Billion-Dollar Manufacturer Kingspan Selects Expand ACCELERATORs to Eliminate WAN Upgrades.

Business Editors, High-Tech Writers

ROSELAND, N.J.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 30, 2002

ACCELERATORs Deliver ROI in Under 6 Months;

Enable Link Downgrades on Multiple Network Locations

Expand Networks, a leader in bandwidth optimizing technology, today announced that the Kingspan Group has selected its ACCELERATORs to boost global WAN performance and eliminate WAN upgrades.

The project will deliver cost savings and deliver full return on investment within six months.

The Kingspan Group, with an annual turnover of EUR 828.9 million, is a leading global manufacturer of insulation products and building components, including composite panels, insulation products, building components, and raised access flooring. The Group is one of Ireland's 20 largest corporations, and has worldwide operations covering Ireland, the UK, Europe, Asia, and the United States.

Expand's ACCELERATOR 4800s are deployed on Kingspan's headquarters in Ireland, with ACCELERATOR 2800s used at the remote branches in the Group's vast network that includes domestic and international frame relay links and point-to-point circuits in multiple locations. The ACCELERATORs enabled link downgrades on all circuits within the WAN, while realizing throughput of 6MB over other 2MB links.

The Group is currently running SAP networked services and rolling out Citrix Thin Clients to streamline its operations and increase business efficiency. Kingspan expects these applications to be among the biggest consumers of its WAN resources.

"In our efforts to support the growth and proliferation of applications like SAP and Citrix, we had to do away with recurring Telco costs," said Sean Hickey, Head of IT, The Kingspan Group. "The ACCELERATORs' pay-as-you grow scalability provides us with the flexibility to respond to growth and change at a moment's notice."

Sean Hickey continues, "With Expand, I can now not only guarantee superior quality of service and uptime, but I can also generate detailed utilization reports that help with capacity planning and proactive faultfinding with its RMON capabilities. We definitely plan on growing the ACCELERATOR deployments across our domestic and foreign operations."

The ACCELERATORs are built on Expand's patented ECT Technology. ECT is an application-independent technology that focuses on increasing network capacity available to all enterprise applications: IP, non-IP, web, and non-web. The ACCELERATORs operate on all network traffic on both ends of the Wide Area Network (WAN) -- central as well as remote sites. They remove repeat data patterns from the network with important bandwidth savings. The end result is an increase in network capacity, throughput and speed of 100 to 400+ percent, which ultimately translates to average payback periods of 6 - 12 months. More than 4000 ACCELERATORs are deployed in over 200 customers worldwide.

"Expand Networks is all about helping global enterprises manage growth and consolidation by improving their WAN cost-structure," said Talmon Marco, president and co-founder, Expand Networks. "World-class organizations like Kinsgspan demonstrate to the market that the phone company with its obsolete pricing models is not the only choice an enterprise has when improving the quality and connectivity of networked service."

"High infrastructure upgrade costs and limited bandwidth availability are just some of the challenges facing companies in Ireland," said Gerry Sheldrick, director, Digital Communications Management Group, an Ireland-based solutions provider. "Why should organizations stick to 20-year old technology when they can have best-of-breed technology at a fraction of the cost with Expand's ACCELERATORs? Not only would it be financially irresponsible, but it would be a strategic mistake not to prepare WANs for future applications."

About Kingspan Group plc

Kingspan Group plc is a leading manufacturer of composite panels, raised access flooring, insulation systems and environmental containers. The Group's head office is based in Kingscourt, Co. Cavan, Ireland and operates from twenty-nine manufacturing facilities; four in the Republic of Ireland, four in Northern Ireland, thirteen in Britain, two in the USA, and one each in the Czech Republic, Poland, Germany, Holland, Singapore and Hong Kong. In addition there are distribution and customer service offices in Belgium, Hungary and Slovakia. Visit www.kingspan.com for more information.

About Expand Networks

Expand Networks pioneered the development of bandwidth boosting appliances -- the ACCELERATORs -- which increase network capacity by 100 - 400+%. The ACCELERATORs eliminate the need for costly WAN link upgrades, enabling quicker deployments of new applications to remote offices. Networked applications such as CRM, Email, ERP, Thin Client and XML increase the strain on scarce WAN resources, often hindering productivity. By removing repeat data patterns found in any type of traffic, the ACCELERATORs provide important bandwidth savings. The end-result is the decrease in network congestion, which in turn speeds up data transfers. Expand Networks allows enterprises to support more networked users, applications and services with fewer resources delivering a typical ROI of 3 to 12 months. Clients include: Motorola, Texas Instruments and the United States Department of Defense. Expand Networks is headquartered in Roseland, New Jersey and Tel Aviv, Israel with offices throughout the United States and in the United Kingdom, France and Italy. To learn more, visit www.expand.com or call 888/892-1250.

Expand Networks, ACCELERATOR 6800, ACCELERATOR 4800, ACCELERATOR 4002, ACCELERATOR 4000, ACCELERATOR 2800, ACCELERATOR 2750 and ACCELERATOR 1800 are trademarks of Expand Networks, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

About Digital Communications Management Group

Digital Communication Management Group (DCM) is a communication service company, which specializes in helping customers deploy innovative, technically advanced solutions in the area of voice, data, multi-media and e-Business. DCM was founded in 1978 based on a vision of an Irish owned and managed Company which would offer world leading products combined with high quality professional services to the Irish market. The company is head quartered in Dublin with regional offices in Cork and Belfast. DCM has also recently established a presence in the United Kingdom, this operation is based in Coventry in the English midlands.