Cascade Receives 1995 New England Entrepreneur of the Year Award; Cascade Awarded For Innovation, Financial Performance, and Personal Commitment To Business And Community.

WESTFORD, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug. 28, 1995--Cascade Communications Corp. (NASDAQ:CSCC) today announced that the company has been named by Ernst & Young as High Technology New England Entrepreneur of the Year. Cascade was selected from 106 nominees by an independent panel of judges as part of the National Entrepreneur of the Year awards program.

Daniel E. Smith, Cascade president and CEO, and Desh Deshpande, Cascade co-founder and executive vice president, received the award in June at a banquet hosted by Ernst & Young, and sponsored nationally by Inc. Magazine and Merrill Lynch, and locally by Sprint. The program honors and recognizes entrepreneurs who have demonstrated excellence and extraordinary success in such areas as innovation, financial performance, and personal commitment to their businesses and communities.

"We are honored to be chosen as the leading High Technology Entrepreneur in New England," stated Dan Smith, Cascade president and CEO. "Cascade is very pleased to be recognized for its contribution in driving the telecommunications industry forward."

Leading the industry in a number of technology advances, Cascade was first to develop and ship many significant, advanced technology capabilities, several of which are still the only offerings available on the market. Cascade is the only company in the industry to offer a comprehensive multiservice switch platform, supporting the broadest range of transmission technologies in one switch, including frame relay, Switched Multimegabit Data Service (SMDS) and Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM).

In 1995, Cascade achieved unparalleled success in the marketplace. In May, the company announced a breakthrough, standards-compliant ATM switch, the Cascade 500. The Cascade 500 features a revolutionary quad-plane switch architecture delivering unprecedented breadth and depth of ATM functionality for deploying small and large production-level ATM enterprise and service provider networks.

With a 619% revenue growth rate from 1993 to 1994 and a 64% compounded annual growth rate, Cascade has become one of the fastest growing data communications companies in the industry. The five-year old company has delivered an increasingly stellar financial performance with revenues increasing from $7 million in 1993 to $50.2 million in 1994.

For the six months ended July 1, 1995, revenue increased to $52.6 million from $14.8 million for the first six months of 1994. Net income for the period was $9.5 million or $.31 per share compared to $2.1 million or $.08 per share for the same period in 1994. On May 4 this year, Cascade announced a two-for-one stock split and subsequently its shares have zoomed from an initial public offering of $15 in July 1994 to a recent high of 49 3/4 (post split) as of July 25, 1995 giving the company a market value of approximately $1.5 billion.

As a winner of the regional award, Cascade is now eligible to become the National Entrepreneur of the Year award recipient. A national judging panel will select from all of the regional candidates and announce the national winners in November at an awards banquet in Palm Springs, California.

One of the world's fastest growing data communications companies and price/performance leader in frame relay, Cascade Communications of Westford, Mass. is a global provider of wide area networking products for the enterprise and public carrier network markets. The pioneer of multiservice WAN switches, Cascade delivers enterprise-ready switches and network management solutions that enable customers to seamlessly integrate existing technologies with ATM for cost-effective network expansion and investment protection. ^Cascade's STDX and B-STDX multiservice WAN switches and the recently introduced Cascade 500 ATM switch offer the highest scalability and network capacity in the industry. Worldwide, private and public networks such as BellSouth, Bridge Information Systems, GTE, Pacific Bell, US West, WilTel, and British Telecom rely on Cascade products for unparalleled quality of service and high-performance WAN services.

CONTACT: Maureen Liberty/Patty Anderson Bob Machlin,

Neva Group, Inc. or Cascade Communications

617-441-4000 508-692-2600