Just outside of Fort Myers, Florida Gulf Coast University (FGCU) is a bustling center of learning sitting on a sprawling, 800-acre campus. The university holds a deep commitment to providing comprehensive education while fostering a collaborative and innovative environment for students. That commitment relies on having a network infrastructure that can deliver on its promises.
For Deepak Sharma, Director of IT Infrastructure and Operations at FGCU, his arrival several years ago was necessitated by an overhaul of FGCU’s network infrastructure—a transformation he oversaw. Struggling with inefficient network operations that were causing delays in addressing reported issues, Sharma set out to show what the right solution could do for FGCU users.
“I came in here primarily for the transformation of their network infrastructure, both wired and wireless,” said Sharma of his arrival at FGCU. “(This was) across the campus as well as the housing locations.” With more than 16,000 students to serve, many living on campus, this was no small undertaking.
In examining the existing Cisco technology on which FGCU’s network infrastructure was heavily reliant, Sharma identified the very first obstacle he’d face in modernizing and maximizing network performance at the university.
“I think the biggest challenge across the industry as well as higher education is: how do you break down barriers in terms of resistance to change?”
This is when he began to see the value and unrealized potential in Extreme Networks.
Spearheading this major infrastructure project meant Sharma and his staff would need a true partnership with a technology provider capable of solving their challenges. With additional facilities in the works, software-defined networking that offered seamless connectivity, proactive monitoring, and quick adaptability across the network would drive the decision-making process.
“FGCU was a shop where they were predominantly Cisco, with Cisco wireless access points,” Sharma said. “We started using switches from Extreme, but I was able to develop a good collaboration and a partnership with Extreme leadership.”
Aware of FGCU’s needs and the common challenges of shifting to a new technology provider, Sharma focused on highlighting not only his working relationship with Extreme, but the benefits of the technology.
This included providing proactive monitoring and better visibility across the campus network, while helping accelerate the speed at which Sharma and his team could address issues before they began to impact users.
“It is a huge change switching vendors, specifically when you’re looking at wired and wireless infrastructure across major organizations,” Sharma said of the shift. “I didn’t have any issues after working with Extreme.”
In starting out with an upgrade of the campus wired and wireless infrastructure, Sharma has identified a path forward to continue improving infrastructure across the entire FGCU campus. Sharma says the collaboration and partnership he and his team have experienced with Extreme has been instrumental in building momentum behind this change.
“This summer, we are going to complete two of our of three locations for campus housing,” he said of future projects with Extreme. And when you ask him for his “why” in completed and pending projects, Sharma can tell you exactly what is driving this change.
“Essentially all of the monitoring you hear about in the IT industry, it’s all reactive,” he said. “We keep talking about generative AI, but really what we want to do is identify problems before our users report the problem.” Embracing Extreme Wireless, Wired, and ExtremeCloud IQ solutions across the FGCU campus, Sharma says his network is being proactively monitored. This allows him and his team to address those issues before they begin to impact student learning and activities.
“We want to be able to fix those issues on the fly,” he said.
Once limited by outdated network infrastructure, today FGCU is seeing the outcomes they’d hoped for when beginning their network infrastructure upgrades.
Monitoring is more proactive and management is simpler, allowing IT teams to address issues quickly, often before they’re reported. High-speed connectivity is seamless and consistent, while the upgraded infrastructure makes FGCU’s network scalable for future expansions. A true change-maker, Sharma credits his team’s hard work and the relationship they’ve built with Extreme.
“They were collaborators. They were partners.”
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