SAN JOSE, Calif., December 20, 2004 - Cisco Systems, Inc., today announced a definitive agreement to acquire privately-held Protego Networks, Inc. of Sunnyvale, CA, a provider of security monitoring and threat management appliances used in enterprise and small-to-medium business networks. The ability of Protego's products to detect, correlate and mitigate threats in the network extends Cisco's Self-Defending Network initiative.

Under the terms of the agreement, Cisco will pay approximately $65 million in cash for Protego. The acquisition is subject to various standard closing conditions and is expected to close in the second quarter of Cisco's fiscal year 2005, which ends on January 29, 2005.

"Cisco is committed to providing customers with end-to-end, multi-layered, and integrated security and Cisco's Self-Defending Network initiative builds proactive and advanced security capabilities directly into the network." said Richard Palmer, Vice President in Cisco's Security Technology Group. "The acquisition of Protego further emphasizes Cisco's commitment to network security and their leadership in security monitoring, threat management and mitigation complements our ongoing work in security."

Protego offers a family of high performance, scalable appliances for threat management, monitoring and mitigation that enables customers to make more effective use of network and security devices by combining traditional security event monitoring with network intelligence, context correlation, vector analysis, anomaly detection, hotspot identification and automated mitigation capabilities. By combining network intelligence, an understanding of network topology and automated mitigation capabilities, Protego's products help companies to readily and accurately identify and eliminate network attacks while maintaining network compliance.

Protego is currently a member of Cisco's AVVID partner program and the companies have been successfully working together to sell security products to customers. The Protego team will be integrated into Cisco's Security Technology Group. Protego was founded in 2002 and has 38 employees.