SANTA CLARA, Calif., Jan. 10, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Extreme Networks®, Inc. (Nasdaq:  EXTR) today announced that industry veteran, and current vice president of technology, Shehzad T. Merchant, has been promoted to the position of Chief Technical Officer (CTO).

Merchant's leadership and vision for networking has been demonstrated over the last 16 years through the delivery of award-winning products and successful deployments of large scale mission critical networks. Merchant holds 10 technology patents for networking including Policy-based quality of service, unified, configurable, adaptive network infrastructure, VLAN aggregation, and security/access intrusion detection. 

Recently, Merchant has shaped the company's Open Fabric data center strategy for open networking for virtualized data center and cloud switching, Software Defined Networking (SDN) and the Company's flagship software platform, ExtremeXOS®, which supports a rich set of APIs, networked applications, and OpenFlow tools enabling customization, more efficient management and secure Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) at the network edge. 

"As the industry makes critical transitions to cloud-based virtualized networking and adopts SDN applications, Shehzad puts us in a strong position to focus our research and development efforts to further differentiate mission critical network technologies and software to benefit our customers," said Oscar Rodriquez, president and CEO of Extreme Networks.

Merchant has also authored a number of industry articles regarding emerging data center and fabric technologies and was a keynote speaker at the 2012 Open Networking Summit covering SDN technologies (view video here).  Early in his career, Merchant served as a pioneer leading the developing of IEEE standards-based Layer 2/3 Gigabit Ethernet switching, scalable and secure Wireless LAN technology and virtualized Cloud and data center networking technology at emerging 40GbE and 100GbE speeds.

About Extreme Networks
Extreme Networks is a technology leader in high-performance Ethernet switching for cloud, data center and mobile networks.  Based in Santa Clara, CA, Extreme Networks has more than 6,000 customers in more than 50 countries.  For more information, visit the company's website at http://www.extremenetworks.com. 

Extreme Networks and ExtremeXOS are registered trademarks of Extreme Networks, Inc. in the United States and other countries. Except for the historical information contained herein, the matters set forth in this press release, including without limitation statements as to sales and sales opportunities are forward-looking statements within the meaning of the "safe harbor" provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements speak only as of the date. Because such statements deal with future events, they are subject to risks and uncertainties, including network design and actual results of use of the product in different environments. We undertake no obligation to update the forward-looking information in this release. Other important factors which could cause actual results to differ materially are contained in the Company's 10-Qs and 10-Ks which are on file with the Securities and Exchange Commission. http://www.sec.gov

SOURCE Extreme Networks, Inc.