SAN JOSE, Calif., October 10, 2006 - Cisco Systems® (NASDAQ: CSCO) today announced that it has completed the acquisition of the intellectual property and selected assets of privately-held Ashley Laurent, a leading provider of software for the embedded service provider gateway market. Ashley Laurent's software provides essential features found in home networking equipment such as firewall/VPN, content filtering, quality of service, device management, TCP/IP routing and virus protection.

The software created by Ashley Laurent will be used to improve Linksys' DSL gateway offerings, while providing more customized solutions for service provider customers. Ashley Laurent's software solutions support most real-time operating systems and networking silicon vendors, thus providing a high level of reliability and performance for consumers.

"Ashley Laurent has been developing software code for home gateway products for more than a decade. This software experience provides Linksys with intellectual property and the ability to bring unique products to market faster while being more flexible to customize solutions for service providers, said Malachy Moynihan, Vice President and General Manager of the Linksys Home Networking Business Unit (HNBU).

Ashley Laurent was founded in 1992 and has eight employees based in Austin, Texas. With the close of the asset purchase, the Ashley Laurent team will be integrated into the Linksys HNBU, led by Moynihan. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

About Linksys

Founded in 1988, Linksys, a Division of Cisco Systems, Inc., is the recognized global leader in VoIP, Wireless and Ethernet networking for consumer, SOHO and small business users. Linksys is dedicated to making networking easy and affordable for its customers, offering innovative, award-winning products that seamlessly integrate with a variety of devices and applications. Linksys provides award-winning product support to its customers. For more information, visit www.linksys.com.