SAN JOSE, Calif., May 24, 2000- The Cisco VPN 3060 Concentrator has been named Hardware Product of the Year by Network Computing magazine, Cisco Systems, Inc. said today.

The publication announced the winners during Network Computing's Well Connected Award ceremony at the Networld + Interop trade show in Las Vegas. Network Computing also honored:

• The Cisco VPN 3060 Concentrator as the best enterprise virtual private network (VPN) product
• The Cisco Catalyst(R) 6509 as the top Modular-Configuration Switch product, and
• The Cisco Catalyst 6500 series as the best Gigabit Ethernet solution

In announcing the Hardware Product of the Year winner, Network Computing wrote: "This product defines the state of the art for VPNs, providing a great management architecture, solid configuration options and excellent troubleshooting tools. It's quite a package."

The Cisco VPN 3000 Concentrator series is a family of purpose-built, remote access VPN platforms and client software. It incorporates high availability, high performance and scalability with today's most advanced encryption and authentication technique. The Cisco VPN 3060 Concentrator is a VPN platform designed for large enterprises demanding the highest levels of performance and reliability, with high bandwidth requirements. It easily handles up to 5,000 simultaneous connections and uses specialized SEP modules for hardware-based acceleration.

The Catalyst 6500 series continues to serve as one of the premier intelligent switching platforms in the industry, delivering high performance and multilayer scalable intelligent services to wiring-closet, server-switching and enterprise- and service provider-backbone environments.

All winners are highlighted in the May 15 issue of Network Computing and on Network Computing Online at http://www.networkcomputing.com/1109/1109well-conn.html.

"The Well-Connected Awards are significantly different from other IT publications' awards," said Fritz Nelson, publisher of CMP's Network Computing. "Our editors worked at length to research and test the best offerings in the enterprise arena."

According to Nelson, products singled out in the Network Computing Well-Connected Awards are unique because "they are not a measure of popularity - they are quality offerings tested over a networked enterprise firsthand by editors themselves. So we know that the Cisco VPN Concentrator and Catalyst 6000 series are truly innovative solutions."

Network Computing (http://www.networkcomputing.com), published by CMP Media, Manhasset, N.Y., is the only IT publication providing in-depth, comprehensive product, technology and service reviews from a real-world perspective to 220,000 IT professionals - The Technology Experts - biweekly, telling them what works, how it works, when to buy and who to by it from. In addition, Network Computing consistently has the largest average-issue audience among all networking publications, according to Simmons and IntelliQuest and was a 1999 Neal Award Finalist.