BASEL, Switzerland - November 20, 2002 - Roche, which employs more than 60,000 people and sells its products in over 150 countries, today announced that they will begin a corporate wide program of standardizing their telephony on Cisco IP Telephony solutions. At the same time Roche will discontinue to make major investments in conventional PBX technology.

A large IP Telephony installation in Italy with more than 1000 end-users in two separate locations, implemented in less than three months, convinced Roche that IP Telephony would meet their world wide needs for an integrated, reliable solution. Roche had begun deploying Cisco IP Telephony solutions in 2001, at a number of local offices around the globe.

Roche's existing global intranet, which spans more than 60 countries and some 310 locations, with data volumes growing by 40% every year, is standardized on Cisco equipment. According to Hans Wilhelm Barz, Global Head of Network Services, Roche has already experienced great advantages in bandwidth, reliability, availability, maintenance and all round improvements across the entire value chain as a result of standardizing globally on Cisco technology.

"Conventional telephony is approaching the end of its life cycle and historically has been a local affair with no corporate synergies. We at Roche realized that as a global organization, an IP Telephony solution would be in line with our standardization goals, as well as providing us with some very real benefits". Explained Barz, "Implementing Cisco IP Telephony on a global level will also allow us to integrate other applications such as Softphones, unified Productivity Tools and in the near future standardized and cooperative call center solutions."

"Cisco is a natural choice because of our long standing global relationship, their leading technologies and comprehensive product and service portfolio. Crucial for Roche is Cisco's customer dedication and service resources. As a global player, we need to work with global solution and service providers that have excellent Quality of service (QoS) capabilities. Since our network and bandwidth availability are mission critical, and Cisco is the network standard for Roche, we have our own Cisco certified specialists. Their skills and resources can also be used in Roche IP telephony", explains Barz.

Roche has chosen several Cisco products, which have been evaluated and tested by its own network specialists at their high tech lab at Corporate Headquarters. These include Cisco's hard and software-based IP phones, Cisco Call Manager which extends enterprise telephony features and functions to packet telephony network devices such as IP phones, media processing devices, voice-over-IP (VoIP) gateways and multimedia applications. Roche is also deploying Cisco Intelligent Contact Management (ICM) software that enables a company to consolidate its Web, e-mail, and telephony channels into an integrated customer-contact environment.

"The IP Telephony agreement with Roche is a proof of confidence and customer satisfaction and demonstrates Cisco's long term global engagement and capabilities to support Roche in this mission critical area", states Marco Brabec, Cisco Global Account Manager for Roche.

About Roche

Headquartered in Basel, Switzerland, Roche is one of the world's leading research-orientated healthcare groups in the fields of pharmaceuticals, diagnostics and vitamins. Roche's innovative products and services address prevention, diagnosis and treatment of diseases, thus enhancing people's well-being and quality of life. In 2001 Roche reported full year sales of 29,2 billion Swiss francs and net income of 4,8 billion Swiss francs.

More information is available at www.roche.com