SAN JOSE, Calif., December 4, 2006 - Cisco today announced that it has reached a major milestone by selling more than 2 million Cisco integrated services routers (ISRs) to customers worldwide. In addition, Cisco introduced key new technologies on the Cisco ISRs, including:

• Revolutionary tunnel-less virtual private network (VPN) solution based on a Group Encrypted Transport (GET VPN) technology
• High-performance services engine
• Two new services modules that deliver a complete wide-area network (WAN) optimization and application-acceleration solution

The new features provide greater service breadth and integration to the existing Cisco ISR portfolio, empowering business branches to integrate more security, voice, video, wireless and data solutions. Customers can drive business growth while realizing substantial savings.

Scaling Highly Secure Business Collaboration with Innovative Tunnel-less VPN Solution

Cisco's market-leading expertise in routing and security has produced GET VPN. The technology changes the way enterprises and service providers create VPNs, by eliminating the tradeoff between data-encryption security and routing intelligence.

According to Neil Rickard, Gartner's vice president of research: "There is pent-up demand from enterprises for a solution that allows them to encrypt traffic running over Multiprotocol Label Switching VPNs in order to meet the pressures of regulatory compliance. Existing tunnel-based encryption techniques make this difficult to do without sacrificing the quality of service and meshing capabilities of these services."

Cisco GET VPN offers scalable, highly secure any-to-any connectivity while using inherent routing capabilities. Customers can use Cisco GET VPN in a variety of WAN environments, including Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS), without point-to-point tunnels. This capability lowers latency and improves voice and video application performance for large networks.

Improving Business Applications Through Integrated WAN Optimization and Monitoring

The new Cisco ISR service modules provide robust WAN optimization and application acceleration along with high-performance network analysis. These service modules help enable customers to improve application performance through eliminating WAN bottlenecks when accessing files and applications from data centers.

With the increasing distribution of a broad range of data-center-based applications to remote offices, both IT and end users experience application performance declines due to WAN latency and other issues. The integration of Cisco Wide Area Application Acceleration Services (WAAS) Software into the Cisco ISR helps enable enterprises to increase network and application performance while optimizing WAN capacity, mitigating the impact of centralized application and storage resources. Equally important, the new WAAS capabilities for the Cisco ISR use the same mode of operation as existing Cisco WAAS appliances, therefore working well with existing ISR-based services such as quality of service (QoS), firewall access control lists (ACLs) and NetFlow.

Empowering Branches With Leading Voice and Video Solutions

Cisco enhanced the robust set of voice, video and collaborative features to the Cisco ISRs that help customers lower costs, highly secure communications, and increase availability. These new features include Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) trunking capability, consolidated voice, video and data on a single primary rate interface (PRI), highly secure Survivable Remote Site Telephony (SRST) and Call Manager Express (CME), integrated voice XML (VXML), Session Border Controller, and more.

McHenry Savings Bank, a full-service financial institution with five branches in McHenry County, Ill., continues to invest heavily in technology to enhance services for its customers, drive business growth and maintain a competitive edge.

"The Cisco 2800 and 3800 ISRs, which helped increase network reliability, performance and service, have enabled us to compete on an equal ground with larger, multinational banks," said Bryan Nash, senior vice president of information technology at McHenry. "The voice capabilities on the Cisco ISRs dramatically simplified McHenry's network operations while increasing network uptime. With Cisco's implementation, we were able to reduce operating costs by $46,000."

Continued Innovation Drives Sales of Cisco ISRs

The multi-award-winning Cisco ISR portfolio consists of the Cisco 800, 1800, 2800 and 3800 series routers; they are one of the best-selling products in Cisco history. With the continued addition of new advanced services to the Cisco ISR portfolio, Cisco empowers branch offices worldwide to optimize and grow their businesses.

Cisco sold 1 million routers in 18 months and another 1 million routers just nine months later. A growing percentage of the routers were sold with advanced services. This adoption shows that Cisco customers value the various integrated advanced services options that Cisco offers.

Cisco in Second Life

In conjunction with today's announcement, Cisco is excited to begin its journey in Second Life, a 3D interactive social networking metaverse, with the opening of our Cisco campus (in Second Life look for "Cisco Systems"). The Second Life community represents a new opportunity for businesses to interact with the public in a creative and fun virtual environment.

Pricing and Availability

The Cisco WAAS module and Cisco Network Analysis Module will begin at U.S. list prices of $3,750 and $4,495, respectively. The Cisco WAAS module is available now, and the Cisco NAM is scheduled to be available first quarter of calendar year 2007.

The Cisco GET VPN solution is scheduled to be available starting December 2006 through a feature of the Cisco IOS® 12.4(11)T on Cisco ISRs, Cisco 7301 and Cisco 7200 routers.

For more information on the Cisco ISR portfolio, visit: www.cisco.com/go/isr.