SOFIA , Bulgaria - July 26, 2002 - Cisco Systems today announced that it has been selected to provide the network infrastructure at a new disaster recovery centre for the Bulgarian Ministry of Transport and Communications. The centre will rely on Internet Protocol (IP) networking to ensure critical government communications can be maintained across the nation's capital, Sofia, in the event of a major catastrophe.

The Ministry's decision to build the centre comes in the wake of recent earthquakes in two of Bulgaria's neighbouring states, Turkey and Greece. The Sofia facility is the first of a number planned by the Government department in major cities across the country, while the Defence and Interior Ministries are also considering similar establishments.

"It is clear that no government can afford to ignore natural or man-made threats to national security," said Ianko Iankov, IT manager for the Ministry of Transport and Communications. "And in any emergency situation, a key objective is to make sure lines of communication are kept open. IP has been shown to be flexible and robust enough to withstand a major disaster; and Cisco's AVVID is a proven IP platform that can manage the high level of graphics information used by our systems."

AVVID is Cisco's Architecture for Voice, Video and Integrated Data, which forms the basis of the disaster recovery centre technology infrastructure along with a network of Cisco IP phones and a Unity 3.1 IP voicemail system.

Tim Stone, Marketing Manager AVVID, Cisco Systems EMEA said: "IP was first conceived as a fail-proof way of maintaining military communications and still does the job admirably today. What we have been able to add through AVVID is a way of handling real time information such as voice and video with no deterioration in quality - even in a disaster situation."