Michael McGowen Named Vice President of Engineering and Chief Technical Officer of ODS Networks, Inc.

RICHARDSON, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 5, 1998--

Reorganized engineering teams chartered to develop the most advanced

solutions for secure, very high bandwidth networks

ODS Networks, Inc., (NASDAQ/NMS:ODSI), a leading supplier of secure and high speed networking, today announced it has named Michael McGowen, Vice President of Engineering and Chief Technical Officer (CTO). Mr. McGowen, a leading expert in high-performance networking and switch design, previously held the position of President of ODS Networks' Essential division.

"With the acquisitions that have occurred in the past six months, we are reorganizing our engineering divisions to be better positioned to react quickly to the changing needs of our core business areas, which are all very fast-moving markets," stated G. Ward Paxton, chairman, president, and CEO of ODS Networks. "The reorganization of the engineering groups will provide ODS with a highly integrated team that can greatly benefit from the expertise in each of these diverse network specialties."

Mr. McGowen will oversee all engineering resources in ODS's main business areas: Network Infrastructure, Network Security, and High Performance Networking with engineering teams located in Richardson, Texas, Albuquerque, N.M. and San Diego. In addition, he will be working with major business partners to oversee the growth of strategic developments and technical initiatives.

In May of 1998, ODS Networks acquired Essential Communications for which Mr. McGowen was President and CEO. Since the acquisition, Mr. McGowen has led the Essential division of ODS and is responsible for guiding the development of high speed networking products including the world's fastest networking switch, the GSN 2000 product, for which he was a principal architect. Last month, ODS announced a $7 million award from Silicon Graphics, Inc. for GSN 2000 switches to be used by the U.S. Department of Energy.

Prior to forming Essential in 1992, Mr. McGowen was a principal investigator for the Multi-Crossbar Network Team at Los Alamos National Laboratory. During that time, Mr. McGowen invented the 800 Mbps High Performance Parallel Interface (HIPPI) which earned him the Lab's Distinguished Performance Award in 1989. Mr. McGowen holds a BSCE from the University of New Mexico.

About ODS Networks

ODS Networks, Inc., (NASDAQ/NMS:ODSI) develops, manufactures and markets a broad range of enterprise, workgroup, and remote access networking products for large and mid-range organizations, including its award-winning InfiniteSwitch. ODS Networks' InfiniteSwitch, HIPPI switch and LANBlazer switch families feature a highly flexible architecture that supports Ethernet, Fast Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet, HIPPI, FDDI, ATM and Token Ring and remote access while providing industry-leading performance in management, security, and fault tolerance. The ODS full line of security products includes CMDS, SecureCom, and CryptoCom which provide a complete suite of infrastructure and remote access-based solutions for both detecting security violations to your network and preventing them. ODS Networks can be reached at 888/ODS-7770; 972/234-6400; or on the Internet at www.ods.com.

Note to Editors: ODS is a registered trademark of ODS Networks, Inc. InfiniteSwitch, LANBlazer, CMDS, SecureCom and CryptoCom are all trademarks of ODS Networks, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective companies.