Extreme Networks Inc 's

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;
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 Co., Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd., Arista Networks Inc., Juniper Networks 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.