Force10 Networks Expands Revenue and Worldwide Customer Base at Fastest Pace in Company History During First Quarter.

Business Editors

MILPITAS, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 27, 2004

Force10 Networks today announced that worldwide customer deployments and revenue expanded at the fastest pace in the company's history during the first quarter, ending March 31. Building on its fourth quarter market share of 27 percent of the Layer 3 Ten Gigabit Ethernet market, Force10 increased Gigabit Ethernet and 10 Gigabit Ethernet port deployments in Europe, Asia and the U.S. while expanding across a diverse base of new customers, including service providers, educational institutions and companies in data intensive industries.

"The past three months has been a period of phenomenal expansion for Force10 as customer deployments accelerated across all of our geographies," said Marc Randall, CEO of Force10 Networks. "Customer uptake exceeded our forecasts and the number of trials that we are currently participating in and winning shows that the first quarter momentum has staying power."

In North America, NASA deployed Force10's E-300 in its Goddard Space Flight Center to interconnect large high performance computing clusters supporting pilot testing programs. In Asia, service providers, enterprise customers and educational institutions continued to deploy 10 Gigabit Ethernet networks. BIGLOBE, Japan's second largest service provider, recently deployed Force10's E1200 to accommodate the flood of peer-to-peer traffic that has overwhelmed its current network and to introduce the predictable performance necessary for new value-added services. In Korea, the world leader in broadband penetration, Chung Cheong University and Sangji Youngseo College deployed the Force10 E-Series at the foundation of their 10 Gigabit Ethernet campus networks.

As educational institutions continue to deploy 10 Gigabit Ethernet networks, new data intensive industries, such as oil and gas services, are leveraging the high speed technology to increase network performance. To explore and analyze the world's oil reserves, the oil and gas services industry requires the predictability and reliability the Force10 E-Series delivers. In Europe, Petroleum Geo-Services (PGS) increased network performance six fold with the Force10 E-Series, and Veritas DGC (NYSE:VTS) deployed the Force10 E1200 in its data processing centers to run advanced new applications for analyzing seismic data.

In addition to its customer deployments, Force10 introduced new technology that increases network reliability and resiliency to provide more predictable performance. The Dynamic Security Suite, which increases network resiliency and protects against the rapidly growing threat of denial of service (DoS) attacks, builds upon the E-Series' distributed architecture. As a complement to its Dynamic Security Suite, Force10 also introduced its industry-leading hitless failover technology, an advanced feature that eliminates the downtime associated with system errors.

As the 10 Gigabit Ethernet market, which the Dell'Oro Group projects will grow to $1.2 billion by 2006, Force10 continues to expand within it. According to the Dell'Oro Group, Force10 posted 160 percent sequential growth in shipped 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports in the fourth quarter of 2003. In addition, Force10 was named Investors' Choice at the Network Outlook Private Equity conference. Selected from 72 private technology companies, the award recognizes the 10 that are best positioned for long-term success in the data communications industry.

In the first quarter of 2004, to extend worldwide operations and prepare for further expansions, Force10 named industry veteran Ralph Harms chief financial officer. Harms, who has more than 25 years of networking and finance experience, is directing Force10's financial resources and managing revenue growth as the company expands into new markets around the world. Harms has led four initial public offerings, including Autonomy Corporation, Flycast Networks and ESS Technology.

To meet the demands of its rapidly expanding worldwide customer, channel and strategic partner base Force10 also announced today that it has named industry veteran Mark Cooper vice president of sales. Most recently, Mark lead Force10's worldwide alliance team as vice president for global alliances. Prior to Force10, Mark spent four years at Cisco and was responsible for generating sales in excess of $1 billion. Mark has also held sales leadership roles at Nortel Networks and SBC Communications in the enterprise market.

About Force10 Networks

Force10 Networks is the pioneer in scalable resiliency for high performance switching and routing. Based on a revolutionary system architecture that delivers best-in-class resiliency and massive scalability, Force10's E-Series switch/routers ensure predictable application performance, increase network availability, and reduce operating costs. Today, many of the world's largest Gigabit Ethernet and 10 Gigabit Ethernet networks depend on Force10 Networks. For additional information, please visit the company's website at www.force10networks.com.

Force10, E-Series, EtherScale and FTOS are trademarks of Force10 Networks, Inc. All other company names are trademarks of their respective holders.