Our architecture delivers tens of millions of flows for deep visibility and control over users, services, and applications to meet the analytic and policy demands of today’s business applications.

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SD-WAN: ExtremeCloud SD-WAN is a software-defined wide area networks solution offered as an all-inclusive subscription, which includes hardware, the cloud-based SD-WAN service, support and maintenance, and customer success support. This helps customers reduce total cost of ownership as they deliver quality user experience for applications used in site-to-site and site-to-cloud environments. This solution detects and optimizes applications automatically and can apply performance-based dynamic WAN selection for quality and reliability. Included also are security options such as a built-in zone-based firewall, EdgeSentry (in partnership with Check Point) for cloud-based firewall as a service and other advanced security capabilities, and integration with Secure Web Gateway partners such as Palo Alto Networks, Zscaler, and Symantec.


Cloud Native Platforms and Applications for Service Providers: 5G is the first generation of cellular technologies built on cloud-native principles, and most traditional network visibility tools cannot be easily adapted for future use cases like autonomous vehicles or industrial IoT. Because many 5G use cases are still undefined, service providers need a composable solution that provides visibility into highly distributed environments and is flexible enough to be adjusted for specific purposes as they arise, without requiring expensive, time-consuming infrastructure upgrades. Extreme has introduced the 9000 series switches and related software, featuring the Extreme 9920 intelligent network visibility platform built with cloud-native design principles and a composable data pipeline to provide highly scalable traffic aggregation, packet filtering, replication, and advanced network packet processing for analytics tools in distributed network environments. The Extreme Visibility Manager has an intuitive graphical user interface to establish new rule sets and commands for all of Extreme's visibility devices. It provides full visibility into every aspect of the network, from a highly geographically dispersed environment with regions and zones to the services running on the system.


Universal ZTNA. ExtremeCloud Universal ZTNA is designed to be the easiest, most complete network access security solution for users everywhere. It is intended to deliver a frictionless user experience and consistent security policy for applications and devices, including IoT. We offer one secure access solution that uses a single identity-based zero trust policy engine for both networks and applications. As a result, customers could have just one solution to secure employees, guests and IoT devices. We offer automated security configuration and enforcement via cloud-managed Universal Devices and unified visualization and reporting for enhanced insight and simplified management.


Customer Service and Support: Our customers seek high reliability and maximum uptime for their networks. To that extent, we provide the following service offerings:

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Support services for end-users, resellers and distributors. We meet the service requirements of our customers and channel partners through our Technical Assistance Centers (“TACs”), located in Morrisville, North Carolina; Salem, New Hampshire; Aurora, Illinois; San Jose, California; Reading, United Kingdom; Penang, Malaysia; Brno, Czech Republic; Bangalore; Chennai, India; Seoul, Korea; and Tokyo, Japan. Our TAC engineers and technicians assist in diagnosing and troubleshooting technical issues regarding customer networks. Development engineers work with the TACs to resolve product functionality issues specific to each customer.

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Premier services. Premier Support is a proactive, high touch post-sale support service that assists customers in managing their Extreme Networks products and network. All resources and deliverables are designed to manage day-to-day technical needs, provide analysis and recommendations while building strong customer relationships, all focused on the network level.

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Professional services. We provide consultative services to improve customer productivity in all phases of the network lifecycle – planning, design, implementation, operations and optimization management. Our network architects develop and execute customized software and service-led networking solutions for deployment plans to meet individualized network strategies. These activities may include the management and coordination of the design and network configuration, resource planning, staging, logistics, migration and deployment. We also provide customized training and operational best practices manuals to assist customers in the transition and sustenance of their networks.

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Education. We offer classes covering a wide range of topics such as installation, configuration, operation, management and optimization – providing customers with the necessary knowledge and experience to successfully deploy and manage our products in various networking environments. Classes may be scheduled and available at numerous locations worldwide. We deliver training using our staff, on-line training classes and authorized training partners. In addition, we make much of our training materials accessible free-of-charge on our internet site for customers and partners to use in self-education. We believe this approach enhances the market’s ability to learn and understand the broad array of advantages of our products.

Sales, Marketing and Distribution

We conduct our sales and marketing activities on a worldwide basis through a channel that utilizes distributors, resellers and our field sales organization. As of June 30, 2025, our worldwide sales and marketing organization consisted of 865 employees. We have domestic sales offices located in four states within the United States and international sales offices located in 29 countries.

