Extreme Networks Celebrates Social Excellence with Prestigious Award

SALEM, N.H., Nov. 6, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Extreme Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ: EXTR) today announced that Enterasys Networks, now a part of Extreme Networks, was honored with a Forrester Groundswell Award in the Business-to-Employee Collaboration category, competing with 150 entries from around the world. The award showcases the effectiveness of the Enterasys Sales 2.0 program, which is powered by social and cloud solutions, leveraging social networking to greatly improve the company's sales and marketing process.

Employees have integrated into their professional practices leading collaboration and gamification technologies, including Salesforce Chatter, Google Apps, TimeTrade, Influitive and Hoopla. The adoption of these tools has helped Extreme Networks achieve a Net Promoter Score of 81 percent, higher than not only any other networking provider, but most leading brands in the market. The use of Salesforce has allowed the Support team to handle 1,000 support cases per week, reducing transaction time per case by 20 percent and case resolution time by 71 percent.  The significant impact of the Sales 2.0 program validates the company's customer service leadership and sets the standard for collaboration tools in the enterprise.

"With social a key component of our DNA, Extreme Networks recognized early on the importance of aligning social technologies with our core beliefs of being accessible and well-connected to customers," said Vala Afshar, CMO of Extreme Networks. "Our innovative use of social and cloud technologies has generated incredible growth in sales pipeline generation and employee/customer engagement, boosting overall customer satisfaction to 97 percent and reducing employee attrition to less than 2 percent. Being on the forefront of cloud, social and gamification technologies continues to drive us forward as a company and in our opinion, led to winning this prestigious award."

The inside sales team used Hoopla to boost leads, reference calls and social media participation, increasing sales productivity by over 30 percent. In addition, the use of the TimeTrade scheduling application resulted in a 10 percent increase in appointments for the team, increasing sales opportunities for the company.

"Once again we received many outstanding examples of how companies are empowering employees with mobile and social business programs," said Forrester Vice President and Principal Analyst, Ted Schadler. "The entries in both categories this year highlight a growing sophistication in how companies are applying these technologies to transform their operations. The 2013 winners successfully engage their workforce with mobile and social technologies to solve customer and business problems."

The Forrester Groundswell Awards recognize excellence in achieving business and organizational goals with social media applications. The awards program was developed to support and recognize the principles outlined in the Forrester Research books Groundswell: Winning In a World Transformed by Social Technologies (Harvard Business Press, 2008) and Empowered: Unleash Your Employees, Energize Your Customers, and Transform Your Business (Harvard Business Press, 2010). More information about the Forrester Groundswell Awards is available at: http://www.forrester.com/empowered.

Additional Resources

• Forrester Groundswell Award Submission Page
• Blog post: Extreme Networks wins Forrester Groundswell Award
• Blog post: How to Identify a Social Business

About Extreme Networks
Extreme Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ: EXTR) sets the new standard for superior customer experience by delivering network-powered innovation and best-in-class service and support. The company delivers high-performance switching and routing products for data center and core-to-edge networks, wired/wireless LAN access, and unified network management and control.  Our award-winning solutions include software-defined networking (SDN), cloud and high-density Wi-Fi, BYOD and enterprise mobility, identity access management and security.  Extreme Networks is headquartered in San Jose, CA and has more than 12,000 customers in over 80 countries.  For more information, visit the company's website at http://www.extremenetworks.com.

Extreme Networks is a registered trademark of Extreme Networks, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries.

Media Contacts:

Jason King
Extreme Networks
+1 603 952 5151
[email protected]

Jennifer Grabowski
Racepoint Group
+1 617 624 3231
[email protected]

SOURCE Extreme Networks, Inc.