Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Extreme Networks 2008 third quarter conference call. (Operator Instructions) As a reminder, this conference is being recorded today, Wednesday, April 23, 2008. This afternoon, Extreme Networks issued a press release announcing the company's financial results for the third quarter of 2008. A copy of this release is available at the company's website at www.extremenetworks.com. This call is being broadcast live over the Internet and will be posted on the Extreme Networks website for replay shortly after the conclusion of this call. The company has asked me to remind you that this conference call contains forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties, including statements regarding the company's expectations as to products, trends and our performance. There can be no assurances that any forward-looking statements will be achieved and actual results could differ materially from forecasts and estimates. For factors that may affect the business and financial results, please refer to the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including without limitation, under the captions, "Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Conditions and Results of Operations" and "Risk Factors," which is on file with the Securities and Exchange Commission at www.sec,gov. The company undertakes no obligation to update the forward-looking information in this conference call. Throughout the conference call, the company will reference both GAAP and non-GAAP financial results. The company has provided a reconciliation table of GAAP to non-GAAP information and the tables that accompany the press and on its website. Please go to the Investor Relations section of the company's website at www.extremenetworks.com. In addition, all announced results are preliminary and may be subject to the change when the review of the fiscal quarter is concluded and/or a Form 10-Q is filed. I'd now like to turn the call over to Mark Canepa, President and CEO of Extreme Networks. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, operator, and thank you all for joining us today. I will discuss some of the highlights of the quarter, point out the areas where we continue to make progress and detail how we continue to position the company for long-term success. Then I will turn the call over to Karen for details on this quarter's financials. Revenue for the quarter was $82 million, and during the quarter we believed Extreme would experience normal seasonality. For the majority of the quarter, bookings tracked well within the historical boundaries. We experienced an abrupt slowdown in booking activity in the last two weeks of the quarter, especially in the US, where we believe the quarter's challenging macroeconomic environment led some customers to delay their purchase decisions. Going into the quarter, we knew and planned for Asia to be weak; however, we also expected the Americas to more than make up for it and for most of the quarter, this turned out to be true. What caught us by surprise was the suddenness of the America slowdown at the end. As we have grown over the last year, we have continued to realign our sales territories, splitting regions and adding new sales teams where we see the largest opportunities. This alignment has really paid off in EMEA, with revenues up 12% year-over-year. I noted in the last call that we separated Germany from Eastern Europe and hired senior sales management for each of those organizations. In addition, this past January we introduced a new channel incentive program for the region. We are now beginning to see the results from those activities. The Americas revenue was down only slightly versus a year ago, which we take as a positive in the current North American economic climate. On April 1st, we introduced a new…

Thanks, Mark and thank you all for joining us this afternoon. Extreme's third fiscal quarter, which is typically seasonally down, was amplified this quarter by a challenging macroeconomic environment. The downturn was particularly sudden and acute in the Americas, as an abrupt delay in customer purchase decisions directly impacted our ability to close transactions in the final weeks. Total revenue for the quarter was $82 million, a decline of 3.6% from the year-ago quarter, with product revenues down 3.1% and service revenues down 5.8%. From a year-to-date perspective, total revenue was up 3% for the nine-month period compared to the prior year, with product revenues up 5% and service revenues down 5%. Our service revenue declined as anticipated. This is primarily due to the increased mix of fixed switch products with higher quality and lower price points which have a lower maintenance service contract attach rate. The product book-to-bill ratio was 1 for the quarter. Taking a look at the sales by the markets we serve, the percent of enterprise to service provider sales for the quarter was 69% and 31% respectively. The shift from our historical pattern of 75% and 25% was driven by a greater proportion of sales in the EMEA region, which had a higher mix of service provider sales, and several large transactions in the quarter. I will now briefly update you on our product revenue metrics. The ratio of stackable and modular product sales was 61% and 39% respectively, and comparable to the prior quarter. Bookings for PoE ports grew sequentially and also grew 77% from the year-ago quarter. We expect PoE ports to continue to grow based on the demand for IP telephony. Looking at revenues on a geographic basis, US revenue was $30.1 million down 2% from the year-ago quarter. The US demonstrated…

Thank you, Karen. This concludes our prepared remarks and we're now ready to take your questions. Operator?

