Middlesbrough College Gains “Extra Team Member,” Eliminates Downtime with Extreme Platform ONE

For nearly two decades, Northern England’s Middlesbrough College has trusted Extreme Networks to power its campus connectivity. Serving roughly 15,000 students ages 16 and up. A longtime Extreme customer, they recently upgraded to Extreme Platform ONE. This move has sparked an AI-driven transformation, turning a routine platform upgrade into a force multiplier for efficiency, automation, and IT capacity.

“We’ve gone from reactive to proactive, cutting our users downtime,” said Jamie Carr, Network Leader at Middlesbrough College. “Today, I can see roaming or connectivity issues instantly and fix them without even waiting for a ticket to come in.”

Growth and rising expectations increased IT demands as experienced staff departed, including:

• Manual and reactive troubleshooting
• Issues were identified reactively, often after passing through multiple support queues.
• Up to 5 hours were spent each week documenting firmware upgrade info.

“The process of tracking firmware used to take me two to five hours,” Jamie said of the previous situation. “There were things that took quite a while to find, and we were always in the position of being reactive.”

The Middlesbrough team needed a fresh way to work smarter, not harder.

Migrating to Extreme Platform ONE offered Jamie and his team a few key benefits:

• Custom widgets could help track issues with roaming and connectivity across campus.
• Automated dashboards could give Jamie hours back each week by bringing firmware tracking into one centralized space.
• AI Expert supports small IT teams with prompts to help apprentice level teammates accomplish experienced troubleshooting.

It didn’t take long for Extreme Platform ONE to make a measurable impact for Jamie and his team.

“I now spend about five minutes looking at firmware,” he said of the shift. “With the automated dashboards I have set up in Extreme Platform ONE, it’s all there the moment I log in.” And when it comes to removing even more manual work, Jamie said, he and his team are no longer reactive.

“Extreme Platform ONE has flipped that reactive dynamic entirely,” Jamie said. “With AI Expert, our entire team is more self-sufficient and less reliant on our senior engineers. We’ve got two apprentices who can now address things I wouldn’t have expected them to understand yet, just by using the prompts we have in place.”

Within just a few months, Middlesbrough realized tangible benefits across its network and team:

• Manual troubleshooting has been cut around 90%, going from an hours long process to mere moments.
• Firmware and lifecycle management have gone from up to five hours per week to about five minutes per week.
• Visibility across personalized dashboards tracking device status and streamlining daily management tasks enables proactive network management.
• AI-based contextual insights help apprentice engineers troubleshoot issues typically reserved for senior engineers.

“Extreme Platform ONE is speeding up almost every aspect of my job. It’s all there just waiting for me, nicely presented, every time I log in,” Jamie said of the profound upgrade to Middlesbrough’s network and team. “It acts like an extra team member.”

Learn more about how Extreme Platform ONE can help K-12 and higher education organizations gain back hours of productivity and build capacity across your team with our At-a-Glance guide.