SAN JOSE, Calif., February 25, 2002 - Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: CSCO) announced today it has expanded its Cisco Mobile Office: At Home program, enabling channel partners to offer complete corporate home office solutions to their customers. Through access to tools on telework feasibility, security and business benefit issues, as well as return on investment calculators, managed service opportunities, and technology, Cisco channel partners will now be able to provide services that span consulting to implementation to support of company-wide teleworking programs.

The move to provide this expanded service was fueled by a rising demand from small and medium-sized businesses to implement formal teleworking solutions for their employees. According to International Data Corporation (IDC) there will be 35 million teleworkers in the United States by 2004, and more than half of these teleworkers will be employed by small businesses.

"Our channel partners are always looking for new programs that help them identify new opportunities and increase profitability," said Surinder Brar, senior director of marketing, Worldwide Channels, Cisco Systems. "The corporate home office solutions provide an opportunity for our channel partners to increase their profitability through value-add services and take advantage of their investments in Specializations."

By taking advantage of corporate home office solutions, channel partners can not only offer their customers secure, manageable, high-speed connectivity to corporate LANs by full-time/part-time teleworking and after-hours employees, but they can also help their customers identify company-wide teleworking needs, the appropriate end-to-end solutions for addressing the need, and ways in which to manage and support those solutions. Additionally, channel partners will find value-add opportunities through offering managed services in the areas of security, virtual private networks (VPN) and remote access.

"We have seen a growing push from our customers for formal teleworking programs as a way to reduce costs, lessen the impact of disruptions such as office moves, and improve employee satisfaction and retention," said Jim Sommer, president, Xitech. "Many of our customers are asking for services and technologies that address such a program and we are very excited that Cisco has come through with a comprehensive and proven solution."

Tools and Education

In addition to education modules and video on demand that will help channel partners explain teleworking programs and technologies to their customers, Cisco offers a unique ROI and VPN calculator for weighing risk and return. Both utilities can be accessed at http://www.cisco.com/go/mobileoffice (click on At Home/Tools).

Cisco has also made education research available to its partners. An example is a 2001 survey completed by Gartner/Griggs-Anderson, Virtual Private Networks: How Companies are cutting costs and improving productivity, communications and network management, which reveals key findings that directly affect the teleworker community:

• Ninety percent of companies using VPNs do so to provide remote access to employees working from home.
• Nine out of ten companies surveyed experience a cost savings with VPN; the average savings was $70K per year for companies with 500-1500 employees.
• Sixty percent of companies experienced a significant productivity gain, averaging three hours per week per employee.

Technology

Cisco corporate home office solutions provide the industry's most complete portfolio of business-class products that allow employees to securely connect back to the corporate network. The Cisco portfolio includes flexible architectures around DSL, cable and ISDN connectivity.

As part of this portfolio, the newest member of the Cisco 800 Series ADSL and ISDN routers, the 806 Broadband Gateway Router, allows small offices and corporate teleworkers to add security, VPN and other business-class features to any broadband connection. The Cisco VPN Concentrator Series is a best-of-breed, remote-access VPN solution that includes a standards-based, easy-to-use VPN client, scalable VPN tunnel termination devices and a gateway and client management system. The Cisco PIX® 501 Firewall extends enterprise-class Cisco PIX Firewall technology to small office and telecommuter network environments.