Thank you, sir. (Operator Instructions). And our first question comes from Richard Church with Collins Stewart. Go ahead, please.

Oh, thanks. Mark, I'm just wondering what gives you confidence that the third quarter maybe an anomaly? Are you seeing the transactions that didn't close in Q3 starting to close in the month of April?

Well, we believe that some of the transactions that didn't close in Q3 will close in Q4. The reason we think it might be more as an anomaly is, that with three weeks of data -- of booking data, we are positive, but cautious. So far the bookings this quarter are tracking within a set of historical parameters. However, let me caution that that was a bit the same way at the start of last quarter, but so far, with three weeks, we are not seeing anything unusual.

And in the third quarter, what vertical markets did you see most of the weakness?

We have not broken it out at this point by vertical markets. With the one exception that, as Karen mentioned, our service provider vertical was 31% of our business and in an absolute dollar terms as high as we've seen it in quite some time. So, certainly we did a fair amount of business in the telecommunications vertical, and as Karen mentioned, that's due to a couple of good deployments that are taking place in Eastern Europe, but the one I highlighted in the call was T-Com of Croatia, which is doing a fairly extensive net -- generation network deployment.

And what's the early read in the US on the new channel program?

Well, as you know, the new channel program just got announced 23 days ago. We had rolled it out in a preview just a couple of weeks prior to our elite partners, which we call our Diamond partners. The official rollout started on the 1st of April. It's going to take awhile to see the read outs of that. I'll let you know more in the upcoming calls as we begin to get better information on it.

Okay. Thanks a lot.

Thank you, Richard.

Thank you. And our next question comes from Samuel Wilson with JMP Securities. Go ahead, please.

Hey, Sam.

Thank you. This is Doug Ireland for Sam Wilson. We have a couple of calls today. I was wondering, with the revenue per employee down and the industry in a downturn if you're looking at restructuring and if layoffs are on the table?

Yes, good question. Currently we don't have any specific plans to do so. Obviously, we watch expenses very carefully and you saw us, even with the lateness of the booking shift in Q3, that we were able to react very well to it and reduce our operating expenses for the quarter. Certainly, employees are one area, but there are lots of other places that we can go look. In addition, as you know, we have employees in many parts of the world with dramatically different kinds of cost structures, so we're also mindful from a long-term point of view to deploy our headcount, where it makes most sense. So, we're continuing to control expenses and -- but at the same time, I am continuing to add revenue-generating headcount in our sales force as necessary to continue to drive the business.

Thank you.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Phil Cusick with Bear Stearns. Go ahead, please.

Hi, this is Scott Thompson for Phil. Just looking at G&A expenses, looks like there may have been a spike there I wanted to dig into that a little bit. Anything big there?

In G&A expenses was what? Sorry.

Looks like there may have been a bit of a spike in expense there.

Yes, Scott. Let me answer that. G&A included $2.7 million of intellectual property litigation charges in the quarter.

Okay. So it's mostly litigation is where we're seeing that come from?

Right.

So, you might also just point -- if we're on the topic of G&A.

We could talk a little bit about litigation and what you guys might want to expect looking into -- going into Q4. Litigation is very tough to predict. It's driven largely by court timing and where you happen to be in the case, but looking at where we've been over this past year; you can see that our litigation charges have been trending up over time. So, in looking at the fourth quarter, we're anticipating that our intellectual property litigation card charges could go up from this quarter say $1 million to $2 million.

The vast majority of our litigation is due to one lawsuit that we're part of and this is the quarter where we're going to trial on it, so we're watching it very carefully, but currently it's expected to be sort of the quarter.

Next question?

Our next question comes from Cobb Sadler with Deutsche Bank. Go ahead, please.

Thanks a lot. Just on the litigation, so up $1 million to $2 million quarter-on-quarter, but would that be kind of the top or could we expect it to go higher than that?

