IT Week: As president and chief executive of Extreme Networks, how do you see demand for 10/100 Fast Ethernet switches progressing?

Mark Canepa: Well, Power over Ethernet [PoE] is probably the biggest saviour of the 10/100 market, even though the centre of gravity has moved to Gigabit Ethernet since a lot more applications just need the gigabit bandwidth. Fast Ethernet is still around and there are a lot of low-end appliances that want to be powered, but that don’t need the bandwidth, so PoE is very important to them. We’re still seeing a fair amount of activity in the 10/100 market, even though the bulk of our business is at gigabit and 10 gigabit speeds.

Do you think that too many complex management features, requiring highly trained IT staff, are being put on LAN switches?

It’s difficult to have a hard and fast rule for everything. Some branches may be small but their need for network control could be very high. You make the operating system as easy to use as possible and create management software around it. We understand that not all our switches will be going into places that have big IT departments, where you can have systems administrators with all the knowledge and capabilities. We were one of the first companies in the world to incorporate a web-based graphical interface, and we also offer a command-line interface [CLI] because in the higher-end environments administrators like the flexibility and you can be more precise with a CLI.

With the 10GBase-T copper 10 gigabit standard ratified, could we see such a switch next year?

I’m sure we’ll eventually see this, but most of the 10 gigabit connectivity you see now is for uplinks to connect everything together. But like everything else these things migrate down. We’ll have to see what happens and the distances that copper connectivity can provide.

Do you think at some point switches will be all-in-one devices providing LAN functions together with sophisticated security features?

It’s tough to make precise predictions. If you look at what tends to happen, features in operating systems tend to “sediment” after a while and so some of the more basic functions could find their way onto the switch. We’ll have to see where it makes sense from a cost point of view.

How is Extreme Networks performing currently?

We’re doing fine, the company has a fairly stable revenue stream, and I’m here to get the revenue stream heading in the right direction as quickly as possible. The company is focusing on the metropolitan area, the enterprise and datacentre – it’s very important for us not to be an all-metropolitan or all-datacentre comms outfit. The trick is that when you look at the $55bn IP market, it’s not one big homogeneous thing; it’s made up of $200m, $300m, $400m segments. It’s a patchwork quilt and Extreme needs to focus on specific areas and execute on those.

About Mark Canepa

Canepa is president and chief executive of Extreme Networks.

He served in multiple vice-president and general manager roles at Sun, after joining the company in 1996, eventually becoming Sun’s executive vice-president of the Network Storage Products Group.

Before joining Sun, Canepa worked at HP in several general manager positions.