Ascend Communications Selects Eloquent Solutions For Business Communications Across the Company.

SAN MATEO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 22, 1999--

Eloquent Solutions Dramatically Reduce Knowledge Transfer Cycle Time

in a Fraction of the Cost of Traditional Training Solutions

Eloquent, Inc., the leader in rich media business communications and learning solutions for Global 2000 companies, announced today that Ascend Communications (NASDAQ:ASND) has selected Eloquent(R) to improve the speed of sales education, new product rollouts and the effectiveness of communication initiatives.

Ascend Communications is a leading provider of wide area network (WAN) and Intelligent Network (IN) technologies. The company employs more than 3,000 people worldwide and distributes products to more than 50 countries.

"In our highly competitive marketplace, time to market is critical. We needed a solution that would allow us to deploy sales education and new product information to our employees located around the world as quickly and effectively as possible," said Scott Gleason, Director of Sales Education, Ascend Communications. "Eloquent has provided us with one-stop shopping for our business communications needs, providing a complete end-to-end solution including software, content production, professional services and excellent turnaround time on the final product."

Ascend has been using traditional classroom style education to communicate existing and new product launch information to employees, flying sales and support personnel into one location for several days. By adding Eloquent solutions to its education methods, Ascend is now able to distribute the same information via the Web and CD ROM, providing a comprehensive and reusable package of information at a fraction of the cost. By offering a single format that works equally well over the Web and on CD-ROM, Eloquent delivers maximum effectiveness for Ascend's highly distributed sales force, which is only occasionally connected to a network. "With Eloquent, we have reduced the education time from months to weeks, allowing our sales organization to be selling much earlier than before. We have also realized a tremendous return on our cash investment, reducing our average new product education cost by anpanies need to find new and innovative ways to es are the de-facto standard for transferring knns; sales, field force, and call center education; legally mandated compliance and certification; HR, motivauickly and cost effectively to large audiences, rket, improved customer satisfaction, and the avides a complete solution, including Web-based pleading technologies such as RealNetworks and Microsoft Windows Media streaming technologies as well as with other digital content such as computer based training (CBT).

Eloquent was founded in 1995 by a team of innovative software and video professionals. The company's unique approach to Web-based information delivery has been adopted by more than 160 Global 2000 companies. Eloquent is a private, venture-financed company based in San Mateo, California. For more information, please visit the Web site at www.eloquent.com.

Eloquent and the Eloquent logo are trademarks of Eloquent, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.