ExtremeCloud IQ Reviews

We see use cases a lot in the education sector. You could find Extreme Wireless just about anywhere. However, I would say the majority would be education due to the dashboard, which is something that people really like.

That's not to say you can't find it in manufacturing. That's not to say you can't find it in healthcare. It's just not viewed as strongly as Cisco.

The dashboards are great and the user interface is quite intuitive.

I'm not on the technical resource. I know a school district, a big school district of mine, ripped out Extreme due to inefficiencies. It was the guest network that can be a struggle. They tried to differentiate between their primary network, and then offer a secondary. For example, if you go to a store and you get the guest network. However, there's been issues with that.

I want to say we had a five-year-old relationship with Aerohive, prior to Aerohive being acquired by Extreme. I would say Extreme has been a presence for two years.

It's a little bit more comfortable for these medium size businesses.

We also use a lot of Cisco products.

The solution is moderately priced. I’d rate it a three out of five in terms of affordability. If five is the highest, which would be Cisco, I would say Extreme definitely gets most of their business by not being as expensive as Cisco. And the licensing also costs less, which is a big selling point.

We sell the solution. We are an Extreme partner. I don't know to what level. We're Cisco through and through. About 70% of what leaves this company is Cisco and we're a $270 million company. However, we’re partners with Extreme too.

I’d rate the solution a seven out of ten.

I'm the founder of the company. 

The most valuable feature is that you can assign zero trust policies from the user. As a result, policy enforcement is very good, it's simple to use and it can traverse multiple switches. The policy works for everyone, whether it's a customer, enterprise organization or someone working from home. It has all layers of security capabilities and that's very useful. Once users are connected you can subscribe a policy that can switch firewalls from remote or from the core network which is useful now that more people are working from home. They can enforce the deep packet inspection, the application layer, presentation layer, and things like that. There is a full suite of capabilities all under the same operating system. If you change one area, the global policy setting can be pushed out for all assets. 

From my perspective, they need to add cyber asset tracking. You can't defend what you don't know, and they're missing the wireless cyber assets. The problem that you have with wireless is that it's more of a rollout product. It's a fixed chip set of 2.4 or 2.5 gigahertz only. When you look at 5GS, it's taking advantage of six gigahertz and of 600 megahertz. Extreme doesn't have a product to fill that gap, so they're flying blind to the new multi-access edge. Whether it's a security feature, an update, or it's adding zero trust policies to their running and switch platform, they're missing that; it's an area that needs beefing up.

Extreme has a different operating system that is easier to use and easier to apply a policy from the edge to the core than Cisco or other solutions offer. Extreme is also backward compatible. You may have firewalls and switches on different versions, but it's compatible. With Cisco, you need to have them all on the same version in order for it to flow through from the edge to the core. You may have different organizations and slightly different versions, but you can easily appreciate an update that will be applicable across the deployment. Those are two key differences. 

No controller is required. Management can be done with either an onsite appliance or a virtual appliance. The heat map is a great aid in choosing the number and location of access points.

It allows our guests to register and accept our terms and conditions without the paperwork that the IT team used to have to do to get someone connected to WiFi.

The firewall inside the AP is a little limited in what it can do. Aerohive support indicated that there are some improvements planned for the next release of software.

I have used it for six months.

Deployment went without any major issues. Most of our issues were with getting cable runs to the AP locations. We wanted an open guest network that would allow access to only our website. That did not work as planned, and we needed support assistance.

Our WiFi has been running without issues since deployment. Changes have been easy to implement. We upgraded the AP software once and the HiveManager NG once without any downtime.

We have not encountered any scalability issues. We added an AP to a new building in a few minutes; had a staffer plug in the AP and it appeared in our manager and received our configuration.

Customer service is excellent. We purchased through a local reseller, and they were our point of contact; took the time to make sure everything was ready for our deployment.

Technical support is very good. We did find a couple of software bugs, and we were escalated quickly through support levels and got resolutions for most within a couple of weeks, with the last pending a major software release. They did assist in a workaround until the update is available.

We previously used Meraki. We looked at TCO for five years and the Aerohive looks like it will be less expensive, especially if purchased with the support up front.

Initial setup was a little complex because of the number of options in configuration. It was a little complicated because we did not find the management interface intuitive about making changes to previously created access groups and SSIDs.

A vendor team of one person implemented it. That was all that was required to get us up and running in one day for 14 APs and 8 SSIDs.

ROI is just under three years. The guest registration allows us to require the user to read and accept terms and conditions before connecting and the basic firewall in the APs made it easy to enforce without extra hardware per site.

There are good discounts for purchasing APs with the support up front. Go for the three- or five-year options if budget allows. The heat map tends to be very conservative so you might be able to use fewer APs than the tool suggests. An extra AP or two is cheaper than a full site survey.

Meraki, Aruba, and Ubiquiti were evaluated along with Aerohive. We had evaluation APs from Meraki and Aruba. We looked at coverage, ease of use, and TCO.

The cloud version of the controller is a little better supported than the on-premises version. Only select the onsite version if there are security concerns.

Since these APs are controller-less they are very dependable and easy to configure. Other features that add value to our institution include deployment planning tools, load-balancing, auto-channeling, auto-power, Cooperative Control Protocols, Firewalls, QoS, to mention a few.

Ease of use and features are its strongest points.

Sometimes, packing a wide array of feature into these APs might overtax them. They would benefit from creating more powerful APs (Processing-wise)

4 years

We started with a small deployment of 300 APs in 2010. Our campus now has ~1400 and we plan to expand to 2000 in the next 2 years.