Currently, we think that will be the peak of it. As I mentioned, we have been preparing for this for the last several quarters and as we get closer to trial, obviously a number of the things that had to take place to do that. This is the quarter we go to trial, and hopefully once that is over the litigation charges for this particular litigation will go -- should go down significantly, so that's our current expectation at this point.

Okay. And when you started to see the weakness two weeks prior to the end of the quarter, how did you handle it? Did you try to scramble offer deals or did you just say, hey, we're probably miss this quarter anyway, let's not push it, maybe let some deals slide? Can you talk about that?

No, no, that's a good question. No, we take making our quarters pretty seriously around here, and so I can quite assure you that the sales force was scrambling to go make things happen all across the world. We actually have a pretty sophisticated process by which we track deals, we review them. We have a thing called the Deal Desk. We meet every Monday for a material period of time with each geography, attended by very senior executives of the company, so it is taken seriously, it's reviewed on a weekly basis and we don't leave stoned unturned no matter, where we are in the quarter.

Okay. Moving on to Eastern Europe, is T-Com Croatia, is that it's a division of T-Com -- Deutsche Telekom T-Com; is that correct?

Yes, yes it is.

Okay. So, what about other territories within T-Com -- would you be pursuing business there?

Well, yes, it's a good question. Clearly, our service provider business in Europe is pretty strong in general, and we have some very good sales folks that really understand that business and so we don't leave stones unturned. In the past we've talked to you about business that we had done with Telefonica. Today I highlighted a business that we do with Wind, the mobile carrier in Italy. So, we pursue it pretty aggressively, and as our products -- where our products fit the customer requirements we're being very successful at helping them deliver much more cost-effective networks, which in turn lets them optimize their operations.

And these European deals and I guess mostly your average carrier deal, are you still pretty early innings and is there room to run there or -- my point we're not getting to a situation, where these deals are slowing or peaked or anything like that. We should expect a continued ramp in many of these deals that you have?

Well, look, we have customers in all sorts of stages of their life cycle, right? Some are terminating their deploy -- they're terminating -- they're coming to the end of their current network deployment. Doesn't mean there are going to be more. Some of them are smack in the middle of the ramp of it and some of them are at the beginning phases of it. So, the good news is we seem to have them throughout their life cycle, so there's the ability to modulate these things. But we tend to take these one quarter at a time and we drive the business as we're able to get the it.

Got it, and last question. On the 8800, the new product, do you think that's stalled any of your North American -- do you think that people are waiting the new product or do you think that didn't have any impact on the quarter?

That's a great question. We've asked ourselves that question. It's possible that there might have been a little bit of business at the end of the quarter that was waiting for the third generation blade. It's tough to quantize there. What we feel is that the new product generation is really good. It's the third generation of a very successful platform. The BD8800 has been around with us for awhile. We continue to enhance that platform. It continues to drives a lot of business in the mid tier and somewhat larger enterprises. We continue to feel really good and have great things to say about that product line and we continue to invest in it.

Great, thanks a lot.

Thank you. (Operator Instructions). And our next question comes from Andrew Nowinski with Piper Jaffray. Go ahead, please.

Hi, Mark. Thanks for taking my call today.

Hi, Andrew.

I'm here for Troy Jensen. We said -- we're wondering if you could provide any color on the Avaya channel, given the discontinuation of the Cajun line last quarter? Just wondering how that ramped up.

Yes, obviously transitioning product lines takes some time. We feel very good about our strategic relationship with Avaya. We meet with them on an ongoing basis. We have summits all the way up on a quarterly basis to the top level of the company. I talk to channel partners all the time. I was just in Asia at our Asia-Pacific partner conference about a week, week-and-a-half ago. I visited with the managing director of Avaya in India. I visited with the sales team in various other parts of Asia. Everybody's pretty excited. We work closely together. We explore opportunities. We believe that between ourselves and Avaya, we're able to deploy the best converge telephony solution and we continue to drive that business. Cajun replacement will happened over the next few quarters, not the kind of thing that happens all at once, so far so good. The linkage with Avaya feels pretty good.