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We sell our products primarily through an ecosystem of channel partners who combine our infinite enterprise vision and product portfolio consisting of cloud-driven applications, wired, wireless, management and analytics software products with their vertical specific offerings to create compelling information technology solutions for end-user customers. We utilize our field sales organization to support our channel partners and to sell directly to certain end-user customers, including some large enterprise and service provider global accounts.

The details of our sales and distribution channels are as follows:


Original Equipment Manufacturers (“OEM”) and Strategic Relationships. We have active alliance, OEM and strategic relationships with Barco NV, Ericsson Enterprise AB, Lenovo, Motorola Solutions, Schneider Electric, and Verizon as well as other global industry technology leaders in which our products are qualified to be included into an overall solution or reference architecture. These tested and validated solutions are then marketed and sold by the alliance, OEM or strategic partners into their specific verticals, market segments and customers as turnkey offerings.


Distributors. We have established several key relationships with leading distributors in the electronics and computer networking industries. Each of our distributors primarily resells our products to resellers. The distributors enhance our ability to sell and provide support to resellers who may benefit from the broad service and product fulfillment capabilities offered by these distributors. Extreme maintains distribution agreements with our largest distributors, Westcon Group Inc., TD Synnex Corporation and Jenne Inc. on substantially the same material terms as we generally enter into with each of our distribution partners. Distributors are generally given the right to return a portion of inventory to us for the purpose of stock rotation, to claim rebates for competitive discounts and participate in various cooperative marketing programs to promote the sale of our products and services.


Resellers. We rely on many resellers worldwide that sell directly to the end-user customer. Our resellers include regional networking system resellers, resellers who focus on specific vertical markets, value added resellers, network integrators and wholesale resellers. We provide training and support to our resellers and our resellers generally provide the first level of contact to end-users of our products. Our relationships with resellers are on a non-exclusive basis. Our resellers are not given rights to return inventory and do not automatically participate in any cooperative marketing programs.


Field Sales. Our field sales organization is trained to sell solutions, support and develop leads for our resellers and to establish and maintain key accounts and strategic end-user customers. To support these objectives, our field sales force:

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Assists end-user customers in finding solutions to complex network system and architecture problems;

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Differentiates the features and capabilities of our products from competitive offerings;

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Continually monitors and understands the evolving networking needs of enterprise and service provider customers;

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Promotes our products and ensures direct contact with current and potential customers; and

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Assists our resellers to drive business opportunities to closure.

Although we compete in many vertical markets, we have focused on the specific verticals of healthcare, education, retail, manufacturing, government, sports, and entertainment venues. Years of experience and a track record of success in the verticals we serve enable us to address industry-specific problems.

Customer Profiles

Extreme’s customers are organizations facing complex IT challenges and/or undergoing digital transformation. These customers typically operate in verticals such as higher education, healthcare, government (federal, state, local, and education), manufacturing, hospitality, stadiums, and retail. These customers often struggle with constrained resources, talent and skill gaps, and rising operational costs, while also navigating a crowded network infrastructure vendor landscape and ambiguity around emerging technologies like AI.

Within the Ethernet Switching and WLAN markets which Extreme serves, we categorize customers into three primary groups based on scale and infrastructure needs:

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Mid-market customers—typically with 500 to 999 employees, are regional or national in scope and possess moderate IT complexity and budgets. This segment represents an estimated TAM of $10 billion in 2025.

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Enterprise customers—defined as companies with 1,000 or more employees—operate global-scale infrastructures and require advanced security and compliance capabilities, representing a TAM of approximately $22 billion in 2025.

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Service providers—which include organizations delivering voice, data, or internet services to consumers and businesses, vary widely in sizes. This segment accounts for a TAM of approximately $2 billion in 2025.

These classifications enable the company to tailor its go-to-market strategies and product offerings to better meet the distinct

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needs of each segment.

From a network infrastructure standpoint, these types of organizations require robust networking solutions within the data center, as well as access and edge switching. These same customers are deploying enterprise-wide or campus Wi-Fi solutions. Security is a pervasive concern, and many are implementing ZTNA technology to secure their end-to-end network. They are also seeking solutions that make deployment and on-going management of the network not only secure but easier, smarter and more intuitive, thus they are seeking solutions including data center fabric automation, cloud/hybrid network management, and SD-WAN. Their IT environments are often a mix of legacy and modern systems, and they seek integrated, scalable solutions to simplify operations and enhance security.

