Extreme could be great....

[unclerico]

if you would actually listen to your customers rather than the almighty dollar.

I have tried for years to get the ear of people within Extreme to create a customer advisory board to help with feature development. You are still small enough where you can do this. The fact that you only prioritize features based on potential revenue is silly. Go look at products/vendors such as Okta or KnowBe4 (I'm sure there are others). They have an "ideas" site where people can submit ideas for product improvements and those ideas that are wanted by the most customers are moved into development. There's no need to filter things through account teams and systems engineers or to do a revenue assessment. Why would you not do this?

Why on earth have we been able to manage EXOS switches in XIQ for three years but we can only manage like 10 things in the configuration? You have had ample time to get feature parity added into XIQ. Why can we still not onboard brownfield switches (the PLM response of "someday" is bogus)? Why am I not able to use VLAN names in my switch configurations and instead have to use VLAN numbers? Why does client data lag behind so much when I can look at a Meraki, Aruba, hell, even Ubiquiti dashboard and get almost up to the second statistics? Why on earth is your industrial switch not running EXOS and also require a proprietary serial cable? Why did you wait so long to get into the SD-WAN space knowing full well that your home baked solution was garbage after I was begging you to get into the space years ago? Why would you not have a branch in a box solution like a Meraki MX or Z series? You had the BR200/600 and then you took out the wireless radios! Why would you do that? Don't even get me started on your documentation. It is absolutely horrendous especially when you compare it to the likes of Cisco and Juniper. When I need a validated design for any product or feature, I know Cisco has one written. Extreme has *some* validated design guides, but your configuration guides are half baked at best.

There are so many areas that could be drastically improved if you only listened to your customers. You could literally dominate the market. I am one of the biggest advocates for Extreme - I fought to get it purchased and installed in my company because I know the core of the wireless solution is still Aerohive (been a customer since 2007) - but when I look at the development of other solutions I can see you lagging behind significantly.

[SamPirok · Accepted solution]

Hey guys! Great feedback here, thanks very much for making this post! We are working on a new gamification system for the community that includes membership to customer advisory board as one of our rank rewards, hoping to have that go live next Spring. I am also happy to forward any post you make with ideas to the appropriate teams and act as a middle man to keep you updated on the progress of said ideas. I can't overstate how much I appreciate your advocacy for Extreme, and I want to do everything I can to help get your feedback to the right people so we can continue to advance together! 

[vandermause]

Thank you Sam!  Looking forward to working with you.

[vandermause]

To summarize and filter, there are some good points in here.  Having an easy way to aggregate the ideas and wishes of the community are a great way to engage and harness the power of the community.  Having a universal EXOS for all devices would be great or have even the Industrial Ethernet switches be fabric enabled.  Documentation and EVDs are always appreciated and is an opportunity for Extreme's knowledgebase.  These are all notable points and completely valid.

On a separate note, I completely appreciate the vision that Extreme has and love that they are our David in this space and offer a legitimate alternative.  I do agree with @unclerico that Extreme could become a very serious contender.  I can only say, "Harness the power of the community."

Keep up the great work everyone!