Cisco Enters SAN Market with Acquisition

August 21, 2002 -- Cisco Systems, Inc. (Cisco.com), announced a definitive agreement to acquire privately held Andiamo Systems, Inc. of San Jose, California. Andiamo is a developer of intelligent storage switching products for the storage area networking (SAN) market.

This acquisition will enable Cisco to extend its data networking expertise into the SAN switching market to deliver new innovations that meet customers' evolving business needs.

With Andiamo's technology, Cisco customers will, for the first time, be able to consolidate disparate storage networks to an integrated SAN infrastructure. In addition, Andiamo's technology introduces new intelligent services that significantly reduce the costs associated with sharing and managing critical data across a company's storage network. These innovations will be built into Cisco products to enable customers to reduce the total cost of ownership of their SAN infrastructure with improved operational efficiencies.

"This acquisition supports Cisco's strategy to enter into new growth markets, such as storage networking, where we believe we have the potential to be the number one or two player,"

According to market research firm Gartner Group, the SAN switching market is expected to grow from approximately $1.2 billion in 2002 to $4.3 billion in 2006.