Incentive Systems Goes to the Extreme; Extreme Networks Chooses Incentive's Software to Help It Manage Incentive Compensation for Its Rapidly Growing Sales Force

Business Wire, Jan 31, 2000

Business/Technology Editors

BURLINGTON, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 31, 2000

Incentive Systems announced today that award-winning switch provider Extreme Networks will use its incentive compensation solution to manage compensation for its sales force. The system will enable Extreme to ensure that all domestic and international sales reps receive accurate and timely commission payments and have Web access to performance reports, which will ultimately motivate them to achieve corporate goals.

Extreme anticipated its rapid growth in revenues and sales headcount, realizing its legacy system would not scale to meet that growth. The legacy system also could not provide the flexibility to design and administer new plans, nor could it simply deal with international plans.

Extreme chose Incentive due to their ability to provide an intuitive, scalable solution that decreases the risk of reconciliation problems and payment delays. In addition, the flexible system uses macro-like formulas, making it easy for Extreme to design new plans and make changes to its existing plans in minutes instead of days. The system will also enable Extreme to calculate commissions in multiple currencies, allowing for the use of one system for all compensation plans worldwide.

Extreme also chose Incentive because it can be integrated with the company's Baan enterprise resource management system to feed information directly into compensation plans for quick calculations. Further, as Extreme develops its distribution channels by using a two-tier distribution model, aligning incentive-based pay with point of sales reporting will be fundamental to the success of this new model.

&uot;We knew that our rapid growth would outstrip the capabilities of a spreadsheet, making it too time consuming to manage our compensation plans,&uot; said Dan Miller, Extreme Networks' Corporate Controller. &uot;Incentive's scalable system is easy to use and administer. Incentive gives us the ability to make on-the-fly adjustments to any of our plans in just minutes. This is an important capability that will allow us to quickly alter compensation plans to incent our sales force to achieve corporate goals as the business dynamically changes.&uot;

Extreme, which went public in April 1999, is a leader in the Layer 3 LAN switching market. To maintain that leadership, Extreme must align employee goals with corporate goals. The Incentive solution provides the company with a strategic tool to motivate its sales force to attain the corporate goals.

&uot;Extreme Networks realizes how crucial incentive compensation is to steering their employees toward strategic goals. When they discovered that their existing system would not efficiently meet their future needs, they didn't want to take chances by trying to modify the system with a temporary fix. Instead they took a very proactive approach by choosing to implement an automated system that would grow with their needs,&uot; said Michael Byers, president and CEO of Incentive Systems.

Extreme will use the Incentive system's Web publishing capability to make plan results available to all participants on a secure, self-service intranet site. This will provide sales reps with real-time updates on their commission status, freeing up the time they used to spend doing &uot;shadow accounting&uot; to check their commissions for accuracy.

About Extreme Networks

Extreme Networks provides high performance multilayer network switching solutions for the Internet Economy. The Company's award-winning networking solutions are designed for Internet service providers, web content providers and large enterprise customers. The Extreme Networks family of Summit(TM) stackables, including the new Summit7i(TM) Internet Data Center Switch, and BlackDiamond(TM) modular switching systems, combine Ethernet and IP with wire speed Layer 3 Switching to increase the flow of information and allow for future network growth. Within its first year of delivering switching solutions, the Company captured the leading position for Layer 3 switch port shipments. Headquartered in Santa Clara, Calif., Extreme Networks distributes its solutions in more than 40 countries through authorized resellers. For more information, visit www.extremenetworks.com.

About Incentive Systems

Incentive Systems, headquartered in Burlington, Mass., is the only commercial software vendor that delivers incentive compensation management systems for extended enterprises and e-business. The company's Incentive(TM) 2.0 product is designed to handle today's dynamic e-commerce business models, enabling companies to motivate every channel involved in customer relationship management to align with corporate goals. More information about the company is available at www.incentivesystems.com.