The typical decision-makers within these organizations include CIOs, VPs of IT, Directors of Infrastructure, Network Architects, CISOs, CFOs, and IT procurement specialists. Their top priorities revolve around reducing cost, risk, and complexity, achieving operational excellence, improving security posture, ensuring uptime, and maintaining compliance. These customers range from cloud-curious to cloud-mature and are actively exploring AI and automation to drive innovation and efficiency.

Customers with 10% of net revenues or greater

See Note 3, Revenues, in the Notes to Consolidated Financial Statements in this Annual Report on Form 10-K for more information regarding our customers providing 10% or more of our net revenues.

International sales

International sales are an important portion of our business. In fiscal 2025, sales to customers outside of the United States accounted for 52% of our consolidated net revenues, compared to 48% in fiscal 2024, and 56% in fiscal 2023. These sales are conducted primarily through foreign-based distributors and resellers managed by our worldwide sales organization. In addition, we have direct sales to end-user customers, including large global accounts. The primary markets for sales outside of the United States are countries in Europe and Asia, as well as Canada, Mexico, Central America and South America.

We operate in one segment, the development and marketing of network infrastructure equipment and related software. Information concerning revenues, results of operations and revenues by geographic area is set forth under Item 7, “Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations.” Information on risks attendant to our foreign operations is set forth below in Item 1A. “Risk Factors.”

Marketing

We continue to develop and execute a number of marketing programs to support the sale and distribution of our products by communicating the value of our solutions to our existing and potential customers, our distribution channels, our resellers and our technology alliance partners. Our marketing efforts include participation in industry tradeshows, conferences and seminars, publication of technical and educational articles in industry journals, communication across social media channels, frequent updates to our publicly available website, promotions, web-based training courses, advertising, analyst relations and public relations. We also submit our products for independent product testing and evaluation. Extreme participates in numerous industry analyst recognitions and placements including Gartner Magic Quadrants, Gartner Critical Capabilities, Gartner Peer Insights, Gartner Customer Choice, Forrester Waves and IDC MarketScapes.

Backlog

Our products are sold based on standard purchase orders and backlog represents confirmed orders with a purchase order for products to be fulfilled and billed to customers with approved credit status. Actual shipments of products depend on the then-current capacity of our contract manufacturers and the availability of materials and components from our vendors. Although, we believe the orders included in the backlog are firm, all orders are subject to possible rescheduling by customers, and cancellations by customers, which we may elect to allow on an exception basis. Therefore, we do not believe our backlog, as of any particular date is necessarily indicative of actual revenues for any future period.

Our product backlog at June 30, 2025, net of anticipated back-end rebates for distributor sales, was $72.3 million, compared to $64.0 million at June 30, 2024.

Seasonality

Like many of our competitors, we historically have experienced seasonal fluctuations in customer spending patterns, which generally adversely affect our first and third fiscal quarters. This pattern should not be relied upon or be considered indicative of our future performance, as it has varied in the past.

Manufacturing

We utilize a global sourcing strategy that emphasizes procurement of materials and product manufacturing in competitive geographies. However, this strategy continues to face challenges from global supply chain disruptions, trade policy changes, and tariff uncertainties that impact cost, availability, and delivery timelines. We rely upon original design manufacturers (“ODM”), such as Alpha

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Networks, Inc., Lite-On Technology Corporation, Quanta Computer Inc., Senao Networks, Inc., Sercomm Corporation and Wistron Neweb Corporation to manufacture, support and ship our products, and therefore are exposed to risks associated with their businesses, financial condition, and geopolitical conflict in geographies in which they operate. Our arrangements with these manufacturing partners generally provide for quality, cost, and delivery requirements, as well as manufacturing process terms, such as continuity of supply; inventory management; flexible capacity, quality, and cost management; oversight of manufacturing; and conditions for use of our intellectual property that allow us to adjust more quickly to changing end-customer demand. We also leverage and depend on the strong Environmental, Social and Governance policies and standards of our manufacturing partners. The ODM manufacturing process uses automated testing equipment and burn-in procedures, as well as comprehensive inspection, testing, and statistical process controls, which are designed to help ensure the quality and reliability of our products. To mitigate security risks associated with conducting business across our interconnected supply chain we have a Supply Chain and Information Security Policy and related procedures for communicating our requirements to suppliers and conducting annual compliance assessments. Additionally, we have launched new product features such as Secure Boot, which are being designed to provide additional integrity assurance of the firmware and software running on our hardware platform by establishing an encrypted key-based chain-of-trust relationship in the boot process. The manufacturing processes and procedures are generally certified to International Organization for Standardization (“ISO”) 9001 standards. The manufacturing process and material supply chains are flexible enough to allow us to mitigate, at least in part, risks arising from geopolitical conflicts that impact cost and delivery.

