Cisco Systems Continues to Lead the Online Support Industry with Unparalleled Technical Content for the Technical Assistance Center, TAC, Web Site

Business Wire, June 26, 2000

Business Editors/High Tech Writers

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 26, 2000

New Technology Pages Provide Additional Troubleshooting

Information; New Solutions Pages Offer Valuable Insight Into

Implementing Specialized Networks

Further empowering its customers with the technical information they need to ensure network reliability, Cisco Systems today announced the latest additions and enhancements to the Cisco Technology Pages at its Technical Assistance Center (TAC) Web site (www.cisco.com/tac). The TAC Technology Pages provide industry-leading technical information, knowledge and tools for troubleshooting network issues. Additionally, the Cisco TAC launched its new Solutions Pages, which contain more focused technical information for customers designing and supporting end-to-end network architectures. The first available Solutions Page provides detailed information on architectures for voice, video and integrated data (AVVID) network configurations. Leveraging the expertise of a worldwide network of TAC engineers, the Technology and Solutions pages provide customers with direct access to technical information that previously required a phone call to Cisco TAC technical support engineers.

"Maximizing network availability is one of the most important objectives for many businesses today," said Richard Dean, Program Manager for IDC's Network Support and Integration Services research program. "To help its clients and services partners improve efficiencies, increase customer satisfaction, and get to market faster, Cisco's online TAC continues to deliver a robust portfolio of network and systems integration solutions that can help maximize network availability."

"At Networked Information Systems (NIS) our team of Cisco Certified Engineers use the TAC Technology Pages as a tool for implementing complex networking solutions for our customers. We use the Technology Pages for researching network technology, as they provide an ample supply of documentation, sample configurations, and technology solutions," said John Tiso, a Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert (CCIE No. 5162) with NIS, a Cisco Partner in the New England Region. "Our engineers also use the capability of the TAC pages to open technical support cases electronically. This allows our engineers to place all information about a technical situation in front of a TAC engineer without making a single phone call, saving everyone a great deal of time."

"Cisco is committed to providing its customers with the most comprehensive and robust technical content in an easily accessible format on the Web," said Steve Gordon, Director of the Technical Assistance Center at Cisco. "The customer feedback we received with the launch of the Technology Pages earlier this year was extremely positive. We have built upon this initial success with the addition of new Technology Pages and the Solutions Pages that capture the specialized expertise of our worldwide network of technical support engineers."

New and Enhanced Cisco Technology Pages

The latest additions to the Cisco Technology Pages include:

Security Technology Pages

The Cisco Security Technology Pages provide users with a wealth of content, enabling them to configure security protocols, verify configurations for maximum network security, troubleshoot issues that relate to security products and technologies, and learn more about network security through general overviews and background information.

Voice and Telephony Technology Pages

The Cisco Voice Technology Pages provide Voice over IP (VoIP) information including packet-voice networks; VoIP network design and implementation enabling quality of service features in a VoIP network and sample configurations for VoIP frame relay; VoIP with channel associated signaling (CAS); and VoIP with common channel signaling (CCS).

Network Management Systems Technology Pages

These pages provide Cisco customers with the knowledge they need to manage remote and local networks, particularly larger, decentralized networks. The pages provide all available information on Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) and Remote Monitoring (RMON) technologies specific to Cisco devices, ensuring that Cisco customers can maintain the highest levels of network reliability.

IBM Technology Pages

The new IBM Technology pages allow customers to search for some of the most frequently occurring Systems Network Architecture (SNA) problems, including sessions that are not establishing properly. The IBM Technology Pages help with configuring, verifying, troubleshooting and learning more about IBM networking technologies and peer-based networking.

ATM Technology Pages

These pages provide customers with information to design and verify their ATM networks, understand ATM addresses, interpret ATM error messages, configure and troubleshoot a PVC and understand loopback modes. The ATM Technology pages also provide LANE sample configurations, network configurations for circuit emulation service (CES), sample CES configurations, information about mapping IP class of service (CoS) to ATM quality of service (QoS) and sample configurations for ATM over IP.