McDATA Continues Expanding Presence in Europe; Growing customer base leads to expansion in Germany.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

BROOMFIELD, Colo.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 24, 2004

McDATA Corporation (Nasdaq:MCDTA)(Nasdaq:MCDT), the expert provider of multi-capable storage networking solutions, today announced the expansion of its European presence with the opening of a second office in Germany, and the appointments of Stefan Born to regional manager of central Europe and a new country manager of Germany, Stefan Haas. The move optimizes support and ensures greater service and leadership for the growing partner and customer base in Germany and throughout central Europe.

McDATA's new office in Frankfurt/Main serves the largest finance sector in Germany, providing enhanced services for the thriving banking and insurance industries. The new office also contributes to McDATA's success in the local markets, enabling better service and improved responsiveness to ever expanding customer demands for data networking solutions. McDATA's German headquarters office is located near Munich.

"The addition of the new Frankfurt/Main office and additional leadership speaks to the success of our central European team. The new appointments of Born and Haas will position McDATA even more strongly in the market, expand our customer growth potential and enable better support for all networking, infrastructure and IT services," said Georg Bartz, vice president EMEA sales and services for McDATA. "Both have proven themselves to be exemplary leaders, driving business and maintaining the high service levels and responsiveness our customers have come to expect from McDATA."

"With the opening of the Frankfurt/Main office, we can offer enhanced support and services for our customers and provide the best resources for improving the education and opportunities available for McDATA's employees, including meetings, training or workshops," said Born. "Overall, this expansion will benefit McDATA, it's partners and customers as we continue to enhance our services and solutions."

Born has been with McDATA since 2002 where he assumed the role of district development manager, taking on the responsibility of expanding the McDATA EMEA team, maintaining existing partnerships, attaining new distributors, system integrators and OEMs, and winning new customers. Prior to McDATA, Born worked for 14 years at mainframe solutions provider Comparex, where for seven years he was responsible for the export department for the northern European subsidiaries team. Born's new responsibilities include managing McDATA's central EMEA team, which incorporates the Nordic and eastern European territories, expanding partnerships and enhancing customer services.

Haas, who joined McDATA in 2000 as a senior sales manager, was in charge of the extension of McDATA business relationships with OEM partner EMC and other key accounts throughout Germany. Prior to McDATA, Haas held several key sales positions that focused on IP network solutions and storage area networks. Haas also worked for Comparex, where he spent seven years as a regional and account manager, managing export sales for local branches in Spain and Portugal, running operations in the Saarland region of Germany, and maintaining services for the banking and media sectors in Frankfurt/Main.

About McDATA (www.mcdata.com)

McDATA (Nasdaq: MCDTA/MCDT) is the expert provider of Multi-Capable Storage Networking Solutions(TM) -- hardware, software and services -- that enable partners and customers around the world to reduce the total cost of storage management today, and be ready to adapt to the real-time information demands of tomorrow. Entrenched in over 8,000 data centers worldwide, McDATA solutions are at the heart of more than 80 percent of Fortune 100 storage network data centers, powering the latest e-business applications, customer databases, financial traffic and other mission-critical data. Customers leverage McDATA's multi-capable solutions to realize immediate cost savings, reduce their investment risk, ensure the continuity of their operations and adapt to changing business requirements.

Forward-Looking Statements 

This press release contains statements about expected future events that are forward-looking and subject to risks and uncertainties. Readers are urged to consider statements that include the terms "believes", "belief", "expects", "plans", "objectives", "estimates", "anticipates", "intends", "targets", or the like to be uncertain and forward-looking. Factors that could cause actual results to differ and vary materially from expectations include, but are not limited to, our ability to ramp SANavigator sales, our relationships with EMC Corporation and IBM and the level of their orders, the impact of the continued general economic slowdown on purchasing decisions by customers and capital spending, our ability to expand sales into higher margin channels through system integrators and distributors, a loss of any of our key customers (or our OEMs' key customers), distributors, resellers or our contract manufacturers, our ability to expand our product offerings and any transition to new products, (such as higher port count and multi-protocol products) integrate recent acquisitions and OEM qualification of such new products which may occur after the general availability dates, possible inventory charges that may occur with any transition to such new products, component quality and availability, the development of the storage area network and switch markets, competition in the storage area network and switch markets, aggressive pricing and product give-aways by competitors, one-time events and other important risk factors disclosed previously and from time to time in our filings at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. These cautionary statements by us should not be construed as exhaustive or as any admission regarding the adequacy of disclosures made by us. We cannot always predict or determine after the fact what factors would cause actual results to differ materially from those indicated by the forward-looking statements or other statements. All cautionary statements should be read as being applicable to all forward-looking statements wherever they appear. We do not undertake any obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.