MADRID, Spain, April 27th, 2004 -- Cisco Systems announced today that it is to equip Spanish Ministry of Agriculture's new Madrid headquarters with approximately 2,000 Cisco Internet Protocol (IP) phones. This is the latest in a series of deployments in Spanish government departments using Cisco IP Communications technology.

Staff at the Ministry of Agriculture will benefit from advanced telephony features such as mobility, which allows staff to log onto any phone in any location and maintain the same phone number, call security, which offers secure communications, identity and trust management and the ability to use their telephone to clock in and out of work. The project will also provide wireless network access and it is expected that the Ministry of Agriculture will deploy an additional 2,000 Cisco IP phones in other locations.

"We have been undergoing a re-organisation and had to set up a new headquarters to house all of the staff we are moving to work in this central location," said Fernando Bezares, CIO of the Spanish Ministry of Agriculture. "As we were putting in a new data network, it made sense to add IP telephony to the same network- which we believe will lower our overall IT costs and help staff spend less time on routine jobs."

The Ministry of Agriculture is not the only Spanish government department deploying IP telephony. Spain's Department of Social Security, for example, is currently building one of Europe's largest IP contact centres - using Cisco IPCC (Internet Protocol Contact Center) technology linked to a Siebel customer relationship management system - with capacity for up to 1,500 users.

The centre will provide a pivotal role in advising individuals, small-to-medium businesses and enterprise customers on how to complete social security-related processes online.

Using a combination of Cisco Call Manager call processing software, computer-telephony integration and interactive voice response technologies, the department is beginning deployment in Madrid and Córdoba, in the south of Spain, to allow regional calls to a central number to be re-directed to the local office in each of Spain's 52 provinces. The department is also looking to update its data network to support voice over IP for internal communications.

Cisco is involved in a number of other significant public sector IP Communications projects in Spain, including:

• The deployment of up to 300 IP phones for the Administration Ministry and a further 200 units for the Ministry of Environment
• The implementation of an IP contact centre, IP Telephony and e-mail manager for the Tax Agency
• The installation of more than 2,000 IP phones in the Andalucian Parliament.

"The scale and number of these projects clearly demonstrates that the Spanish government has grasped the significance of the opportunity offered by migrating to IP telephony," said Kaan Terzioglu, Director of Advanced Technologies for Cisco in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. "Spain provides a leading example of the benefits the public sector can accrue by deploying IP Communications on a converged network."