Meru Networks Announces Nationwide Children's Hospital as 100th Healthcare Installation.

Reliable Application Performance with Meru Wireless LAN Leads to Rapid Adoption by Healthcare Organizations

SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- Meru Networks today announced that Columbus, Ohio-based Nationwide Children's Hospital is the 100th healthcare organization (HCO) to successfully leverage Meru's innovative wireless LAN solution. Nationwide Children's Hospital chose Meru Network's solution because it outperformed alternate wireless LAN solutions in tests and offered the lowest total cost of ownership.

"The other solutions we researched offered evolutionary technology, but Meru delivers revolutionary technology," said Karen Hartley, Manager of Converged Network Services for Nationwide Children's Hospital. "We chose Meru's solution because it clearly offers the best wireless architecture designed for the enterprise."

Meru's award-winning infrastructure with its patented Air Traffic Control[TM] technology supports improved patient safety, quality of care, and enhanced mobility for clinician efficiency at the point of care and throughout the hospital campus. It provides secure, consistent wireless connectivity to information systems, seamless roaming, pervasive coverage, and unparalleled network reliability and performance, including the ability to deliver and manage voice, data and multi-media applications on a converged network using any device. The architecture of the Meru Wireless LAN system addresses the unique challenges of healthcare organizations, their building designs, and clinician workflows.

Not only does Meru's best-in-class WLAN system offer the lowest total cost of ownership, but it also facilitates the adoption of wirelessly-enabled devices and applications, which work more efficiently and seamlessly on Meru's network.

According to a recent report from SpyGlass Consulting Group, 64 percent of nurses believe wireless infrastructures in healthcare organizations are not reliable enough to support point-of-care computing solutions.

"We have found that nurses using computing devices over the wireless network are frustrated with the frequency of dropped network connections due to dead zones and poor access point transitions resulting in lost application and session data," said Gregg Malkary, managing director of SpyGlass Consulting Group.

But Ann Farrell, BSN, RN, Principle of Farrell Associates, a San Francisco-based strategic healthcare consulting firm specializing in EMRs and wireless IT, believes that Meru has addressed these issues.

"Meru is solving big healthcare enterprise and clinician problems that are not being well addressed by competitors," she said. "Healthcare organizations are relying more and more on their IT systems at the point of care, but most wireless infrastructures are unable to reliably handle the demands of highly mobile clinicians working with life critical data, often in hospitals designed decades ago. Current networks must scale dramatically to take advantage of EMRs and the avalanche of new, promising wireless solutions using bar-code, RFID, VoIP and video technologies."

A diverse group of HCOs including acute and sub-acute hospitals and clinics, ambulatory care facilities, and skilled nursing and intermediate care facilities have used Meru Networks Wireless LAN Solution to deliver a variety of applications including:

* EMR applications from McKesson (NYSE: MCK), Epic, Meditech, Cerner (Nasdaq: CERN), Siemens (Nasdaq: SI), Eclipsys (Nasdaq: ECLP), and Allscripts (Nasdaq: MDRX);

* Voice applications for nurses and doctors based on devices from Vocera, Polycom/Spectralink (Nasdaq: PLCM), Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO), Ascom, Nortel (NYSE: NT), and Avaya;

Unlike the "micro cell" approach of legacy wireless LAN designs, which assign different channels to adjacent cells of the network, Meru's unique "virtual cell" approach automatically selects a single channel for use enterprise-wide, maximizing network performance and Quality of Service while accelerating and simplifying deployments. With its zero-handoff technology, mobile devices need not switch channels when roaming, so users and applications have a guaranteed, uninterrupted connection. Meru's single channel set-up eliminates interference so hospitals can cover larger areas with fewer devices. And, while other wireless LAN solutions require complex channel planning in an attempt to avoid co-channel interference because of unique building topologies and high densities of users, Meru customers can change or add access points to increase capacity without a channel planning survey.

"The flexibility and scalability of the Meru platform offers greater protection for our wireless investments," said Hartley. "Thanks to Meru, it's not the wireless network that keeps me up at night. We are prepared to meet our clinicians mobility needs, today and in the future."

Meru Networks has installed its innovative WLAN solution in 100 diverse HCOs, such as Miller School of Medicine, Miami, Fla..; Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center, Winston-Salem, N.C.; St. Johns Hospital, Springfield, Ill.; St. Agnes Healthcare, Baltimore, Md.; Somerset Medical Center, Somerville, N.J.; Sun Health, Phoenix, Ariz.; and Lifesphere Cincinnati, OH. Not only are these customers achieving reliable toll-quality voice with no dropped calls throughout the hospitals, but they also are realizing tremendous cost savings.

"Meru Networks is committed to the healthcare industry and to serving the needs of medical practitioners and IT in healthcare organizations," said Ihab Abu-Hakima, Meru Networks President & CEO. "HCOs each have unique requirements and user demands, but one thing is consistent among them--they all require extremely reliable IT systems running on an infrastructure that can support mission- and life-critical communication."

Learn more about Meru Networks at HIMSS booth #2629, February 25-28, 2008 in Orlando, Fla. Also, hear Karen Hartley of Nationwide Children's Hospital speak on her challenges in choosing the most robust solution for her facility and detail her real world implementation of Meru Network's Wireless LAN Network on Tuesday, February 26 from 7:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. at the Loews Royal Pacific Resort at Universal Orlando. To register, go to http://www.merunetworks.com/welcome/qr.php?campaign=himss08br

About Meru Networks

Meru Networks develops and markets wireless infrastructure solutions that enable the All-Wireless Enterprise. Its industry-leading innovations deliver pervasive, wireless service fidelity for business-critical applications to major Fortune 500 enterprises, universities, healthcare organizations and local, state and federal government agencies. Meru's award-winning Air Traffic Control technology brings the benefits of the cellular world to the wireless LAN environment, and its WLAN System is the only solution on the market that delivers predictable bandwidth and over-the-air quality of service with the reliability, scalability and security necessary to deliver converged voice and data services over a single WLAN infrastructure. Founded in 2002, Meru is based in Sunnyvale, Calif. For more information, visit www.merunetworks.com or call [phone].