Ed Meyercord
Analyst · Rosenblatt Securities. Please proceed
Thank you, Stan, and thank you all for joining us this morning. Our results in the first quarter were ahead of plan and reflect what we believe are the early stages of a broad networking market recovery. We also benefited from higher new logo win rates and a few large projects that closed earlier than anticipated. This resulted in sequential growth in what is usually a down quarter. We expect the return of market demand to continue in the second quarter as our funnel of opportunities is growing. SaaS ARR grew 23% year-over-year, demonstrating the value and stickiness of our cloud offering. The differentiation of our enterprise campus solution is the primary driver of our new logo expansion. The combination of our cloud management with integrated AI and security capabilities, campus fabric, licensing simplicity and number one ranked service are significant competitive advantages for Extreme. We’re the only enterprise player that brings end-to-end solutions from the campus data center to the edge across the wide area network from one cloud. We significantly de-risk enterprise customer migration to modern networking infrastructure and offer unmatched premier services to ensure customers get the most out of their investment with Extreme. We have the most simple, resilient and secure enterprise networking solution in the industry. Our end-to-end zero touch provisioning enabled by our campus network fabric is unrivaled by any of our competitors. We eliminate the time-intensive process of configuring virtual LANs to deliver services at the edge of the network. Our network fabric also reduces the risk of cyberattacks by enabling granular micro segmentation, eliminating lateral movement within campus networks and significantly limiting the blast radius of attacks. When customers see the security benefits of our campus fabric, our win rate drastically increases. And finally, our campus fabric offers unmatched resiliency and sub-second convergence. This means zero downtime during upgrades or maintenance. The network is unbreakable because it heals itself, which means end-users never experience an interruption. None of our competitors can match this. In fact, sub-second convergence was the biggest reason we won a large Fortune 100 Manufacturing Company this quarter, which is slated to be one of the most significant deals in Extreme’s history. This week, we extended our security footprint with the availability of ExtremeCloud Universal zero trust network access, which combines our very mature network access control solution with our zero trust remote application access in a single, easy-to-use SaaS offering. We’re the only networking vendor to offer a single policy engine for cloud-based NAC and ZTNA. This helps boost IT team productivity and reduce troubleshooting time. This quarter, we reinforced our position as an early adopter of the most innovative technology coming from our chipset vendor. We continue to set new standards for innovation and high-performance connectivity and are the first and only player shipping enterprise-grade Wi-Fi 7 Access Points. Wi-Fi 7 delivers substantial benefits, including lower latency, enhanced capacity, better data throughput and reliability. It has crossed the chasm of mission-critical applications. Demand for our AP5020 is being driven from performance improvements across high-density environments and use cases like augmented reality and virtual reality, 4K and 8K streaming, real-time analytics and automation. We’ll continue to expand our Wi-Fi 7 portfolio over the coming months. Finally, our co-pilot AIOps solution is critical for large retailers, universities, manufacturers and healthcare facilities to identify network issues and detect anomalies before they impact uptime or business continuity. It provides proactive recommendations on how to remediate issues, which helps save customers time and money associated with day-to-day network management. This quarter, we have wins at both the National Institutes for Quantum Science and Technology and the Photon Science Innovation Center in Japan. Leveraging Extreme’s Universal switches and Fabric Connect, they’ve built large-scale research facilities with a network that enables users to easily and securely access highly sensitive data and resources. We recently displaced a large competitor at Texas Tech University, where we upgraded their campus data center and edge network with Extreme’s Universal hardware, ExtremeCloud IQ and campus fabric. The university benefits from end-to-end simplified management and enhanced security, which helps them meet the growing demands for online resources, testing and classroom technology. 27 NFL teams, including new deployments with the LA Chargers, Minnesota Vikings, Green Bay Packers and Houston Texans, are leveraging Extreme’s Wi-Fi 6E, ExtremeCloud and Business Insights for venues to deliver seamless connectivity across stadiums and practice facilities. 2024 marks our 12th consecutive season as the league’s official provider of Wi-Fi solutions and Wi-Fi analytics. Finally, we displaced our largest competitor in a deal with one of the chief clinical hospitals in the Netherlands, Hofland Atrium Medisch Centrum. This hospital plans to refresh its aging infrastructure to a more modern cloud-based network and extend the network to one of the new buildings on its campus, an ideal use case for our campus fabric. In addition to our technology innovation, we’re starting to get traction and seeing positive momentum with two new commercial models we’ve been working on for the past 18 months. Extreme subscription private offer gives us the flexibility to be more aggressive in supporting service providers and large customers with scalable technology and flexible pricing models. We closed our first transaction this quarter which included a major European retailer and a Fortune 100 company. Our managed services platform is also resonating. We had 32 MSP partners at the end of the first quarter up from 27 in Q4 and consumption billings doubled sequentially. Partners love the flexibility of this unique consumption-based billing model and poolable licensing. No one else in the industry offers this level of simplicity and licensing economics. Turning to guidance, we expect continued sequential growth in Q2 based on the size and quality of our funnel. We anticipate further market share gains and revenue growth for the full year and we expect this growth to be accompanied by increased margins and cash flow. With that, I’d like to turn the call over to our CFO, Kevin Rhodes, to walk us through the results and guidance.