Extreme Networks Wins Auction for Avaya's Networking Business

As you may have seen, last week we announced that Extreme won the bid to acquire Avaya Inc.’s networking business. Under the terms of the agreement, the assets of Avaya’s networking business unit will be sold to Extreme for approximately $100 million, in accordance with the terms and conditions of the asset purchase agreement. We expect to close the transaction in the early July time frame.

This strategic acquisition underscores Extreme’s growth strategy of being the only company in the world exclusively focused on providing software-driven wired and wireless networking solutions for the enterprise. Avaya’s networking business complements our existing portfolio and will significantly broaden Extreme’s enterprise solutions capabilities across our target vertical markets. With this transaction, we will expand our existing product portfolio and strengthen our campus core and data center networking solutions with new modular and fixed switches with a unique secure, scalable fabric. Avaya’s solutions also complement the new releases of our core multi-rate fixed switches and IP based fabric. With this acquisition, existing Avaya customers and partners will benefit from additional wireless solutions, fixed edge and core switching as well as our software portfolio with control, analytics and advanced management. The roadmap will be discussed in detail with the Avaya and Extreme teams on the June 14^th webinar.

For partners and customers, we understand the impact that disruption can have on your business. This is why we have been working closely with the Avaya business and operations teams for significant integration planning. We will provide our prospective customers, partners and distributors continuity of product line and we're mapping a path forward at natural technology inflection points without disrupting customer environments.

For partners selling Avaya’s networking technology, we will continue to support the benefits of the current Avaya Partner Program for the time being. At our global partner conference in October, we will be announcing a new, unified partner program to share with you and will certainly continue to keep you updated along the way. Post-closing, we will launch a reseller helpline to ensure partners get answers to their acquisition-related questions quickly and efficiently. More announcements will be made during our global partner conference in October, which will include a unified partner program and a single partner portal.

I look forward to sharing more with you over the next several weeks and months.

Sincerely,

Ed Meyercord

P.S. You can find the latest information on the acquisitions of Avaya Networking and Brocade Data Center Networking here.