When we installed the latest firmware versions on these APs, sometimes we encountered major/minor bugs that would force us to roll back until an appropriate patch was released. Also, with some bleeding-edge AC units we had some problems when they were under high client-loads were new clients would be unable to associate to the APs.

Not really. We simply had to buy a more powerful Hive Manager appliance when we went over the 1000 AP mark, but other than that, this product scales very easily.

I would rate it at 10 out of 10 as their staff is very polite with customers.

I would rate their TAC team at 9 out of 10 as some of their Tier 1 engineers needed more experience and/or training.

The initial setup is very easy. the APs automatically find our local Hive Manager and make it very straight-forward to configure.

Day to day cost is minimal, as these APs don't fail very often. The initial setp was a bit pricey as well as our expansion (if you calculate at around $1200 per newly deployed AP, including wired lines)

I'd highly recommend this product if they're looking for feature-rich APs that are easy to deploy & manage.

ExtremeCloud IQ is an intuitive platform. The tool's ability to streamline network operations depends on the end customer. Sometimes it's quicker, and sometimes it takes much longer. It helps me to address network problems. 

In our end customers, we activate two-factor authentication for login, ensuring very secure access. The tool's security features presented are also very good.

For me, the only issue is the potential delay in the tool statistics updating in real time after making changes.

The product's stability is good. 

I rate the tool's scalability an eight out of ten. 

My experience with customer support is good. 

The major differences between ExtremeCloud IQ and competitors include the superior updating of devices and the overall better support provided by the cloud solution.

I rate the tool's deployment a seven out of ten. The duration for deployment varies based on the client's specific configurations and requirements. It can range from one day to sometimes three days for final configuration and functionality. Three resources are enough to handle the tool's deployment. 

ExtremeCloud IQ's pricing is high. 

ExtremeCloud IQ is considered a very good platform with excellent support, although there may be some concerns with pricing and a minor issue with information delay in statistics.

ExtremeCloud IQ is the next level of monitoring from Extreme. Our customer used to use NetSight, and the next generation of that is ExtremeCloud IQ. We use the solution to manage the wireless solutions and the devices on the network.

Our customer used to have a lot of issues with the previous version of the wireless network from Extreme Networks. When we deployed the new IP that is managed wirelessly in the cloud, it fixed the problems. Now, we don't have any more reports, and everything works fine.

There are some things that need to be fixed. For example, the solution will show us that there are some issues, but when we try to find those issues, we can't see them. The IP shows us that a certain number of devices are connected, but when we go inside the IP, the number is different. Maybe it has some kind of delay in the statistics that it's reporting, but the manufacturer needs to fix it.

I have been using this solution for about a month. 

The stability is good. We haven't had any issues with it. 

We currently have seven or eight people using the solution.

The technical support team helped us with deployment. They gave us recommendations, and helped us fix issues that came up. They were very helpful. 

The way that we can set up devices in the cloud is very easy, so we can do it if we follow the guide. It took us less than a week to set up.

I handled the implementation myself. Two people are needed for deployment, and one person is enough for maintenance. 

I think that it's a very useful cloud solution. I would rate this solution as a nine out of ten. 

What's most valuable for me in ExtremeCloud IQ is easy management. It also has centralized administration, so you don't have to go to the customer site to program it. It can be programmed remotely.

A room for improvement in ExtremeCloud IQ is roaming. My team is facing roaming issues with the solution, particularly when using VoIP over WiFi. For example, VoIP sometimes breaks when you walk around the customer site.

In terms of what I'd like to see in the next release of the solution, right now, the inventory for ExtremeCloud IQ is awful. There's no stock, and you must wait a year and a half for new stocks. It's awful.

I'm a reseller of ExtremeCloud, so I don't use it. The solution is for my customers, but I've been reselling it for one year now.

In terms of deployment, the controller of ExtremeCloud is on the cloud, while the access points are on-premises.

I'm rating ExtremeCloud IQ eight out of ten.

Overall management / UI is great. There is a lot to it, but it is well organized and relatively simple to use.

The guest user portal and generation of PPSK's has proven invaluable.

The self-registration guest wi-fi portal and optional approval are very important to the functionality of our environment.

While the UI is great, it could still use some tweaks. The latest revision is heading in the right direction.

Started using it in August 2015, but didn't use it in-depth until about May-June 2016.

The biggest issue we encountered was a bug in the guest self-registration portal, which was minor in the big picture.

Stability is not an issue at all. Since implementation, we have had more power outages than wi-fi outages. I'm even impressed at the coverage during AP updates.

Scalability is not an issue in our environment at all. We have over 100 AP's, some of which are in near Faraday cages in our facility.

Customer service was fantastic. We had to call a few times during implementation and minor troubleshooting and we always got an answer.

Technical support is extremely knowledgeable, responsive, and eager to get answers. If we were unable to get a response on the phone call, we always received a timely call back.

We did not use an enterprise solution previously. We built a new manufacturing facility and needed a solution that would meet our needs.

Slightly complex - we have multiple profiles / classes of users, multiple SSID's, and different types of AP's.

We implemented using a consultant. I'd give them an 8/10 at the start of the project and 9/10 after the project.

ROI is difficult to answer in this situation. Wi-Fi cost was part of infrastructure cost of our new manufacturing facility.

Pricing and licensing is straight forward. Make sure to read appropriate documentation and ASK QUESTIONS. Also be sure to always ask about three-year renewals on licensing, there can be huge savings.

We evaluated Meraki prior to choosing Aerohive. At the time, Meraki did not support PPSK's, which was a requirement for our network.

The overall experience is very good. The best part is that it can be managed with a skeleton IT support team.