West Orange-Cove Consolidated Independent School District Deploys Extreme Platform ONE for AI-Assisted Workflows and a More Reliable Student Network

Located in Orange County, Texas, West Orange-Cove CISD serves the communities of West Orange, Pinehurst, and portions of the city of Orange. The district supports more than 2,500 students across four campuses.

As part of Education Service Center Region 5, the district benefits from shared resources and collaboration across Southeast Texas school systems—while still operating with a lean internal IT team responsible for delivering reliable, high-performance connectivity to support modern digital learning.

West Orange-Cove CISD’s lean IT team is responsible for maintaining reliable, district-wide connectivity, but over time, they faced mounting challenges as the district simultaneously pushed for more technology modernization.

The district’s legacy Cisco network infrastructure increasingly made technical advancement challenging, and created operational friction, particularly around:

• Limited visibility into network performance and topology
• CLI-based configuration workloads
• Inefficient troubleshooting and management processes

The IT team selected Extreme Networks, with the support of Solid IT Networks, to deploy more modern solutions for wired and wireless networking, alongside cloud management for increased network visibility and monitoring.

The transition to ExtremeCloud IQ (XIQ) successfully boosted network performance as the IT team evolved its technical standards and knowledge to fully integrate Extreme's best practices. However, the team was ready to embrace more functionality, and a unified console for cloud management of switches and access points.

With support from Extreme’s Customer Success team, West Orange-Cove CISD engaged in a structured enablement program to transition from XIQ to the more robust and capable Extreme Platform ONE.

Through guided sessions, the IT team quickly built proficiency across:

• Monitoring & Alerts – Real-time dashboards and proactive issue detection
• Network Visualization – Geographic, physical, and fabric-level views
• Configuration Management – GUI-based control of VLANs, port profiles, and policies
• License & Subscription Management – Centralized administration

As confidence grew, the team evolved from exploratory usage to fully operational workflows—ultimately replacing XIQ as their primary management interface.

Extreme Platform ONE became the district’s unified management for:

• Wired (switches) and wireless (APs) infrastructure
• Device access and configuration
• End-to-end visibility and troubleshooting

The West Orange Cove team has achieved operational improvements and efficiency gains, resulting in a number of essential performance metrics. Most notably, the team is spending less time diagnosing network issues, and more time solving them – improving troubleshooting time by over 50%.

Other benefits achieved through daily operational platform adoption include:

Operational Efficiency Gains

• Reduced reliance on CLI through GUI-based configuration
• Faster troubleshooting using integrated data and visualizations
• Streamlined workflows across monitoring, configuration, and support

Improved Visibility & Control

• Holistic view of network topology and performance
• Better understanding of fabric relationships and dependencies
• Centralized access to all devices and network insights

Increased Trust in the Platform

• Shift from reliance on external validation → confidence in platform-driven insights
• AI capabilities embraced as a trusted starting point for decision-making
• Seamless escalation to GTAC directly through the platform