Okay, great. Just one more question and to regarding the X150, is that gaining the traction you expected and are you still seeing Cisco and HP as your typical competitors in that space?

Yes, the 150 continues to ramp, it's doing exactly what it was designed to do, which is to give us a sub-$1,000 price point that are enables us to complete the edge of the network. And as you see from our continued strengthen in product gross margins, it is actually, while it may have somewhat lower margins, it helps by driving the complete network solution. It actually overall helps us keep our enterprise margins up pretty healthy. The important thing is, within the rest on our laurels with 150. Two weeks ago we introduced the X350, which is the gigabit companion version of the 150, and we expect great things from it, too. It just started shipping at the beginning of the quarter, so it'll take a little bit of time to tell what's going on, but the kinds of things we were able to do in the 10-100 space with the X150 we believe that we can begin to do that now with the 350. And if you go and look, we priced the 350 pretty aggressively in order to send a clear message to our customers that we're there to take care of, not only their core, but their edge and everything in between.

Great, thanks, guys.

Thank you. And our next question comes from Ed Ching from B. Riley. Go ahead, please.

Afternoon, guys. With the downturn in North American market are you guys seeing any pricing pressure here?

Not specifically to the downturn in North America that I can tell, right? You can only ferret it out so much from the data. The pricing pressure is like -- no different than I've been describing over the last 18 months. It tends to be more related to deal size than it does to any generalized pricing environment today. And so to the extent that over a period of time some of our deals tend to get larger, then as it pertains to that, that trend is about as I've described it over the last few quarters. We do see the bigger deals tend to be more competitively fought on it. Now, the fact that we just introduced the 350, and we introduced the X150 gives us another weapon, a lower-priced product that we can put in there to successfully fight the pricing pressure, which mostly tends to be at the edge of the network.

Okay. And what's the likelihood of, say, Europe starting to feel the pain that we're feeling in North America here? We've been sort of hearing some rumblings about some weakness in Europe approaching here going in the second and third quarter. Have you guys seen anything that would alarm you?

Yes, that's a good question. Obviously, we had a really good quarter last quarter in EMEA, they're doing great, and there is always lots of variables, right? We've got a new management team in there and they're really executing like crazy, and so I think a lot of -- part of it is execution, but the economy seems to be in reasonable shape. It's early to tell in Q4, based on the first three weeks. Nothing unusual taking place in Europe that we can tell, but again, you know, what it's like, the quarters tend to be -- 50% of the quarter happens in the last four weeks. Obviously with the way the world is -- economic macro environments are happening these days, we are just on a constant high alert watch on a day-by-day basis on what's taking place around the world, but for now, EMEA seems to be doing.

Okay, great. And with $230 million in cash on the books there, guys, any more thoughts on a share repurchase program there?

Yes, we discuss it on an ongoing basis with the Board of Directors. You can rest assured that there is all of the due diligence that is required. Just because we haven't done anything, doesn't mean that there is not massive conversations and discussions at the highest levels of the company, and obviously at the Board of Directors. At the end, it's the Board's decision of exactly what to do with the cash. We understand your input, we take it very seriously, and as things evolve, obviously we'll keep you posted.

Okay, when's the next Board meeting?

Well, we had one last night and the next -- we typically have a couple of them a quarter.

Okay, thanks.

So, with that thank all of you for joining us this afternoon. I want to thank once again our employees for all of their effort, especially during these volatile times. We've made a lot of good progress at Extreme and we've positioned ourselves for even better things to come and I really look forward to speaking with you again at the next conference call. So, thank you very much.

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes the Extreme Networks 2008 third quarter results conference call. If you would like to listen to a replay of today’s conference, please dial toll free 800-405-2236 or 303-590-3000, passcode 11112105. Again, that's toll free 800-405-2236 or 303-590-3000, passcode 11112105. ACT would like to thank you for your participation and you may now disconnect.