Cisco WAN Optimization Solutions Help Hundreds of Customers Accelerate Business-Critical Applications Across the WAN

SAN JOSE, CA -- (MARKET WIRE) -- March 6, 2007 -- Cisco® (NASDAQ: CSCO) today announced that Cisco Wide Area Network (WAN) Optimization solutions that ease management of branch offices are achieving rapid adoption from hundreds of customers. Customers including freight forwarding company Panalpina Group of North America, architecture firm Reynolds, Smith and Hills, Inc., and travel leader Sabre Holdings Corporation, are using the award-winning Cisco Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) to share centralized files and increase remote users' productivity and collaboration across the organization. As part of Cisco's Application Networking Services Advanced Technology segment, these Cisco WAAS customers help demonstrate Cisco's success in improving the availability, performance, and security of applications delivered across the network platform.

"Customers are rapidly deploying Cisco WAN Optimization solutions to simplify branch data management, enable collaboration and accelerate access to consolidated application infrastructures," said George Kurian, vice president of the Application Delivery business unit of Cisco Systems. "We are pleased that customers are endorsing our core design approach to enable Cisco WAAS to be deployed and implemented seamlessly within our customers' existing network services, provisioning and operational frameworks."

Freight Forwarder Used Cisco WAAS to Enable Data Center Consolidation which Helped Save the Company One Million Dollars

An industry leading freight forwarding and logistics company, the Panalpina Group of North America, deployed Cisco's WAN optimization solution as part of their data center centralization project resulting in a one million dollar savings in capital expenses. To maintain end-users productivity, the company's IT organization needed a WAN optimization solution to ensure that the 200 employees working out of their Toronto office would have the same performance for email, file access, and print services as when the applications were delivered by local servers.

"Cisco WAAS offered us a complete solution, accelerating all the applications we were looking to optimize, including Exchange, SAP, file services and print services," says Armin Heinlein, corporate vice president, North American IT Competence Center for Panalpina. "Also with Cisco, we are confident that they deliver a global solution that can be deployed and maintained at all our locations world wide."

After testing, the company realized that Cisco WAAS delivered applications centralized in their data centers to remote end-users at the same level of performance as when the servers were stored locally without interfering with their networking services. Since Cisco WAAS is transparent to existing network services, Panalpina was able to easily install and integrate the WAN optimization solution into their existing Cisco network of routers, switches and IP communications services.

Architecture Firm Achieves LAN-like Performance Over the WAN

With numerous sites spread across the U.S., the architectural and engineering firm Reynolds, Smith and Hills, Inc. (RS&H) faced the challenge of helping collaborative teams of consultants and clients access and share information. RS&H distributed data and business critical applications in local offices connected throughout their WAN. The company's engineers and consultants struggled with the WAN latencies that slowed mission-critical Computer Aided Design (CAD) applications when accessing remote engineering files.

The company evaluated different WAN optimization solutions and discovered that most vendors required an overlay network that would interfere with their existing sophisticated network operations. The Cisco WAAS solution offered RS&H the network transparency they needed to be easily integrated into their WAN infrastructure and not interfere with their voice over IP (VoIP) phone deployment as well as their security policies.

"Our teams of engineers depend on a highly distributed network to complement their work style. They now see LAN-like performance for large file transfers after initial access, regardless of the physical location of the files being accessed by the applications," said Harold Hamm, vice president of Information Technology for RS&H. "Cisco WAAS solution gives us a comprehensive solution that transparently stores and accelerates content, while minimizing traffic to address our business challenges without adding significant cost or time delays."

With the WAAS solution deployed, teamwork and collaboration among geographically dispersed RS&H colleagues has been visibly improved. The IT group is easily managing the Cisco WAN optimization solution because it integrates into its existing network and scales to thousands of nodes as the company adds employees or opens new offices. The Cisco WAAS auto discovery, predefined application policies, and central management and control features have saved their IT managers time and increased their ability to manage and secure vital corporate intellectual property.

Travel Leader Centralizes IT, Speeds Applications, Increases Productivity

Sabre Holdings Corporation, a global industry leader that retails travel products and provides distribution and technology solutions for the travel industry, was challenged to protect the critical business information on employee desktop and laptop computers in more than 100 remote locations across 45 countries. The company had limited WAN bandwidth that slowed down performance of business applications when shared with their IP communications applications. Cisco WAAS increased the access performance for remote offices and reduced their bandwidth usage by 20 percent to enable Sabre to easily protect their business critical data.

"Cisco has market-leading technology in the WAN optimization area, and my end users loved the results," says David Gula, manager of Telephony and Data Services within the global Sabre Holdings' IS organization. "The Cisco WAAS solution provided application acceleration features and total network transparency to our end users which allowed us to reduce remote file downloads from 20 seconds to two seconds, and easily increase the network performance without having to actually increase the network bandwidth."

Cisco WAAS acceleration features enabled Sabre to improve productivity of remote end-users by increasing performance of business applications such as Microsoft Outlook, Web portals, and FTP file access. With the Cisco WAAS solution deployed in their data center and call centers, Sabre's 750 end-users noticed performance improvements of its CRM customer care application which is critical to servicing their customers.

For more information on Cisco WAAS solutions and customers successes go to www.cisco.com/go/waas.

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