'Ever increasing security threats directly impact the stability and reliability of enterprises'

Extreme Networks is a leading company in the open converged

networks space. Open converged networks will facilitate customers to implement

IP Telephony, voice grade wireless, high performance computing and other network

intensive applications. Extreme Networks CIO and VP (Marketing) Paul Hooper spoke

to VOICE&DATA about the company's game plan in the networking space

and its expansion plans out of India. Excerpts:

Can you tell us about Extreme Networks'

key focus areas in the networking space?



Extreme Networks delivers innovative solutions enabling

organizations, both enterprises and service providers, to address complex

business challenges. Our products deliver secure converged voice, video and data

with advanced switching infrastructure, sophisticated management and monitoring

applications, and advanced network protocols that are complemented with an

extensive professional services portfolio.

For telecom service providers, we deliver cost-effective carrier

Ethernet infrastructure that incorporates quality of service and subscriber

scalability allowing carriers to build metro networks that profitably deliver

triple play services for residential and business subscribers with one network.

What are the key networking challenges

enterprises face today, and what are the solutions that you are offering?



Enterprises are facing three major networking challenges-one,

enabling the network infrastructure to allow tighter integration and awareness

of applications that travel on the networks; two, an ever increasing set of

security threats that directly impact stability, reliability and overall

enterprise services; and three, the need to simplify the complexity of

environment management and compliance.

Extreme delivers product and services that enable enterprises to

have far greater insight and control of the activities and actions of the

networking infrastructure. Specifically, we have delivered an open, extensible

operating system that supports standards-based XML management communications; we

have delivered VSR (virtual security resource) technologies that provide for

virtual in-line security without compromising on reliability or performance and

a powerful enterprise-class management platform that allows single-station

management of all Extreme solutions.

Can you provide more details about insight

and control-and their significance?



True network intelligence requires two critical components-'insight'

into the activities and demands upon the network in conjunction with the ability

to 'control' response or reaction to events or threats. Specifically, the

native insight feature on our edge systems is able to detect 'new connection'

events and then initiate control actions that automatically undertake end-point

client-less scans for virus or configuration anomalies before establishing

appropriate connectivity.

Furthermore, we can uniquely support companies in evolving from

the current practice of converging networks to a new era. We call this the

"embedded stage" — the basis of intelligent communications.

How important is India to Extreme's

overall business?



India is a strategic and important region for Extreme. We continue to

invest in India as a new market for Extreme to expand its world wide sales

presence, and also to deliver continued cost-effective growth of both our

engineering and IT organizations. The engineering function within India is

focused on the development, testing and sustaining-engineering of our

cross-platform operating system, ExtremeXOS, and also our enterprise management

system-EpiCenter. Our IT function in India provides development and support for

the core enterprise applications deployed within Extreme.

Shrikanth G





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