Extreme Networks
More info
- Released
- 1996
- Type
- Networking company
A Gigabit switching pioneer that became the industry's collector of other people's networking divisions.
Founded in 1996 in California, right as the industry moved from Fast Ethernet to Gigabit. Its Summit switches did layer-3 routing in hardware and took on Cisco in campus networks and internet exchange points around the turn of the millennium.
When organic growth stalled, the strategy became acquisition: Enterasys in 2013, Zebra's wireless LAN business in 2016, and in 2017 both Avaya's networking unit and Brocade's data-centre business. The result is a product catalogue that reads like a museum of 1990s networking vendors, now with cloud management to compete with Meraki.