We use a collaborative sales and operations planning forecast of expected demand based upon historical trends and analyses from our Sales and Product Management functions as adjusted for overall market conditions. Demand Planning, Supply Operations and our Distributors work closely using a ‘continuous planning’ methodology as part of our Sales and Operations Execution process to determine and position our material requirements to support customer demand. Our manufacturing partners procure the components needed to build our products based on our demand forecasts that cover material lead times. This allows us to leverage the expertise and purchasing power of our manufacturing partners. Our products rely on key components, including merchant silicon, integrated circuit components and power supplies purchased from a limited number of suppliers, including certain sole source providers. Lead times for materials and components vary significantly, and depend on factors such as the specific supplier, technology, complexity, contract terms, demand and availability for a component at a given time. From time to time, we may experience price volatility or supply constraints for certain components that are either sourced from a limited number of qualified suppliers or concentrated in specific geographic regions. While supply chain conditions have improved over the past year, risks remain—tariffs, trade disruptions, and fluctuating component lead-times continue to impact the broader supply ecosystem. We continue to learn from the evolving global supply chain and build upon innovative strategies to enhance resilience and agility into our supply chain. Utilizing technology brought forward from our ongoing Digital Transformation project, which has entailed integrating digital technology into all areas of our business, changing how we operate and deliver value to customers. In this case, new systems and processes have given us better visibility and control over inventory. Collaborative partnerships with our ODMs and diversified sourcing strategies have also emerged, fostering greater flexibility and risk mitigation. Our product development efforts also depend upon continued collaboration with our key suppliers, including our merchant silicon vendors such as Broadcom. As we develop our product roadmap and continue to expand our relationships with these and other merchant silicon vendors, it is critical that we work in tandem with our key vendors to ensure that their silicon includes improved features and that our products take advantage of such improved features. Further information on risks relating to our inventory forecasting and supply chain is set forth below in Item 1A. “Risk Factors.”

We believe our sourcing and manufacturing strategy allows us to adjust quickly to changes in market demand, working with our ODM suppliers and developing direct relationships with key component suppliers to support the backlog. We continue to focus on optimizing product availability through multi-sourcing, visibility and control of key supply lines, rationalizing our supply chain, outsourcing or virtualizing certain activities, and consolidating distribution sites and service logistics partners. These efforts also include process optimization initiatives, such as vendor managed inventory, and other operational models and strategies designed to drive improved efficiencies in our sourcing, production, logistics and fulfillment.

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Research and Development

The success of our products to date is due in large part to our focus on research and development. We believe that continued success in the marketplace relies on our ability to regularly bring to the market new and enhanced products employing leading-edge technology that provide business solutions affordably, securely, and effortlessly. Accordingly, we are undertaking development efforts with an emphasis on increasing the scalability, reliability, usability, and security while innovating our user and buyer experience reducing complexity and the overall network operating costs of customers.

Our product research and development activities focus on solving the needs of customers in the enterprise campus edge and core by providing a unified wired, wireless, and SD-WAN cloud-driven network, enabling secure access from edge to public, hybrid, or private clouds in targeted verticals. Current activities include the continuing development of our innovative switching technology aimed at giving our customers flexibility in how they deploy, connect to the cloud, monitor, and configure instantly saving time and money. Our ongoing research activities cover a broad range of areas, including cloud native technologies and solutions, generative AI, agentic AI, network security, identity management, wired and wireless networking, switching, and routing, open standards interfaces, software defined networks, campus, and data center fabrics. In addition, we continue to invest in ML/AI technology solutions targeting self-healing autonomous networking, Cloud Wi-Fi, IoT anomaly detection, and user recommendations.

We continue to enhance the functionality of our network operating systems which have been designed to provide high reliability, scale, and availability. This allows us to leverage a common operating system across different hardware and network chipsets.

