Extreme Networks has been very busy announcing acquisitions lately. Yesterday, it announced plans to acquire Brocade’s Data Center switch business and on March 7, it announced plans to acquire Avaya’s switch business. Additionally, it completed its acquisition of the Zebra Wireless LAN business just last October 2016.
When the two switch acquisitions are completed – some time in the summer of 2017 – the company will be vaulted higher to become one of the major share leaders in switching. To put the acquisitions into context, assuming the acquisitions had been completed last quarter, using our 4Q16 Ethernet Switch Market Report revenue share figures, the company’s share would have been:
- #6 Overall Ethernet Switch vendor worldwide
- #3 Campus Switch vendor in North America
- #5 Data Center Switch vendor in North America
Acquisitions and consolidation in the networking industry have been occurring at a rapid pace over the past few years. HPE acquired #2 WLAN vendor, Aruba; Arris is acquiring Ruckus plus Brocade’s ICX product line, for instance. It is our view that scale is becoming more important in the networking market as many customers are looking for vendors that support both wireless and wireline campus technologies. Additionally, scale matters in the Data Center switch market as well, as Cloud service providers are experiencing a very rapid capital expansion of their services networks.
In 2016 Data Center switch market share leaders by revenue were (alphabetically) Arista, Cisco, Juniper and White Box vendors. In the North America in the Campus Switch market by revenue, considering Extreme had acquired the switch divisions of Brocade and Avaya it announced in March 2017, market share leaders were Cisco, Extreme and HPE.
Starting this year, we expect that networking customers will get used to seeing Extreme in the top share lists when considering vendors.