REHAU, World-Leading Manufacturer Transforms Global IT Service Provision With Cisco Wide Area Application Services

ERLANGEN, GERMANY--(Marketwire - January 22, 2008) - REHAU, one of the world's leading polymer-based product manufacturers, is using Cisco® (NASDAQ: CSCO) application networking technology to help increase global collaboration and transform the provision of global information technology (IT) services. REHAU expects to cut IT costs with a Cisco Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) solution. REHAU also expects the Cisco solution to improve access to and use of global collaboration tools, many based on Microsoft Sharepoint and IBM Lotus Notes databases, by improving wide-area network (WAN) performance by 50 percent and reducing the time to download files from a minute to just three seconds.

REHAU is deploying Cisco WAAS across several administration, sales and manufacturing locations around the world. It is being used to bring virtually all of the company's business applications into the company's data centre in the town of Rehau in Germany. The company expects Cisco WAAS to reduce its server hardware footprint by half and help cut time to market for delivering new IT services to the business from months to a week. Cisco WAAS has already been deployed to six locations worldwide, such as Riga in Latvia. Branch offices managers have saved an hour per day because they no longer need to manage server resources and Lotus Notes application managers will no longer need to worry about managing Lotus Notes Servers across several time zones.

Ralf Kosczor, IT team leader at REHAU, said, "We expect Cisco WAAS to deliver considerable business benefits to REHAU from reducing IT costs and time spent on IT management and maintenance, to improving the way we use global collaboration tools, like Microsoft Sharepoint and IBM Lotus Notes , to improve services to customers. With Cisco we are also seeing a perception shift within REHAU's IT department from one that used to talk about systems, machines and boxes. Now, it's all about services. We are offering a service and acting as a service centre for the whole group and the nearer we can get to the goal of delivering services and not boxes the better."

REHAU is deploying a Cisco Data Center Network solution across several worldwide locations using Cisco Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) and Cisco Wide Area Application Engine (WAE) Appliances. The Cisco Data Center Network solution also comprises a Cisco WAN and Cisco local-area networks.

"Global businesses like REHAU are taking full advantage of Cisco Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) to deliver benefits that help enable them to improve customer services and make internal operations more productive," said Uwe Peter, director, Unified Communications and Data Center, Cisco Germany. "Cisco WAAS delivers centralised applications with LAN-like speed to remote users, while preserving visibility and branch security. It helps to consolidate costly branch office servers, storage and backup infrastructure into data centers, while optimising WAN bandwidth usage. In addition, those businesses can maximise regulatory compliance and data protection through consolidation of branch storage, as well as acceleration of branch backup applications."

About Rehau AG

REHAU, a world leader in developing and manufacturing polymer-based products, was founded in 1948 in the Bavarian town of Rehau in Germany, the company's main administrative site. Its products were used in the manufacture of the original VW Beetle car and have since been used in other projects such as the latest Audi Q7 Sports Utility Vehicle; construction of stadiums used in the 2006 FIFA World Cup in Germany; and in several regenerative energy innovations. REHAU has more than 15,000 employees around the globe -- 12,000 of whom are in Europe -- in 170 manufacturing, sales and administrative locations.

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