As of June 30, 2025, our research and development organization consisted of 1,045 employees. Research and development efforts are conducted in several of our locations, including Morrisville, North Carolina; San Jose, California; Salem, New Hampshire; Toronto, Canada; Hangzhou, China; and Bangalore and Chennai, India.

Intellectual Property

We rely on a combination of patent, copyright, trademark and trade secret laws and restrictions on disclosure to protect our intellectual property rights. As of June 30, 2025, we had 644 issued patents in the United States and 411 patents outside of the United States. The expiration dates of our issued patents in the United States range from calendar years 2025 to 2043. Although we have patent applications pending, there can be no assurance that patents will be issued from pending applications or that claims allowed on any future patents will be sufficiently broad to protect our technology. As of June 30, 2025, we had 41 registered trademarks in the United States and 326 registered trademarks outside of the United States.

We enter into confidentiality, inventions assignment or license agreements with our employees, consultants and other third parties with whom we do business, and control access to, and distribution of, our software, documentation and other proprietary information. In addition, we provide our software products to end-user customers primarily under “clickwrap” license agreements. These agreements are not negotiated with or signed by the licensee, and thus these agreements may not be enforceable in some jurisdictions. Despite our efforts to protect our proprietary rights, unauthorized parties may attempt to copy or otherwise obtain and use our products or technology, particularly in foreign countries where the laws may not protect our proprietary rights as fully as in the United States.

Competition

The market for network switches, routers and software (including analytics) which is part of the broader market for networking equipment, is extremely competitive and characterized by rapid technological progress, frequent new product introductions, changes in customer requirements and evolving industry standards. We believe the principal competitive factors in this market are:


expertise and familiarity with network protocols, network switching/routing/wireless and network management;


robust, cloud-driven options that reduce the cost of acquisition, provisioning, and ongoing management of network management;


expertise and familiarity with application analytics software;


expertise with network operations and management software;


expertise in machine learning and artificial intelligence;


product performance, features, functionality and reliability;


price/performance characteristics;


timeliness of new product introductions;


adoption of emerging industry standards;


customer service and support;


size and scope of distribution network;

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brand name;


breadth of product offering;


access to customers; and


size of installed customer base.

We believe we compete with our competitors with respect to many of the foregoing factors. However, the market for network switching solutions is dominated by a few large companies, particularly Cisco Systems, Inc., Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Company, Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd., and prior to the recent merger with Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Company, Juniper Networks Inc. To a lesser extent, Extreme competes with products and solutions from Arista Networks Inc., CommScope Holding Company, Inc., Fortinet, Inc., and Ubiquiti Inc. Most of these competitors have longer operating histories, greater name recognition, larger customer bases, broader product lines and substantially greater financial, technical, sales, marketing and other resources.

We expect to face increased competition from both traditional networking solutions companies and cloud platform companies offering Infrastructure-as-a-Service (“IaaS”) and Platform-as-a-Service (“PaaS”) products to enterprise customers. In that regard, we expect to face increased competition from certain cloud computing companies such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Google providing a cloud-based platform of data center compute and networking services for enterprise customers.

We believe Extreme is uniquely positioned to address its overarching vision of the future, the Infinite Enterprise, with its bet on industry-leading cloud solutions, automation and AI. Although we believe that our solutions and strategy will improve our ability to meet the needs of our current and potential customers, we cannot guarantee future success.

Restructuring and Impairment

Fiscal year 2025

During fiscal 2025, the Company continued to execute the restructuring plans initiated in prior years.

Fiscal year 2024

During fiscal year 2024, the Company initiated various restructuring plans, including the “Q1 2024”, “Q2 2024”, and “Q3 2024” Plans, to reorganize and rebalance the workforce to create greater efficiency and improve execution, in alignment with the Company's business and strategic priorities, reduce its ongoing operating expenses, and focus its sales and marketing efforts on specific geographies and industry segments with higher growth opportunities. The Q1 2024 Plan was completed in fiscal year 2024.

Fiscal year 2023

During fiscal year 2023, the Company initiated a restructuring plan to transform our business infrastructure and reduce our facilities footprint and the facilities related charges (the “2023 Plan”). As part of this project the Company moved engineering labs from its San Jose, California location to its Salem, New Hampshire location. This move is expected to help reduce the cost of operating our labs. The Company expects to complete the 2023 Plan by the end of fiscal year 2026.

