Extreme Ways- At Wireless Field Day 6

Extreme ways are back again,  Extreme places I didn’t know…

  – (Moby, Extreme Ways)

When it comes to wireless networking, Extreme ways are here, And Enterasys ways are gone- along with the legacy company name behind the product line that is now IdentiFi. New product line, new logo, new forward looking strategy. Now the company just needs to hire Moby to do some commercials…

I had the pleasure of visiting Extreme’s offices in San Jose as part of Wireless Field Day 6. The facility is very nice, and so were our hosts. Director of Mobility and Applications Mike Leibovitz opened the presentation with an overview of IdentiFi, which for me was the first formal intro I’ve had to Extreme’s WLAN solution. (I have covered Extreme WLAN from afar in the past, for NWC.com- like the release of the Altitude 4511 AP). Mike handed off to colleague Will Aguilar, Director of Product Management for IdentiFi.

Will filled the delegates in on IdentiFi’s APs, the system’s virtual and hardware appliances, and alluded to Extreme’s management tools (was a bummer we ran out of time and did not get a demo). I can’t say that I heard anything particularly unique in Extreme’s presentation, but it’s obvious that IdentiFi is positioned to compete with any WLAN vendor in the industry,

Given the buzz over the last couple of months regarding Extreme’s partnership with the National Football League for providing Wi-Fi analytics (and not necessarily only where Extreme WLAN is in use), it was nice to get a little glimpse of how Extreme has carried out stadium wireless in venues like Gillette Stadium and Lincoln Financial Field (Philadelphia Eagles), but the delegates made short work of Senior Wi-Fi Architect Dionis Hristov’s time. I also spent some time after the presentation hearing from Aguilar on the value of analytics, and the sizable dollars that they lead too in marketing and monitization. This is a huge topic and we’ll no doubt be hearing a lot about it in the months to come.

The videos from Extreme’s session at WFD 6 are here. Since Field Day, Extreme has announced Purview, the magic behind it’s new analytics gig.

My final analysis: Extreme is a big solutions story with a lot of chapters. A couple of hours wasn’t nearly enough to properly get our feet wet, and I hope we hear more from the company in future Field Days.