We are subject to various environmental and other regulations governing product safety, materials usage, packaging and other environmental impacts in the United States and in various countries where our products are manufactured and sold. We are also subject to regulatory developments, including SEC disclosure regulations relating to so-called "conflict minerals," relating to ethically responsible sourcing of the components and materials used in our products. To date, compliance with federal, state, local, and foreign laws enacted for the protection of the environment has had no material effect on our capital expenditures, earnings, or competitive position.

We are committed to improving energy efficiency in our product lines. Accordingly, we believe this is an area that affords us a competitive advantage for our products in the marketplace. We maintain compliance with various regulations related to the environment, including the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment and the Restriction of the Use of Certain Hazardous Substances in Electrical and Electronic Equipment regulations adopted by the European Union. To date, our compliance efforts with various United States and foreign regulations related to the environment have not had a material effect on our operating results.

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Human Capital

At Extreme, we manage our human capital guided by our core values of Candor, Transparency, Curiosity, Teamwork, Ownership, and Inclusion. We apply these principles to talent acquisition and management, compensation and benefits, and inclusion and engagement.

As of June 30, 2025, we employed 2,811 people. Of these, 30.8% work in sales and marketing, 37.1% in research and development, 5.2% in operations, 15.2% in customer support and services and 11.7% in finance and administration. These employees were located worldwide, with 43.1% located in the United States, 8.9% in other locations in the Americas, 31.6% in the Asia Pacific region (“APAC”), which includes India, and 16.4% in the regions of Europe, Middle East and Africa (“EMEA”).

None of our U.S. employees are subject to a collective bargaining agreement. In certain foreign jurisdictions, where required by local law or customs, some of our employees are represented by local workers’ councils and/or industry collective bargaining agreements. We consider our relationship with our employees to be good, and we have not experienced any work stoppages due to labor disagreements.

Talent Acquisition and Development. We strive to attract and retain the most qualified employees for each role within the Company. We on-board new employees through the New Hire Academy and encourage skill development throughout the employee journey utilizing various role-specific training programs, career development tools, manager training, coaching, and mentorship. We continue to develop our employees, for example, by providing a subscription to LinkedIn Learning for all employees. We provide regular feedback to our employees with performance management reviews.

Compensation and Benefits. Our compensation philosophy is to offer a competitive compensation package designed to reward achievement of the Company’s goals. Our short-term bonus plan is designed to motivate employees to meet half-year goals, and our employee stock purchase plan and grants of restricted stock units to eligible employees reward longer-term stock price appreciation. Our U.S. benefits plan includes health benefits, life and disability insurance, various voluntary insurances, flexible time off and leave programs, an employee assistance plan, an educational assistance policy, and a 401(k) plan with a competitive employer match. Our international benefits plans are competitive locally and generally provide similar benefits.

Inclusion and Engagement. We believe we gain valuable perspective that drives better decision making when we include all voices. To foster an inclusive environment, we support several employee-led employee resource groups, including Abilities Alliance (employees with disabilities), API (Asian Pacific Islanders), APEX (Aspiring Professionals @ Extreme), Black @ Extreme (Black/African American), LaRaza (Hispanic), Maitri (employees in India), Parents at Extreme Networks, Pride Alliance (LGBTQ+), Veterans Council, and Women in Networking. Our employee resource groups are open to all and provide regular programming to create connections between employees and enhance engagement within Extreme. To further build employee engagement, we request feedback from employees through our annual ECHO (Employees Communicate Honest Opinions) survey, an avenue for leadership to listen and then take action based on the feedback received. We also promote an open door policy and encourage employees to provide feedback to leadership on an informal basis.

Organization

We were incorporated in California in May 1996 and reincorporated in Delaware in March 1999. Our corporate headquarters are located at 2121 RDU Center Drive, Suite 300, Morrisville, NC 27560 and our telephone number is (408) 579-2800. We electronically file our Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) disclosure reports with the SEC and they are available free of charge at both www.sec.gov and www.extremenetworks.com.

Our corporate governance guidelines, the charters of our Audit Committee, our Compensation Committee, our Nominating and Corporate Governance Committee and our Code of Business Conduct and Ethics policy (including code of ethics provisions that apply to our principal executive officer, principal financial officer, controller and senior financial officers) are available on the Investors section of our website at investor.extremenetworks.com under “Governance.” These items are also available to any stockholder who requests them by calling (408) 579-2800.